The title specifies the distance over which an NYPD detective must transport a garrulous witness from jail to courthouse in Lower Manhattan, weaving through a whole platoon of murderously corrupt cops; and the hour-and-a-half duration approximates the time limit allotted to get him there. Overextended even at that tidy length, …
Second-chance fantasy that, through the agency of a bewhiskered supernatural school janitor, sends the middle-age-crazy hero not back in time, but back in age, back to the high school of his youth, so that he must fend off the incestuous flirtations of his teenage daughter and make age-inappropriate advances to …
Grandfather and grandson swap personalities, and reverse the digits in their ages, after plowing the Rolls into a storefront. The old man's body remains laid up at the hospital, while his soul does handsprings inside a college freshman: this arrangement allows George Burns to fire off some interior-monologue wisecracks without …
Bernardo Bertolucci combines a pamphleteer's penchant for straight, party-line ideology and a best-selling novelist's flair for wanton sensation: heaps of flesh, blood, and excrement (of both the literal and figurative sort). In its breadth, if not in its detail, this maxi-budgeted extravaganza could loosely be termed "novelistic." But just whose …
The sighting of a stray Japanese submarine off the California coast ignites a slapstick panic which might more revealingly have been titled The Japs Are Coming, The Japs Are Coming. Steven Spielberg must have figured that if Stanley Kramer could resuscitate slapstick comedy (cf. It'a a Mad, Mad [etc.] World), …
Exciting year, excruciating movie. Ernest (On Golden Scum) Thompson, directing for the first time in addition to writing, makes a characteristically shallow belly-flop onto deep thematic waters: Vietnam, the generation gap, long hair, LSD — that whole package. The finale — a funeral party turned protest march — is guaranteed …
Much of its reputation comes from exposing the masses to special effects that had been done much more excitingly, not to mention economically, in experimental shorts. Only where money really counts -- the finicky construction of model spaceships -- does it move into new territory. Kubrick's paranoid spoofs on modern …
Much of its reputation comes from exposing the masses to special effects that had been done much more excitingly, not to mention economically, in experimental shorts. Only where money really counts -- the finicky construction of model spaceships -- does it move into new territory. Kubrick's paranoid spoofs on modern …
Much of its reputation comes from exposing the masses to special effects that had been done much more excitingly, not to mention economically, in experimental shorts. Only where money really counts -- the finicky construction of model spaceships -- does it move into new territory. Kubrick's paranoid spoofs on modern …
Upwards of a dozen New Yorkers in destiny's dance on New Year's Eve, 1981. Flatly written comedy, and broadly acted in compensation. Wall-to-wall oldies. (It's an MTV Films co-production.) With Ben Affleck, Dave Chappelle, Janeane Garofalo, Kate Hudson, Courtney Love, Jay Mohr, Martha Plimpton, Christina Ricci, Paul Rudd; written by …
The Mothers of Invention, Theodore Bikel, and Ringo Starr in a video-taped rock fantasy. It looks a lot like a television variety show, with a flat, oddly colored image, and with studio sets and skits and musical numbers, but it is several lengths raunchier, and longer, than Dean Martin's weekly.
Roland Emmerich's widest view of disaster to date: the sky-high eruption of Yellowstone (Old Faithful gone Vesuvius), the toppling of the Washington Monument and St. Peter's Basilica (the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower would be so old-hat), the block-by-block collapse of Los Angeles (a rented limo outrunning the …