Ah, the very title conjures up a fifty-year hit parade of big, bold, passionate (etc.) best-sellers. And for certain the original screenplay by Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas has all the elements: all the horrors of family and the troubles of war; the suspense, the drama, the tragedy of a …
A dime-a-dozen punk rocker in New York figures to increase her value by moving to Japan, where her peroxide hair and Amazonian legs will be rarer. Fran Rubel Kuzui, the director, is torn between documenting the culture (nothing too new, apart from the series of "love hotels") and midwifing a …
The Harvey Fierstein triple play about a drag queen's quest for True Love, Eternal Youth, that sort of thing: a would-be Oscar Wilde but a resigned-to-be Neil Simon, albeit a subcultural Neil Simon. The dramaturgy, in the result, leans heavily on the conventional -- the forgotten birthday, the random act …
Nicolas Roeg tears the lid off that popular can of worms labelled Frustrated Housewife, and out comes a spray of those pretty-colored joke-shop coiled springs. A regulation Mysterious Stranger arrives in town, all the way from England, and thus with tinges of Teddy Boy menace, as well as with the …
The transparent parallels between the post-war career of automobile entrepreneur Preston Tucker (played with Tom Swiftian boyishness by Jeff Bridges: an inventor out of Jules Verne) and director Francis Ford Coppola's own Zoetrope story -- a couple of maverick visionaries bucking the system and, for all the creative compromise and …
Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito, products of a genetics experiment gone haywire, are twins. That's the joke. The whole joke. Oh, there are others inside it, to do with industrial espionage and a hired killer and a pair of hot-to-trot sisters, but they're just kapok. Kelly Preston, Chloe Webb; directed …
Zalman King, as one of the co-writers of 9 1/2 Weeks, expressed some disappointment over the finished product. Now as both the writer and the director of Two Moon Junction, another tale of obsessional passion, he has the chance to show us what was intended. Apparently it was a matter …
Or mutter and harrumph. The messianic Irish rock band on tour in the U.S., pretentiously photographed in styles favored on MTV (grainy black-and-white, backlit silhouettes, etc.). So much here seems so common -- the baying-at-the-moon vocals, the telegraph-key guitar rhythms, the tossed mop of hair, the bare shoulders, the torn …
With the Milan Kundera novel as his source, Philip Kaufman has managed to fashion a purebred European film without subtitles, and this is bound to lend him a new sort of cachet in some people's eyes. Besides which, like The Right Stuff before it, it's three hours long: it must …
With the Milan Kundera novel as his source, Philip Kaufman has managed to fashion a purebred European film without subtitles, and this is bound to lend him a new sort of cachet in some people's eyes. Besides which, like The Right Stuff before it, it's three hours long: it must …
Paranormal adventure comedy, though in most other ways a pretty normal one. The sub-Edgar Rice Burroughs quest for the Room of Gold in the Lost City of Ecuador is just tedious, and the dialogue cries out for either a TV laugh track or a vaudeville drum-and-cymbal routine. But Jeff Goldblum …
A lot like Like Father, Like Son, and too close on the other's heels to escape derision as a copycat. Once again father and son swap personalities, only this time it's through the agency of an ancient Thai statue, and the son is slightly younger (eleven). All the sure-fire stuff …
Paul Cox undertakes, so to speak, to exhume Vincent van Gogh through his letters to his brother Theo, his artwork, the places on earth he haunted, and some costume-drama re-creations of the period. Fitfully successful though this is, the cinema may not be the happiest medium for it. There is …
Free-lance prostitution on a sleeping car seems a rather uneconomic concept, but also, in its sinful way, a rather romantic one: strangers on a train, strangers in the night, etc., etc. The off-train material is less appealing: the prostitute's daytime job is smothered under heavy irony (lecturing to girls on …
An imprisoned bisexual (Gary Oldman) in 1950s England has to find temporary lodgings for his hideous baby boy and his beautiful German shepherd (better say Alsatian in post-war England). A former lover (Alan Bates) takes a shine to the dog, not the infant -- and vice versa. But both of …