Though its title may sound like some middle-to-lowbrow parody of an Asian art film (no less than Ozu's The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice or Mizoguchi's The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums), and its air of quietude may in many ways live up to that same brow's dimmest and …
Though its title may sound like some middle-to-lowbrow parody of an Asian art film (no less than Ozu's The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice or Mizoguchi's The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums), and its air of quietude may in many ways live up to that same brow's dimmest and …
Steven Spielberg's (mostly) black-and-white, three-and-a-third-hour Holocaust film. And the nearest thing to a feel-good Holocaust film that a Holocaust film can be. (The real-life hero -- a gentile businessman who spared over a thousand Jews by keeping them employed in his pots-and-pans plant -- is a reassuring figure for American …
A you-can-have-it-all inspirational tale. More precisely, you can be a seven-year-old chess prodigy (Max Pomeranc) and still be "decent," have fun, study simultaneously under two teachers of radically differing philosophies, go fishing for two weeks prior to the national championship tournament, walk off with the trophy. The movie goes through …
A good children's movie. To split hairs: a good movie for children and also a movie good for children. Good for them in the sense that it is a good introduction to concepts of the inner world and the outer world, living and dying, growth and stuntedness, courage and surrender …
Stuffy film about the airing-out of a stuffy man: namely C.S. Lewis, Oxford don, Christian philosopher, fantasy novelist, and a bachelor shy of "contact." (Anthony Hopkins could play this part in his sleep, and very nearly does.) The airer-out (Debra Winger, as "different" as ever) is his American fan, and …
Canadian superproduction of the Eskimo epic, Agaguk, about a renegade Inuit with white man's blood on his hands. ("You turned your back on the people! The spirit of the White Wolf will hunt you down!") Outside of the whale hunt, with its echoes of Jaws, what unfolds is as short …
Robert Altman shuffles together several Raymond Carver short stories, or at any rate several sets of characters from them, and in so doing transforms pithiness into garrulity -- three hours' worth. At the same time he has upped the levels of kookiness and smuttiness, and lost touch with Carver's common …
They are Chuck Norris (playing himself -- as sanctimoniously as he plays anyone else) and Jonathan Brandis (asthmatic weakling, daydreamer, Chuck Norris idolater), and together they hook up to battle the bullies at the Texas Open Team Karate Tournament. There is an elementary appeal about this, although actual Norris idolaters, …
Mob hitmen are no longer on the tail of our Vegas entertainer, so why would she give up a booming career and disguise herself once more as the Singing Nun? (Even she wants to know: "Somebody tell me why I'm dressed like this again.") Well, to make money for Father …
Fred Schepisi's filmization of John Guare's stage play is a nervous and brittle New York comedy, of limited export value, about a high-rolling art dealer and his wife who let into their apartment a bleeding young black man claiming to be a mugging victim, as well as a college chum …
An outrageous bluff which no thinking man, much less any card-carrying cynic, can let pass unchallenged. The germ of the idea -- an eight-year-old boy in Seattle places a call to a nationwide radio psychologist on behalf of his widowed father, and a newspaperwoman in Baltimore, along with thousands of …
At least it has a definite and deathless theme: voyeurism. A New York book editor, and not incidentally a specialist in tell-all celebrity biographies, moves into an East Side high-rise, and someone who signs himself "Secret Admirer" warms her new home with the gift of a telescope through which to …
A feel-my-machismo movie: the Marines' top hitman, with "seventy-four confirmed kills" to his credit, drags a civilian novice through the Panamanian jungle for the purpose of political assassination. There's nothing complicated about the mission, but it absorbs the moviemakers to the exclusion of all else. Lots of shots through telescopic …
A man afraid of commitment suspects that his current girlfriend is the serial spouse-killer he has read about in the Weekly World News. Apart from his besetting phobia, the protagonist is gravely ill-defined: it's hard to reconcile his apparent wit and charm with his professional self as a throwback beat …