Laughable fright show, based on an Atari video game. A long-winded preamble (stretching from an ancient extinct Native American tribe called the Abkani to a current top-secret paranormal agency called Bureau 713), a twenty-two-years-earlier prologue, and an up-to-the-minute dose of first-person narration ("My name is Edward Carnby, and I'm here …
Effective kidnap thriller, even if some of its effect is achieved by cheating. And even if, too, some of the effect is subjected to insufficient elucidation. And even if, in any case, the total effect is cheap and empty. For all that, once we get over the rocky start (the …
An ostensibly romantic comedy throwing together Mr. Uptight (Ben Stiller) and Ms. Free Spirit (Jennifer Aniston), written and directed by John Hamburg, whose mind is quite literally in the toilet. The fart at the men's-room urinals is just a warm-up for the illustrated definition of "shart," an intended fart that …
Another occasion to be shocked, shocked, at the behavior of America's youth, specifically drug-dealing middle-class SoCal white kids who have embraced a black gangsta ethic ("Chill out, dog"). A true-crime wallow, with the names changed to protect the exploiters; long-drawn-out; overacted like mad. Emile Hirsch, Justin Timberlake, Anton Yelchin, Ben …
Prologue: "Reality is too complex, so you make it fiction to make it comprehensible." What this fiction is about, according to its tentative original title, is "Tarzan vs. IBM." Godard takes his hero from the public domain, the pulp domain — Lemmy Caution, a sort of Gallic Mike Hammer — …
The traditional mad scientist dressed up in new clothes, or rather, divested of his clothes and floating naked in an isolation tank. That's just for starters. It's quite nice the way the metaphysical odyssey of this so-called "Faust freak" keeps expanding into new territory, moving through a Dr. Leary psychedelic …
Live action plus computer animation, with Jason Lee, directed by Tim Hill.
Well, once in a while, maybe. Steven Spielberg's remake and update of Guy Named Joe, a WWII fantasy about the ghost of a recently deceased flyer who (unbeknown to anyone alive) tutors a neophyte flyer and even plays matchmaker between that neophyte and his own former sweetheart, loses some of …
So you think you want more movies about real people with real problems, really talking about them the way real people really do, and without any unreal heightening and tightening. Henry Jaglom's home movie on the dissolution of his marriage to Patrice Townsend should cause you to think twice. Jaglom …
Another in the Fellini line of semi-autobiographical entertainments, episodic and variable in quality from episode to episode, this one set in the hometown of his youth. In his choice of recollections, there is a strict ban on the banal (it hardly seems possible that this wonderland is the same sort …
A Hal Hartley film, which description will mean something to the eighteen fans worldwide of his peculiar brand of frivolous eccentricity. It revolves around a self-professed nymphomaniac virgin ex-nun author of pornography, an amnesiac porn-film producer, a blackmailing former porn actress, an unfulfilled publisher of pornographic magazines ("My aspiration was …
The opening sequence, in which a band of Left-wing terrorists take hostages at the American consulate in Munich and arbitrarily execute one of them, is pretty gripping. Subsequent developments, in which the victim's bereaved lover — a mild-mannered cryptographer for the CIA — defies his superiors and sets out for …
An old-school screen biography (or hagiography) of the English abolitionist, William Wilberforce, who spearheaded the anti-slavery movement in Parliament from the late 18th Century to the early 19th, a long, slow struggle against the forces of entrenched economics. On the virtuous side of every issue -- in favor of free …
A cub, a Cub Scout, a couple of poachers. Amazing indeed in its dullness, despite cuddly animal footage and authentic China locations. With Ryan Slater, Yi Ding, Stephen Lang; directed by Christopher Cain.