An evident filching and ineffectual rewording of a Tennessee Williams title, for use on a blue-collar comedy by Luis Buñuel. The movie overall -- except for the staging of a neighborhood religious pageant, which demonstrates a perfect understanding that such amateur theatrics needn't be exaggerated in order to be hilarious …
The basic situation is a combustible one. A political prisoner named Valentin shares a cell with a homosexual pederast named Molina in an unnamed Latin American country. The homosexual, who is eventually revealed to have been bribed by prison officials to worm information out of his cellmate, but by then …
A loser. Cheap humor, cheap sentiment, cheap filmmaking, around a $370 million jackpot, hit by a ghetto youth who doesn’t know enough to sign his ticket before the news gets out. With Bow Wow, Brandon T. Jackson, Naturi Naughton, Loretta Devine, and Ice Cube; directed by Erik White.
Screenwriting and directing debut of rapper and actor Ice Cube (a bit-player here), revolving around a seedy strip joint, but sluggishly, chuggingly, lacking the energy to make up for the crudity. With LisaRaye, Bernie Mac, Monica Calhoun, Jamie Foxx.
Richard Quine has suffered long and unfairly from comparisons with his friend and frequent collaborator Blake Edwards, and his comic version of The Prisoner Of Zenda seems certain to cause renewed suffering -- partly because of Edwards's earlier use of a Zenda subplot in his The Great Race, and partly …
Built like a bullet, yet with his mind a cage of wormy lust, greed, and bigotry, cop Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson) is far below the LAPD’s finest. Oren Moverman directed as if fiercely merging Colors and Bad Lieutenant, while chief writer James Ellroy overplays his slumming zeal for lowlife crud. …
The appeal of Ice Cube (Trespass, Three Kings) as an action star began to thaw somewhere around the time of Torque and the two Are We Disinterested Yet? kidpics. Drive Along is enough to put the freeze on any man’s career, preferably that belonging to Mr. Cube's co-star, chatterbox Kevin …
In a rare slip, critic Scott Marks suggested that the original Ride Along was" enough to put the freeze on any man’s career." Instead, it pulled $134 million domestic on a $25 million budget. So what do you know, there's a sequel. Ice Cube and Kevin Hart return, as does …
A kind of update of Kelly's Heroes, in deportment as well as in period: an insanity-of-war movie, set impudently at the end of Desert Storm, centered around four American soldiers (George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube, and, immediately recognizable as expendable, Spike Jonze) who have extracted from a captive Iraqi's …
A kind of update of Kelly's Heroes, in deportment as well as in period: an insanity-of-war movie, set impudently at the end of Desert Storm, centered around four American soldiers (George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube, and, immediately recognizable as expendable, Spike Jonze) who have extracted from a captive Iraqi's …
Roaring motorcycles, shrieking electric guitars, sneering bad guys, chillin' good guy. "Look," the last-mentioned points out, "this is my mess, not yours. You don't have to make this run." Advice best taken, sooner rather than later. Martin Henderson, Ice Cube, Monet Mazur, Jay Hernandez; directed by Joseph Kahn.
Walter Hill gets back to basics: your basic treasure hunt, your basic Mexican standoff, your basic moralizing and ironizing. Two Arkansas firemen, in the pursuit of their calling, come into possession of what appears to be a map to buried treasure, plus a yellowed news clipping that identifies said treasure …
The former triple-X (Vin Diesel, that would be) has been killed, off-screen, in Bora-Bora. "The new triple-X," muses his old boss, Samuel L. Jackson, "has gotta be more dangerous, deadlier, more attitude." Enter Ice Cube, straight from nine years in lockdown, a James Bond from the Hood (and a hammeringly …