An unexplained power outage, over a vast area and an extended time, chips away at the thin veneer of civilization. (The opening scene offers a glimpse of chaos of special interest to the concerned moviegoer, an accurate depiction of the problem of people gabbing in theaters: "Hey, I got a …
Didactic romantic comedy founded on the hypothesis -- the cold hard fact -- that a terrific female mind and personality will not get a second male glance unless they come in a package such as Uma Thurman. The premise is further chilled and hardened by endowing Thurman with a decidedly …
Closeups, sunlight, and a Victorian setting are of no benefit to Shakespeare's flimsy masquerade of cross-dressing and mistaken sexual identity. The language, naturally, is full of delights, and Helena Bonham Carter does nicely with it, but she's not the one who must wear the mustache. Imogen Stubbs, Nigel Hawthorne, Imelda …
One big wow, sum of a lot of little wows. But once that's been said, what's left? Enumeration of the wows? Ranking of them in size? (The flying motorboat, the flying cow, the entire house somersaulting across the road, etc., etc.) It must be said -- periodically, if not necessarily …
For display only, a discordant arrangement of florid characters in a studiedly "cool" crime comedy: a couple of professional hitmen, one psychopathic, the other oversensitive about his hair loss; a couple of vice cops, one burnt-out, the other aspiring to Homicide; a Winter Olympics also-ran; a suicidal Emmy winner with …
John Dahl branches out from his film noir pastiches, Kill Me Again, Red Rock West, The Last Seduction. He starts out in or near that same neighborhood, at a multiple-homicide crime scene where the Seattle P. D. medical examiner (Ray Liotta) gets to show off one of the "Dick Tracy" …
We watch (and listen to) Gena Rowlands talking to herself, delivering the morning papers, pulling her car up ten feet (or, through the telephoto lens, what looks like ten inches) and stopping again, getting out, talking to herself, delivering more papers, and we get tired of the movie before the …
Puff piece on the exciting and demanding and rewarding field of TV journalism. The names of the savvy veteran and his protégé, eventually husband and wife, has-been and star-is-born, tell you all you need to know: Warren Justice and Tally Atwater. (They are acted, with soggy chemistry, by the former …
Same well-drilled cast and same overworked joke -- a Seventies TV sitcom family living untouched in the world of today ("Hip-hop? Sounds like something a rabbit listens to"). And a few new laughs in between and in spite of the incongruous con-man plot, the contamination of the original idea (Greg's …
Admitted to America, through those cultural sentinels at Miramax, with the commendation of "France's highest grossing film of all time." And the breadth and depth of the humor -- clarification: the broadness and lowness of it -- leave us in no doubt as to the truth of the claim. An …
The characters number among them a cop and some crooks, but any resemblance to a hard-boiled policier is strictly incidental. (There's a tense car heist, even though we know ahead of time what will happen.) This is foremost a "relationship" thing, in a "realistic" mode (lapsing often into sensationalistic), pretentiously …
One bosom buddy is getting married; the other is getting desperate not to fall too far behind. (Could the video-store clerk, even with his taste for Freak Show VII, be a prospect?) Nicole Holofcener's relationship comedy, otherwise known as a "girl movie," is cozy and warm and not especially sustaining. …
Wanting to be taken more seriously as an actor and director, Emilio Estevez navigates a well-marked short cut: to Vietnam, and to the tempestuous readjustment of a war vet to civilian life. The dynamic of the central family of four is credible, especially in the ways in which hurt can …
Innocuous little nothing about a missing cat and the motley Parisians who take part in the search. Filmmaker Cedric Klapisch harks back in several respects to the original (the one and the only) French New Wave: a shoot-from-the-hip, improvisatory, almost diaristic approach to his material; a cast filled out with …