Did you hear about Did You Hear about the Morgans?? Well, it’s not as bad as you may have heard. The premise of a splitsville Manhattan couple whisked away together to wild, wild Wyoming in the witness protection program is no worse than that of many a screwball comedy of …
It is now (ahem) four decades since James Bond made his debut on screen, never mind another decade since his debut on the page: he must, as a film entity alone, be into his seventies by now. However you calculate it, he can ill afford to spend fourteen months in …
Twelve superbly drilled, highly financed, and heavily armed international terrorists find themselves overmatched against a vacationing New York cop in bare feet. The action, set almost entirely inside an L.A. skyscraper, is a pyrotechnical marvel. But the overriding marvel is how action so marvelous has come to seem, in the …
"How could the same shit happen to the same guy twice?" marvels Det. John McClane (now of the LAPD). Clearly the filmmakers do not lack self-awareness. If anything, the shit is a bit deeper this time, in that the single-handedness of McClane's heroics makes less sense at a Major Metropolitan …
Twelve superbly drilled, highly financed, and heavily armed international terrorists find themselves overmatched against a vacationing New York cop in bare feet. The action, set almost entirely inside an L.A. skyscraper, is a pyrotechnical marvel. But the overriding marvel is how action so marvelous has come to seem, in the …
NYPD Det. John McClane (Bruce Willis) is presently on suspension for undisclosed reasons, and hence hung over and unshaven, when a massive explosion rips through the Bonwit Teller department store (no casualty report: such is the level of human interest); and the German-accented, nursery-rhyming mad bomber (Jeremy Irons) phones up …
One type of queen portrays another type of queen: Charles Busch, who adapted his own stage play, dolls himself up in drag to impersonate a faded Hollywood diva, in this salute to, or spoof of, the women's pictures of old. (The diva's husband, for contrast, is a Stanley Kramer-ish producer …
Leather-jacketed Brit literally bumps into an old schoolmate (bike bumps into cab), but the boy once known as Karl is now a prim and proper young lady named Kim. The course of romance thereafter is right-mindedly, none too humorously, rather boringly instructional ("So you're telling me Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson …
Under the chipper direction of Joe McGrath, this cross-breeding of British Goon Show silliness with a Disney formula animal story is a surprising success, and probably more fun for grownups than for tots. McGrath's sophisticated cartoon technique, which is rich in little details as well as in extravagant whimsies, gives …
Barry Levinson's very "personal," yet very derivative, portrait of young manhood in Baltimore, 1959. The production is unstinting in its collection of period cars and haircuts and toggle-button jackets and what-have-you (and are those pink-flamingo lawn decorations a sly tribute to that other cinematic bard of Baltimore and fellow pop-culture …
Nothing much to shout about cinematically, but in its airily histrionic and tirelessly talkative way, this MGM centerpiece is abundantly entertaining -- especially so in the husband-and-wife set-tos between the inspirationally matched Wallace Beery and Jean Harlow. With John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Marie Dressler, and Lee Tracy; adapted from the …
Softened, mushed-up remake of a rather distasteful French farce, called here The Dinner Game, concerning a clique of fat cats who periodically convene for a soirée to which each of them for their shared amusement brings along an unwitting idiot to compete for the laurel of biggest idiot. For the …
A French farce ticketed, like any of Francis Veber's directorial and/or auctorial efforts, for a Hollywood remake. The title is not a verbatim translation of Le Dîner des Cons, which would (or could) have been The Dinner of Assholes. Said dinner, in any case, is a periodic ritual of a …