From Disney, the self-proclaimed First Fully Computer-Animated Feature Film: reason enough to disdain it on general principle. Reason in particular, and in plenty, is provided by the horrible forms of the figures -- closer to Puppetoons, Claymation, Gumby, Speedy Alka-Seltzer, and the Pillsbury Doughboy than to the Disney family of …
Golden childhood memory -- golden, literally, in photography -- of the day in the summer of '33 when the La Paloma cinema opened its doors in South Philly. How's the little hero going to raise the twenty-five-cent admission? Mostly stilted and mawkish; a couple of eye-widening episodes of human aberrance …
Theo Angelopoulos, the esoterically esteemed Greek director, blends past and present, history and fiction, Balkan politics and Bazinian aesthetics, in an "epic" quest (i.e., three hours in length) for some legendary lost reels from the dawn of cinema. Sluggish, solemn, deeply felt if not necessarily strongly communicated, it plays almost …
Another eruption of neo-noir. Maybe not quite so "neo-" when you notice it's a remake of a Golden Age noir. But at the same time, and for the same reason, all the more noir. The original, Criss Cross (1948), was directed by Robert Siodmak, not just generically Germanic but genuinely …
Casey Ryback, full-time Navy cook, moonlighting One-Man Army, is again in the right place at the right time: travelling with his newly orphaned niece on a hijacked passenger train, made over into a mobile command post for an evil genius bent on demolishing the Pentagon. Birdbrained, copycatty, but puppyishly energetic …
Intently, insistently, strainingly eccentric family portrait centered around a twelve-year-old boy whose mother is stricken with terminal cancer and whose father, already distracted by his crackpot inventions (e. g., a remote-control tent over the boy's bed), is distracted further by his wife's illness. So the boy opts to stay over …
Is this a ripple in the inevitable Tarantino backwash? The caper plotline is snipped into nonsequential segments, and the dialogue runs harum-scarum for the four-letter words and their compounds. (Unusually amusing example: five participants in a police lineup performing their different interpretations of "Hand me the keys, you fucking cocksucker.") …
Eddie Murphy as the last of a race of Caribbean blood-drinkers, come to Brooklyn in quest of a bride to continue the line. (Strikingly like Coming to America.) For long stretches, the horror-comedy forgets altogether about trying to be funny -- easy to do, because even when it was trying …
The second screen adaptation, thirty-five years later, of John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos, retaining the title of the earlier British one. Though it loses something by being uprooted from tranquil postwar England, this is a story that can stand to be retold: the alien litter of robotic blond Master Racists …
A virtual-reality mass murderer escapes into the real world in the body of an android, more precisely a "nano-tech synthetic organism." ("The only way to stop him is to bust up his software module.") Rudimentary shoot-'em-up, insufficiently and rather irritatingly camouflaged in computer jargon and graphics. With Denzel Washington, Kelly …
A women's film, specifically a black women's film, more specifically a film of four black women. Although adapted from a novel by Terry McMillan, it plays as a sort of dramatization of a panel discussion on Oprah, giving voice to feelings of dissatisfaction with menfolk, as well as voice to …
Overdue approach to the Vietnam experience -- from a specifically black angle. But stiff-jointed and stomping, especially entering and exiting the civilian-life flashbacks. Allen Payne, Joe Morton; written, directed by Preston Whitmore II.
Total mush, and uncommonly runny mush at that, about a make-believe marriage between an already married WWII vet and an already pregnant señorita, the deflowered flower of a noble Napa winegrowing family. (The meet-cute: she barfs on his uniform aboard a train.) Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Arau brings to Hollywood his …
The premise of an inundated planet ("The polar icecaps have melted," an anonymous narrator brings us up to speed, without whys or whens) is centrally entrenched in the science-fictional subgenre of catastrophe and survival: the altered conditions on Earth, the necessary means of coping with them, maybe a trace of …