The pretty girls and prettier boys of the glamorous world of "open-wheel racing." Vapid talk, careening camerawork, screeching rock songs. With Sylvester Stallone (who also wrote the script), Kip Pardue, Til Schweiger, Estella Warren, Stacy Edwards, Gina Gershon, Cristian de la Fuente, and Burt Reynolds; directed by Renny Harlin.
Cops-and-robbers stuff, stripped to the barest essentials of the genre, reduced to the irreducible, abstracted to no more than the bluesy mood and the methodical, calculated, chess-game maneuvers. The nearly monochromatic color and uncluttered compositions conjure up a poetic night world somewhat in the manner of "Whistler's nocturnes." Writer-director Walter …
A summer job with an over-the-hill actress (Julie Walters) emboldens a timid minister's son (Rupert Grint, the Ronald Weasley of the Harry Potter series) to throw off the yoke of his smothering mother (Laura Linney). Coming-of-age confection, sweet enough to cause tummy ache. Written and directed by Jeremy Brock.
Essentially a two-character piece -- a crotchety old Southern Jewess and her amiable black chauffeur -- based on a Pulitzer Prized play of typically slight distinction, cozy, comforting, demographically made-to-order for the upper-middle-class middlebrow Broadway theatergoer. Despite the efforts of Bruce Beresford (the Australian director on an extended Southern sabbatical: …
The Hammer horror factory already had the thought (in 1971) to re-do the R.L. Stevenson tale as a sex-change thing: Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde. Of course that version didn't have the thought to do it funny. But then this version had only the thought, not also the ability. Tim …
First in the film series employing Ian Fleming's James Bond, Agent 007, Her Majesty's Secret Service. Perhaps a trifle swifter and leaner (Sean Connery conspicuously so) than the subsequent ones; but fairly well developed, muscled, principled, even at this stage. Ursula Andress is Honey; Joseph Wiseman is Dr. No, a …
First in the film series employing Ian Fleming's James Bond, Agent 007, Her Majesty's Secret Service. Perhaps a trifle swifter and leaner (Sean Connery conspicuously so) than the subsequent ones; but fairly well developed, muscled, principled, even at this stage. Ursula Andress is Honey; Joseph Wiseman is Dr. No, a …
An imaginary playmate, imprisoned as a jack-in-a-box for twenty years, is let loose when his old friend returns home after a separation from her husband. Only he's not really imaginary, just invisible to all but his playmate, and completely uncontrollable. And, with his shit-snot-puke predilections and his British music-hall costume …
The appropriate cartographical co-ordinates are easy to fix: the Coen brothers' Fargo, for its Minnesota setting, accents, and idioms (one of the unsung stars of that film, Kristin Rudrüd, has a cameo as the TV spokesperson for the St. Paul Pork Company, and is permitted to keep her own surname …
A suspended U.S. Marshal (Wesley Snipes) goes out on his own, and into the alien skydiving community, to avenge his brother's murder and thwart a plot to cripple the DEA. Basically boneheaded action film, spruced up with some attractive Hawksian trappings, including especially a husky-voiced heroine (Yancy Butler) and two …
Three women named Cissie, three identically murdered husbands, a games-playing coroner who unsuccessfully woos each widow in turn (aged roughly from sixty down to twenty), a young boy who counts dead bodies of all species and sets off fireworks at their places of death, a hoop-skirted jump-roper who counts the …
A conventional, imitative, unimaginative, unadventurous dark comedy concerning the multiple suspects in the suspicious death of the most despised woman in Verplanck, N.Y. Dark comedies are not what they used to be. They are much nearer the middle of the road. (Once again the cliché of the canine casualty: run …
A major ouch. The kiddie-lit holiday homily — "Maybe Christmas doesn't come from a store./ Maybe Christmas perhaps means a little bit more" — illustrated in theme-park sets and costumes (rodenty snouts on all the citizens of Whoville save the little heroine, Taylor Momsen, and Christine Baranski). Jim Carrey, as …
Stanley Kubrick's scattershot spoof on the military in the push-button age. Several of the players — Sterling Hayden, George C. Scott, and Peter Sellers in two of his three roles — have their own assigned areas well under control, while Kubrick darts helter-skelter in eagerly salivating pursuit of comedy material …
More specifically, a Dallas gynecologist (Richard Gere, with a tidier haircut and a sincerer persona) and his psychotic wife, his materialistic sister-in-law, his protective and adoring receptionist, his numerous demanding patients, a country-club golf pro who becomes his new lover, and his two grown daughters, one of whom is soon …