Godzilla meets Barney. Or in a word, Aladar, a dino orphan raised by apes and instilled with family values and community spirit: "Stand together!" (How did the species ever die out with him on the team?) The computer-generated imagery is dazzling, the computer-programmed emotion cloying, and the James Newton Howard …
A teenage girl, bound for college and the Peace Corps in the summer of '63, falls in with the "entertainment staff" at a Catskill resort, and it changes her life forever: goodbye Namibia, hello mambo. The transformation, presented as an Ugly Duckling makeover with a debouchment in Swan Lake, amounts …
Brought to Batista's Cuba by her well-heeled father in late '58, a blond blue-eyed Jane Austen reader (Romola Garai) gets a bit of a Lawrentian thing going with a swarthy young pool boy (Diego Luna, a true cutie). Patrick Swayze, from the original Dirty Dancing, trying desperately to look younger …
Starring Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine and Charles Bronson.
Clint Eastwood and his favorite director, Don Siegel, took over this project from Frank Sinatra and Irvin Kershner, and the result is yet another halfway sharp, halfway shoddy Siegel cop movie, with vast stretches of barely motivated and barely connected dashing around, punching and gouging, shooting and dying. The grudge …
The beginning-to-end car chase is elevated somewhat above the ordinary (hair-raising stunts, ear-splitting sound effects) by the polished, if overly souped-up, direction of John Hough, and by the unsympathetic, unwholesome characterizations of Peter Fonda as a nervous, cackling, narcissistic speed maniac and Susan George (the one and only) as a …
The bicontinental British filmmaker Stephen Frears returns to the milieu of his Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and My Beautiful Laundrette -- the London melting pot, but this time in the grimmer mood of a Thirties-style social drama (the Warners studio, most typically), with a rough, raw, skinned-knuckle image and …
Steve Martin and Michael Caine take over the respective roles of Marlon Brando and David Niven in the 1964 flop, Bedtime Story: two con men preying on wealthy women on the Riviera. And they play them extremely broadly, to reassure the audience it's all in fun -- lethal in a …
John Waters at low ebb. Spring is sprung, the sap is flowing, the birds twitter and the bees buzz, and the battle lines are drawn, straight through Middle America, between the sex maniacs and the neuters. ("Let's go sexin'!" vs. "I'm Viagra-vated and I'm not going to take it anymore!") …
Sexual harassment in the workplace: of a man, by a woman. It eventually comes to light (a dim, glimmering light at most) that the perpetrator was motivated not by lust but by a calculated scheme to oust the victim. Which would seem to transform her into more a Mata Hari …
Luis Buñuel's pleasant reminder that, at age 72, he is still on the watch. If the student revolutionaries seem a bit stiff and out of place, the drug-smuggling South American ambassador and the Catholic Bishop and the loyal maid and the various dreamers seem extremely comfy. The gags are spun …
Heist comedy with an inadequate fund of ideas to establish it (and re-establish it) as a comedy. The dour Fred Gwynne looks more than ready for a change of approach. With Corbin Bernsen, Ruben Blades, Lou Diamond Phillips, and William Russ; written and directed by Jim Kouf.
Family album of barely moving snapshots of a working-class Liverpool household modelled on the director's own, in the period from the Blitz to the middle Fifties. But perhaps not so much an album exactly, since that implies a sense of order and chronology; more an old hatbox of photos fetched …
Con man named Thomas Jefferson ("Jeff") Johnson gets himself elected to the seat vacated by a deceased congressman named Jefferson Davis ("Jeff") Johnson. A pert and pretty consumer-rights advocate leads him into romance and conscience. Eddie Murphy is permitted to do plenty of "funny" voices (a couple of them -- …