California weirdo, alone on campus for Thanksgiving break, is invited by the farmer's daughter to Hicksville, U.S.A., where he makes himself right at home, secure in the knowledge that he's the star of the show. Pauly ("High-on-Himself") Shore is the lucky fellow. It must be luck, mustn't it? With Carla …
Blake Edwards resumes the Inspector Clouseau series after a ten-year hiatus: long enough to eliminate any sense of desecration (in contrast to Trail of... and Curse of the Pink Panther), but too long for there to be any compelling reason to resume. And let's be honest: there was a sharp …
Switched-at-birth comedy (spotted with blackness) about British royalty and their lessers: an Eric Idle vanity piece. Besides writing it and executive-producing it and composing and singing its title tune (in early British Invasion style), he is the principal star, has Barbara Hershey as his mother(!), scampers around bare-assed, draws compliments …
Sloppy cop show. If a car chase takes place first thing in the morning, it shouldn't be nightfall by the time they pull a groggy survivor out of the wreckage. And if again a body is fished out of the river first thing, it shouldn't be nightfall when the homicide …
Waspish little English comedy of no lasting sting. At best, it grants us Jeanne Moreau in her first big star turn in eons. With her growling-cello voice, her carroty hair, her putty face, her tentlike outfits, she blows into stuffy suburban Croydon (ca. 1959) as a gust of cosmopolitan fresh …
What could be more logical in the Nineties than a movie based on a video game? As a matter of fact, what took so long? (The "Trust the fungus" catch phrase is a clear emulation of Star Wars's "May the Force be with you.") Mario Mario and Luigi Mario, two …
Two adopted Santa Monica surfers find out they are really crown princes of a place called Patu San, hunted by a man with half a metal face and protected by a man with one eye. Anemic color; anemicker comedy. Rob Schneider gamely remains in good spirits. With Ernie Reyes, Jr., …
Just when (or long after) you thought there could be nothing new to tell about life under Hitler, along comes Thomas Carter's directorial debut to unearth a subterranean society of youthful rebels in pre-war Hamburg who listened to jazz (officially known as "nigger-kike music"), danced the jitterbug, spoke a secret …
Time (and place) travel from the New York sewers to feudal Japan ("Hey, dudes, check it out! We're in Shogun!"). Satisfaction for the under-ten crowd's appetite for a samurai spoof. Anyone else will be better off with Sanjuro. Elias Koteas, Paige Turco; written and directed by Stuart Gillard.
Short for Temp-from-Hell. But her boss has been in therapy for paranoia. Maybe he's imagining things again. Maybe it's only a coincidence that office co-workers are turning up dead. Maybe there's a reasonable explanation for everything. Maybe not. A laborious exercise in is-she-or-isn't-she, redeemed a little by Lara Flynn Boyle's …
Nostalgia of the noncrass, "sensitive" type, but a type nonetheless. It's 1961, the goldie oldies are bumper to bumper, the first-person narrator talks too much, and a little girl on Long Island learns about life and love from the big girl across the street. Based on the novel by Alice …
Part cultural epic, part soap opera, from the Amy Tan best-seller on Chinese-American family life. There are a couple of sizable stumbling blocks in the movie. The first is the voluminous, overinstructive, bookish narration ("Only the most dutiful daughter would put her own flesh in a soup to save her …
Yes and no. It's really only one film, divided into thirty-two titled sections, to equal the number of movements in the Canadian pianist's signature recording, Bach's Goldberg Variations. (So why not The Gould Variations?) One of the sections, at any rate, is a legitimate short film (actually an excerpt from …
Based on Tobias Wolff's memoir of his middle-to-late teen years, from the late Fifties to Sixty, during which period his footloose single mother settled down and remarried an auto mechanic in the ominously named small town of Concrete, Wa. (Wedding-night revelation: "You can get it doggy style or laying on …