Leslie Nielsen, the patriarch of zany, in a decades-late takeoff on James Bond, with sideswipes ranging from Home Alone to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. A couple of flashback jokes stand out from the numbing fusillade of other jokes as jewels of intelligence and ingenuity. In one, we flash …
The viewer who failed to follow faithfully the Next Generation television series is liable to feel lost and left out whenever Capt. Picard goes all steely-eyed over his previous encounter with "the Borg." ("Borg? Sounds Swedish," says a character equally in the dark.) The tonnage of science-fictional gobbledegook in the …
Essentially just Gidget Goes Artistic, notwithstanding the name and reputation of Bernardo Bertolucci (Last Tango in Paris, Sheltering Sky). To an eclectic soundtrack of rock, blues, jazz, classical, and in a Tuscan setting littered with terra-cotta sculptures, paintings, pastels, a nineteen-year-old American virgin spends summer vacation abroad, ostensibly to have …
Fit as she obviously, obsessively, vainly is, Demi Moore is not a fit mother. That is, she's a poor fit in the written part: a topless dancer who is first and foremost an average, everyday, devoted, loving mother only temporarily employed as a topless dancer in order to raise the …
Theater director Daniel Sullivan's re-staging of the Jon Robin Baitz play, still stagebound, about a Holocaust survivor and old established New York publisher (Ron Rifkin) who has no room for frivolity on his booklist. There's some fun in the character's unyieldingness, as well as in the particular titles he champions: …
A reform-minded high-school teacher (the earthy Diane Venora) gets kneecapped, or Nancy Kerriganned, while jogging; and her boyfriend (Tom Berenger), who happens to be a recently laid-off soldier of fortune, gets himself assigned to her classroom, hellbent on ferreting out the guilty parties, with a ready-made commando team at his …
That culture-vulture, James Ivory, circles this time around a book without cachet, a disreputable bit of scholarship by Arianna Huffington. The cachet resides entirely in its subject, the Big Cubist, the very embodiment of Modern Art, reduced here to a woman-devouring monster, reduced additionally to a scenery-chewing villain in the …
Guy talk, among a group of Hollywood wannabes (their chief points of reference in life appear to be Reservoir Dogs and Goodfellas, openly aped by director and cameraman Doug Liman in slow-motion and Steadicam sequences, respectively) whose highest form of praise and self-praise is "money," as in "You're money!" and …
Tom Hanks's bow as writer-director, a rock musical in regressive pursuit of early-Beatles innocence, simplicity, pep, cheer, and other illusory or evanescent states. For all its relative smallness and modesty -- relative, for pertinent examples, to Forrest Gump and to Apollo 13 -- the movie gives off a glow of …
From Raul Ruiz, Chilean émigré in France, come three tales of the strange and fantastic, tied together by a pointy-headed sensibility, an arch tone, impish camera, intrusive musical track, and a befuddled Marcello Mastroianni. With Anna Galiena, Marisa Paredes, Arielle Dombasle.
The adaptation of the earliest and not least ambitious John Grisham potboiler, about a Mississippi black man on trial for the double murder of his ten-year-old daughter's rapists, bundles up the author's fairy-tale articles of faith (the luck of the beginner, the ascension of the underdog, the might of right) …
An unambitious and self-destructive sports comedy about an unambitious and self-destructive golf pro who has sunk to his comfortable level as manager of an armadillo-infested driving range in dusty West Texas. The leading question on the docket is whether Kevin Costner, with his bare-buns days far behind him, can recapture …
A rattletrap contrivance built around a Labor Day weekend that doubles, or triples, as the birthday and deathday of the titular Gillian, whose surviving husband (Peter Gallagher) still clings to her memory two years after her header from the highest point on a sailboat. (Suggested alternative title, with apologies to …
Danny Boyle's group portrait of young Edinburgh deadbeats bound together by their addiction to heroin — a junk bond, as it were. For all its visual flash and dash — all its distorting lenses, freeze frames, fast-motion, and so forth; all its head-first dives into the rabbit hole (or in …
Steve Buscemi's debut as a writer and director, an almost shrinkingly modest independent film about and around the clientele of a Long Island neighborhood watering hole, a shades-of-gray corner building with a spindly sapling planted in the sidewalk out front. In his directing hat, he is meticulously observant of the …