Think of it as Young Blades, if you please. When Richard Lester remade the tale in 1974, he was already unable to take it seriously. Now the next generation demands a turn to show that they can't take it seriously, either. Thanks for your very valuable input, fellas. Charlie Sheen, …
It has the plot of a bedroom farce, though the director, Yurek Bogayevicz, doesn't appear to notice the fact, or feel obliged on that account to be funny, or have any inhibition about reaching for the spiritual heights. A closet lesbian, all set to "come out" at her sister's wedding, …
More accurately Henry Selick's Tim Burton's The Nightmare before Christmas, Burton having had the idea for it and then having turned it over to Selick, a specialist in three-dimensional stop-motion animation. As so often in that medium, the aesthetic plane, quite distinct from the financial plane, is not sufficiently higher …
Tony Scott, alias Blue Boy, alias Mr. Misty, alias I.C. Spots, pursues his calling as a reshaper of traditional screen icons (aviator: Top Gun; racer: Days of Thunder; private eye: The Last Boy Scout) for the MTV generation. Here, working from a script by Quentin Tarantino, alias I.M. Hip, it's …
Canadian documentary on the early-Sixties dance craze, its immediate forerunners (Lindy Hop, Jitterbug, Stroll, etc.), and its immediate successors (Monkey, Fly, Mashed Potato, etc.). The method is bread-and-butter: archival footage (often of such poor quality you feel like rubbing your eyes) cemented together with latter-day interviews (Hank Ballard, Chubby Checker, …
Romantic triangle in the rarefied world of classical music. The music itself is not just for decoration. It undoubtedly corresponds to the theme of the Expression and/or Containment of Emotion. Even more, the three Ravel chamber pieces on the program go well with the configuration of a triangle: the (female) …
Outmoded spy comedy about a husband-and-wife secret-agent team, and mutual-admiration society, who offhandedly dispatch thugs and terrorists in between wisecracks and parental duties (a bouncing baby girl named either Jane Louise or Louise Jane -- they haven't made up their minds). They are so pleased with themselves they're unlikely to …
Beauty-and-Beast romance (more the Beauty and the Beast TV series than any other version: the withdrawn watchdog in his subterranean haven) between a Minneapolis coffee-shop waitress with "too good a heart" and a scraggly-haired busboy with a medically "bad" heart. The image is too soft and smeary for the blue-collar …
Better thought of as The Reappearing. George Sluizer's remake — and travesty — of his own 1988 thriller is nothing so much as a monument to American provincialism and ethnocentrism: if it isn't in English, it can't be a real movie. Never mind that it was a perfectly good movie, …
The Finnish filmmaker, Aki Kaurismaki, working in France and in French, and reviving (or at least propping up the embalmed cadaver of) the mythical struggling artist in Paris. Three of them, to be precise: an Albanian portrait painter with a dog by the name of Baudelaire, an evicted playwright (unproduced …
A promo film flashing false credentials as a documentary, under the auspices of the American Film Institute and the American Society of Cinematographers. Hence the concentration on Americans, or at any rate American movies. The clips are often entrancing: Peter Ibbetson, photographed by Charles Lang, still looks glorious; and the …
The son of Satan (Julian Sands, rising full-sized and naked from a yucky pile of afterbirth) is gathering up the Druidic runestones to free his father from the prison of hell. Only a teenager can stop him. Lord help us. With Chris Young, Paula Marshall, Joanna Pacula; directed by Anthony …
On the Clinton campaign trail, from New Hampshire to happy ending. The movie looks like hell (grainy film, fuzzy video), but it affords privileged access to Strategy Central, cheek by jowl with campaign manager James (the Ragin' Cajun) Carville and communications director George Stephanopoulos -- most privileged of all during …