Jovial and juvenile martial-arts hokum. The kung-fu king of Hong Kong comes to the States for his uncle's wedding (to a buxom black woman, ha-ha), and lands in the crossfire between motorcycle gang and Mafia. Jackie Chan's brand of slapstick violence earns some honest laughs when the athlete-acrobat incorporates a …
Deliberately, diligently, self-contentedly conventional dead-teenager thriller: the deeds are done by a serial killer in a Grim-Reaper-by-Edvard-Munch mask. The relentless allusions to film and television ("You can only hear that Richard Gere gerbil story so many times until you have to start believing it") are supposed to lift it above …
The title refers to subterranean "autonomous mobile swords," or more specifically to the noise these make before they carve up enemy soldiers on the planet Sirius 6B in the year 2078. What follows after the title has a few things to tide over the science-fiction fancier till something better comes …
It might be slightly difficult to think of a two-hour-twenty-two-minute movie in terms of a handy summary, but there was a lot to be summed up from the dozen or so prior entries in the filmography of Mike Leigh: the wide range and the sudden shifts of emotion (the excruciating …
Tall tale, with pseudodocumentary trimmings, about a perpetual outsider who invents a new persona for himself and enlists in the French Resistance safely after the Liberation. It speaks of, and to, those enduring human feelings of inferiority and envy, though the details of the transformation are not very convincingly imagined. …
Or: Girlz n the Hood. Four daughters, nieces, younger sisters, or diligent students of Pam Grier (Jada Pinkett, Vivica Fox, Queen Latifah, Kimberly Elise), all of whom seem to answer to the name "Girl," decide after due deliberation to supplement their janitorial incomes with the occasional bank robbery: "Look, we …
Take away Phil Silvers, and you take away any point. Steve Martin, Dan Aykroyd, Phil Hartman, Glenne Headly, and company are just good little soldiers, and their commander, director Jonathan Lynn, is strictly by-the-book.
In Japan, the spoken prologue briefly fills us in, "ballroom dancing is regarded with much suspicion." So it would abundantly appear. A white-collar drudge on his nightly train commute has a clear view, from one of the stops on his way to the suburbs, of the lighted window of an …
A ticklish problem for those who overrated The Brothers McMullen. No big deal for those who rated that as no big deal either. Edward Burns, the director-writer-star of both, clearly relishes the creative power of moving people around on the gameboard of Personal Relationships. Not to mention the power of …
The true-life story of David Helfgott, an Australian musical prodigy who suffers a total mental collapse after his "thesis" performance of Rachmaninoff's D-minor piano concerto at the Royal College of Music in London ("No one's ever been mad enough to attempt the Rach 3!" "Am I mad enough, professor?"), spends …
Lorenzo Carcaterra's best-selling revenge tale, obligingly but dubiously filed on the nonfiction bookshelves, of a quartet of Hell's Kitchen hellions who are sent together to the Wilkenson Home for Boys, are routinely beaten, tortured, and sexually abused by a quartet of Gestapo-esque guards, and then -- with The Count of …
Growing up scared and scarred in a Glasgow slum in the late Sixties. The narrative is not very coherently threaded together or satisfyingly filled in: the single mother of three strapping lads is a notably spotty figure, and school is only for the administration of corporal punishment. And the direction …
Cursory examination of the festering wound in Northern Ireland, treated with a balm of inspirationalism and rationality as an apolitical Catholic schoolteacher (Helen Mirren, who also served as Associate Producer) inches into activism on behalf of her incarcerated son. The recounted history -- the hunger strike of 1981 -- has …
More fun to look forward to than actually to look at: a feature-lengthening of the TV commercials combining a live-action Michael Jordan and an animated Bugs Bunny, here reunited under the same director, Joe Pytka, along with other Looney Tunes luminaries, and at the last minute Bill Murray, for a …
First-time director Lee David Zlotoff, a TV veteran who is at pains to avoid identification as such, puts up a respectable semblance of serious filmmaking, for a while at least. His work here is careful and well-crafted, with fine attention to points of view, fields of view, as in the …