The long-awaited (by some) prequel to the Star Wars trilogy, and such a letdown as to make you feel almost sorry for George Lucas, poor little rich boy. Even moviegoers who have never attended a foreign film in their lives are apt to be aware that Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden …
A send-up (as it used to be called) of the Merchant-Ivory strain of High-Tea Cinema: upper-crust Brits and trampled rustics, the repressed homosexual, the marriageable maiden, the spinsterly chaperone, the globe-trotters and the colonials, the loud-mouthed Americans -- all that. The settings range from the home country (a pub called …
Intrepid Vatican investigator (the chronically gloomy Gabriel Byrne), field agent of the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints, is put on the case of a Pittsburgh hairstylist (a punkish Patricia Arquette) with puncture wounds in her wrists and lacerations on her back, and a subway surveillance video to corroborate …
An "ordinary" man, moderately depressed about it, submits to an unskilled hypnotist for the sake of a party game ("What's the worst that can happen?"), and takes all too literally a posthypnotic suggestion to be more "open-minded." The 1958 Richard Matheson novel, with its ingenious blend of ingredients of science …
A concert movie and nothing more, and as narrowly focussed a one as ever was: little of the live audience, nothing of the backstage, only the on-stage. In fairness, the movie (directed by Jonathan Demme) is probably better to look at than most concert movies, and the concert (staged by …
Examination of a marriage made in, on, or from the Hollywood "A" list: Bruce Willis, Michelle Pfeiffer. (Combined body temperatures: eighty-nine-point-six degrees Fahrenheit.) The dialogue rings consistently false, or more accurately it rings, as director Rob Reiner tends to prefer it, with a consistent ba-da-bing, ba-da-bang, ba-da-boom. The action spans …
An oddity among oddities, a G-rated Disney film, in nice bright color, directed by David Lynch (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, etc.). But notwithstanding its Midwestern corn and its heartland-on-the-sleeve, it turns out to have its fair share of Lynchian crotchets as well. This cuts both ways. The movie …
Aw-w-w-w-w-w. The computer-animated talking white mouse, in his high-top red sneakers and assorted outfits, is cute as all get-out, even if his computer program gives him a too-close resemblance to a Coca-Cola polar bear. The soft-sell absurdity of his adoption into a live-action human family (Hugh Laurie and Geena Davis …
Show-biz wannabes and has-beens ("They want me to play Christina Ricci's mother!") in present-day L.A., every one of them poked, jabbed, chopped, and skewered, with a very dull knife. Ally Sheedy, Rosanna Arquette, Michael Des Barres, John Doe, John Taylor, Beverly D'Angelo, Martin Kemp; co-written and co-directed by Allison Anders …
Spike Lee takes a wrong-end-of-the-telescope view of the Son-of-Sam murder spree during a New York City heat wave in 1977: the events in little. (In his introductory and closing remarks, newspaperman Jimmy Breslin witlessly parrots the catch phrase of TV's Naked City: "There are eight million stories in the Naked …
Writer-director Woody Allen here makes only token appearances on screen, as himself, in talking-head interview segments, together with jazz writer Nat Hentoff and others, to lend a documentary touch to the made-up story of Emmet Ray, a "little-known" American jazz guitarist of the Thirties ("I was a huge fan of …
Hollywood remake of the first of Patricia Highsmith's five Ripley novels, originally made in France, under the title Purple Noon, forty years earlier. (The remake is done in period: Chet Baker and Charlie Parker are the coolest, man.) Clearly, writer-director Anthony Minghella does not owe his inspiration to a desire …
Decidedly weak tea (and not so hot, either), with filmmaker Franco Zeffirelli holding forth from the head of the table as a rambling raconteur, remembering the days of his youth among the artsy English ladies of pre-war and mid-war Florence ("I've warmed both hands before the fires of Botticelli and …