Insipid "biopic" -- family-authorized to make sure that nothing too tangy intrudes -- about the tejano singing star and Grammy winner, a rags-to-riches success story ("We think she's the next Gloria Estefan!") abruptly halted by homicide. Jennifer Lopez, lip-synching to original recordings, rises well above exhilaration and to within a …
Jean-Jacques Annaud's true-life odyssey of a self-centered mountaineering glory-seeker and uncommitted Nazi Party member who becomes a better person in the aura of the juvenile Dalai Lama. Mostly a big drag unless your pulse uncontrollably quickens at the sight of the bleached-blond Brad Pitt or the snowy Himalayas. The sound …
Complacent political-paranoia thriller in the footprints of The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, et al. George P. Cosmatos, the director of Tombstone, Rambo, et al., shows glimmers of competence. The action is every bit as fast-moving as it is confusing. And the Wellesian deep-focus shots, too occasional to add …
No one could accuse director Nick Cassavetes of reluctance to trade on his father's name. His first film, Unhook the Stars, was a vehicle for John's widow and frequent star, Gena Rowlands. And this, his second, comes from an unproduced screenplay by John (with a small part for Gena as …
TV mini-series adaptation of the Stephen King novel.
Martin Short as the sole male member of the National Association of Fairy Godmothers. (Subtle new stress on fairy: he wears his hair like the young Oscar Wilde.) There are some hopeful early signs -- the opening sequence of the written final exam for aspiring fairy godmothers; the star's discriminating …
Disney-manufactured synthetic sports thrills, with a goaltending (and intentional-fouling) ghost to assist the Washington Huskies on the road to the Final Four. The team makes it all the way to the championship game before its members become bothered by the fact that they are "cheating." In the conscience department, it's …
Billy Bob Thornton's Karl -- a borderline moron released from a mental institution twenty-five years after murdering his mother and her lover -- is a striking portrait, difficult to recognize as the same man who, for instance, was once the bullying cardsharp faced down by an unarmed Wyatt Earp in …
Glacial murder mystery, unfluidly adapted from the touted Peter Hoeg novel. The questions are sometimes tantalizing ("Why would somebody shove a biopsy needle into a dead child?"). The pursuit of answers, behind the uninflected performance of Julia Ormond as the Nancy Drew amateur sleuth, is consistently tedious -- even when …
George Tillman, Jr.'s semi-autobiographical account of the black experience in the middle-class Midwest. As artless as it is earnest (with too much play-by-play and analysis from its small-fry narrator), but it at least enters African-American cuisine into the current trend of food films: The Big Night, Eat Drink Man Woman, …
The burnt-to-a-crisp and resurrected superhero from the Todd McFarlane comic books, and the HBO cartoon series, comes -- like a Batman out of Hell -- to live action, or at least partially live. His assorted powers -- his cape, his armor, his spikes, his chains -- and his shapeshifting enemies …
Too speedy. The pace is indeed so insistently frenetic, and the camerawork so agitated, that we cannot begin to appreciate, even if we can begin to comprehend, the moves and countermoves aboard a hijacked Caribbean cruise liner. The lone hijacker, and the last word in disgruntled ex-employees (Willem Dafoe), gives …
An hispanic Hollywood wannabe ("It must be great to be loved by so many people, make people laugh, make people cry") bides his time in a stable of male prostitutes run by his own father. A minor embarrassment, maladroit, sentimental, and simple-minded, with some credible wasted work by Efrain Figueroa …
Paul Verhoeven has cushioned himself against the common accusations flung at the Robert Heinlein boys' sci-fi adventure -—"fascism," "puerilism" — with an overall larkish air of insincerity. Correction: one area of presumable sincerity might be the continuation of his career-long quest of the physically repellent. Plenty of scope here for …
Innocent and innocuous superhero fantasy about a retired Army weapons expert (basketballer Shaquille O'Neal: half a foot taller than the military maximum, but if David Robinson can join the service, why can't Shaq?) who, in a suit of bulletproof armor, teams up with a paraplegic colleague called "Sparky" (Annabeth Gish, …