What would or could have been cause circa 1970 for something wayward, moody, contemplative, possibly even introspective, is here just an excuse to bring Hollywood flash and frippery out onto the road and into the heartland. Director Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner, Black Rain) might seem to be a little …
A simple and true (based on fact, but also and nonetheless true) story of a Chinese peasant girl sold by her father into slavery in the late 19th Century, taught some useful English phrases such as "I live at the saloon," and resettled among the "white demons" of Oregon, where …
The call girl as sacrificial lamb. She works for an S&M agency, so the uniform kinkiness of the clientele is to be expected: "My dream is to rape dead women." The detailed sex scenes -- spiritual crucibles, really -- are very long and very strong, despite some softening via the …
Splashy debut by Belgian director Jaco Van Dormael, a switched-at-birth fable about an embittered old man (Michel Bouquet) who's convinced that another man has taken his rightful life. His, so to call it, "wrongful" life is recounted nonsequentially (using three other actors: baby, child, and young adult), and with all …
All that mischievousness of the student body at The Regis School, nicknamed The Rejects School, comes in handy when the place is raided by Colombian terrorists. Another dab of liniment for the adolescent ego. With Sean Astin, Keith Coogan, Lou Gossett, Jr., and Andrew Divoff; directed by Daniel Petrie, Jr.
Lenny Henry, the chubby-cheeked black comedian out of British TV, is given a chance to play a white Mafia hitman (under a ton of makeup), a Harlem pimp, James Brown's imaginary brother, a raisin, Othello, among others, and he takes that chance, or those chances, with relish. The plot that …
Very roughly a Ghost for grownups. Not all grownups, on reflection, but those who possess some of the qualities idealistically associated with grownups, qualities like wisdom and worldliness and temperance and common sense. So, in other words, not a sufficient number of actual grownups to ensure it as a box-office …
A picture of Madonna, and all but worthless as documentary except in the sense that Cocteau once noted: that all movies are documentaries -- documents, records, remembrances -- of themselves. What it documents, in that sense, is the feature-length advertisement it has opted to be instead of the full-blown documentary …
Patsy Kensit, with her permanently puckered lips, takes us into the innermost thoughts of a sexual adventuress who seems to feel that sleeping with two men at more or less the same time, one of whom is borderline impotent, requires the disclaimer: "I don't want you getting the idea I'm …
Collaborative effort of George Romero and Dario Argento -- collaborating this time not as director and producer, as they had done in the past, but as co-directors, not literally sharing the workload but splitting it roughly down the middle. More exactly, adapting separate Edgar Allan Poe stories, "The Facts in …
For all its end-of-the-millennium momentousness, for all its science-fictional gadgetry and threat of nuclear holocaust, for all its furtive fugitives and government agents and rhyming, harmonica-playing private eye ("To be effective, you need a detective"), for all its almost complete circumnavigation of the globe, and for all its two and …
Conciliatory treatment of the political factions in post-WWII France (collaborationists, Communists, fence-sitters in between), taking its attitudinal cue from the "benevolent indifference" of Philippe Noiret's widowed teacher: "I love the rain as much as the sun." The original Marcel Aymé novel was not far removed from the actual period, but …
Routine private-eye maneuvers, except that the wisecracking gumshoe is here a woman, leading to lines like "You're a female dick, right?" (Many a male dick, or male anything, might envy the woman's apartment if nothing else: perched over the outfield fence of Wrigley Field.) There is also a lot of …
A fast-bonding psychiatric patient, after his first session with a new doctor, follows the man onto his summer vacation. Bill Murray lacks the guilelessness to pull this off (or the ability to fake it), and it doesn't help to have the script paving his way into everyone's heart but the …