To feel affection for the grade-Z science-fiction films of the Fifties, especially as their descendants get ever more deluxe, is perfectly natural and no cause for shame. (A Not-Guilty Pleasure.) To set out in the 21st Century to make a grade-Z science-fiction film of the Fifties, purportedly shelved and now …
Plural, more accurately: Aliens vs. Predators, facing off in the arena of an ancient pyramid under the Antarctic ice. Notwithstanding the outward hostilities, it's a pragmatic pooling of commercial assets by the Fox studio, profit motive only. A clearer motive, at any rate, than that of the dreadlocked Predators, who, …
Rainer Werner Fassbinder's crocodile-tearjerker about the romance and marriage of a sixtyish German scrubwoman and a young Moroccan immigrant. It's a crossbreed of two Douglas Sirk tearjerkers of the Fifties, All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life, and twice as hard to swallow as either of those. Fassbinder clicks …
Grisly details of the 1972 plane crash in the Andes, the survivors of which resorted to eating the casualties in order to stay alive. The crash itself is hair-raising, and the rest is certainly a more tasteful (not to say tasty) treatment than the 1976 Mexican quickie, Survive. Possibly it's …
AIDS in the world of ballet, specifically the British ballet, more specifically the fictitious Ballet Luna ("Queers have made my theater great!"). All very never-say-die and brave and exemplary, but tediously goody-goody and idealized, too. And the climax -- an Opening Night sans rehearsal -- is canned corn. With Jason …
Joseph Mankiewicz accepts all the Broadway Backstage stereotypes and hones them into a like-new sharpness, a little dulled again before movie's end. Bette Davis is the insecure star and Anne Baxter the ambitious ingénue climbing up her back. Gary Merrill, Davis's real-life husband, plays her husband, and George Sanders and …
Pedro Almodóvar's paean to womanhood, in particular motherhood and actresshood, is dedicated to three of the kind: Bette Davis, specifically for All about Eve; Gena Rowlands, for Opening Night; and Romy Schneider, for The Important Thing Is to Love. The title, quite plainly, derives from the Davis film, a Spanish-dubbed …
Pedro Almodóvar's paean to womanhood, in particular motherhood and actresshood, is dedicated to three of the kind: Bette Davis, specifically for All about Eve; Gena Rowlands, for Opening Night; and Romy Schneider, for The Important Thing Is to Love. The title, quite plainly, derives from the Davis film, a Spanish-dubbed …
Light-hearted, ham-handed caper film about a bounty hunter, a con artist, some diamonds, and a lottery ticket. Too brutal to be seen as funny, too shticky to be taken straight. With Ice Cube and Mike Epps; directed by Kevin Bray.
Animated animal tale, about a flea-bitten mutt short-changed on devotion to humans, and embroiled in a turf war with a no-good cur. The canine protagonist's beyond-and-back experience, after being "rubbed out" by his rival, is decently inventive: he snatches his assigned time-piece from an administrator in the celestial Hall of …
A shamefaced copycatting of Disney's FANTASIA. To put some distance between his model and himself, Bruno Bozzetto, the Italian animator, elects to flip-flop the values of the Disney movie -- the naivism of the animation and the solemnity about classical music. Bozzetto's cartoon sequences are both gamy and preachy, and …
Romantic mystery starring Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst. The story is loosely based on real experiences of Robert Durst, a real estate heir whose first wife disappeared in 1982.
Hip horror movie which, when not too wrapped up in tracking down an overgrown reptile, throws in some cinematic "in" jokes ("Harry Lime Lives" scrawled on a sewer wall) and some digs at industrial research, rich people, and male chauvinism (Henry Silva, nice to see, as a Great White Hunter). …
A vivid demonstration of parental indulgence: Susanna Hoffs, the lead singer of the Bangles, is directed by her mother, Tamar Simon Hoffs, in a youth comedy about the pre-commencement blowout (or Last Chance Romance) at Pacifica College. It would have been better, or anyhow a shorter route, to go for …
Comic Steve Martin and director Carl Reiner hash over roughly the same idea of their previous The Man with Two Brains. The beautiful body with the ugly personality remains constant, except that the body in this case is Victoria Tennant's instead of Kathleen Turner's. But the beautiful disembodied brain has …