Billy Wilder, who takes as his source material a French farce by Francis Veber, and who seems in general at a loss for original ideas, banks heavily on the very unoriginal idea of teaming Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon (for the third time in a Billy Wilder movie and fourth …
Gary Busey's surly, burly performance in the lead role somewhat elevates this conventional musical biography, which skims without pause over the short road from jam sessions in a small-town Texas garage, to Top 40s fame and fortune, to an early grave in the Midwest winter. (Nothing in this easygoing movie …
Ry Cooder, the eclectic American guitarist, singer, composer, and musicologist, rounds up some old lions (and a lioness) of Cuban popular music, for a series of live concerts, recording sessions, on-camera interviews, and ultimately a debut at Carnegie Hall. (Their sightseeing sidetrips on that occasion are a delight.) Directed by …
It's been 20 years and this reunion film reunites the remaining members of The Buena Vista Social Club minus Wim Wenders. Lucy Walker directs.
A young Mexican man seeks out a friend's relative in Germany. Subtitled in Spanish and German. Written and directed by Jorge Ramírez Suárez; starring Kristyan Ferrer, Ingeborg Schöner, Adriana Barraza.
An emotionally imprisoned ex-con, who took a phony fall to square his account with a bookie, now wants to even the score with the Buffalo Bills placekicker, Scott Wood, who missed the Super Bowl-winning field goal. (The real-life former Bills kicker, Scott Norwood, could not be altogether pleased with this …
Or Robert Altman's absolutely unique and heroic enterprise of inimitable lustre. You can't get through the title and credits without wilting under the oppressive self-consciousness and self-congratulation of this debunking of an American hero (or this kicking of a dead horse). Altman's remedy for the anti-Indian attack of past Hollywood …
Hellerish, or just plain hellish, view of an overseas Army base in the late-Eighties: "Soldiers with nothing to kill except time," and hence the black-marketeering, the drug-manufacturing, the arms-dealing, and so on. The film's release was long postponed after 9/11, on the supposition that it wouldn't suit the nation's mood. …
What Bill and Ted did for time travel (i.e., less than nothing), Buffy does for vampire hunting. An airheaded high-school cheerleader, whose yellow-and-purple costume is neutralized by jaundiced cinematography, is the Chosen One to combat an infestation of bloodsuckers in Southern California. Mostly flat outside of Kristy Swanson's chest and …
Your opportunity to see a praying mantis eat a fly's head in IMAX. These are wondrous times we live in.
Disney's second computer-animated feature, following Toy Story, and somewhat embarrassingly released two months after Antz, from arch-rival DreamWorks. There can be no question of outright copycattery. The movies were too close to neck-and-neck for that. But the mere coincidence of two computer-animated features set in an ant colony and centered …
Siegel, that is -- the vain gangster, the "visionary" gangster, the lovesick gangster, the henpecked gangster, the moonstruck, the loony, the buggy gangster. He makes a wide-ranging acting portfolio for the narrowly talented Warren Beatty, but he never really comes into focus as a character. And the movie on the …
A novelty act: an all-juvenile cast, dolled up with double-breasted suits and slicked-down hair, re-enacts the underworld passions played out on the Warner Brothers lot in the Thirties by Cagney, Robinson, McHugh, Blondell, et al. The kids break into periodic song-and-dance routines, and the guns are loaded with lethal whipped …