Furiously winking Jazz Age comedy, in the Damon Runyon idiom. That means the characters will have names like Regret, Feet, The Brain, Lovey Lou, Hortense Hathaway, and Handsome Jack. (Ouch! Ow! Oof!) The job of keeping up the pace and the tone, shirked by the writing and editing, falls chiefly …
The All-American boy grows up playing soldier in Massapequa, Long Island, is further instilled with the fighting spirit on the high-school wrestling team, gets recruited by the Marines ("There is nothing finer, nothing prouder, nothing standing as straight ..."), goes to Vietnam, gets disillusioned, gets shot, gets paralyzed from the …
Major disappointment. Past fans of director Bill Forsyth (Local Hero, Comfort and Joy, Housekeeping), and not of writer and usually director John Sayles, will have the option of attempting to lay the blame on the latter. (Past fans of both of them seem to have no other option than to …
A satire, one supposes, on the average American suburb, with the targets drawn so broad as to be all but unmissable -- and so broad, too, as to be all but unrecognizable. A double-twist ending cancels out the last-minute moralizing after first cancelling out the endless-minutes storyline. Tom Hanks, Bruce …
A Vietnam atrocity film about the kidnap, gang-rape, and murder of a pitifully coughing village girl by four American foot soldiers, with one abstainer. David Rabe's screenplay is compactly constructed in its setting-up phase, so that everything we need to know about relations between the Americans and natives, as well …
Goodly awful. A reincarnation fantasy about a recycled soul, processed too quickly and not properly inoculated, who begins to remember his past life once he runs into his former wife -- not before he has already met, by a stupefying coincidence, her best friend and her now nubile daughter (who …
A valentine to all movie lovers. Or else a blackmail note. Part-Truffaut and part-Fellini (part-Day for Night and part-Amarcord), it's a sentimental flashback to a post-war Italian village where, in the eyes of one altar boy, the movie theater supplants the church as the religious house of choice, and the …
Fittingly tacky documentary, by Ron Mann, on the history of comic books -- a static subject by nature, "cinematized" with crude animation techniques and montages. The decision to devote better than half the running time to the advent of the Underground (and after) may have been dictated solely by the …
Taken from Whitley Strieber's alleged nonfiction best-seller (no dispute about the goodness of sales), this tale of abduction by aliens will convince no one as yet unconvinced. But its desire to be taken for possible protects it from SFX extravagance. It doesn't protect it from tedium. With Christopher Walken, Lindsay …
There is an oddly unfinished quality about this Mafia comedy, as if director Susan Seidelman had lost interest or control or had got distracted by something else. (Possibly something, in specific, starring Meryl Streep and Roseanne Barr. Something called She-Devil.) Whatever the case, there are scenes here that never get …
Most of it takes place in an out-of-the-way London restaurant nestled at the end of a wind-whipped and smoke-strewn cul-de-sac patrolled by a pack of scavenging dogs: an image of desolation that suggests the most recent visitor thereabouts might well have been the Luftwaffe. The actual best customer and part …
American remake of a very lucrative French export by Jean-Charles Tacchella (to whom, whatever happened?). It could hardly have gotten any shallower than it already was, without complete evaporation. And indeed the roles for the secondary mates (William Petersen, Sean Young) have been considerably beefed up. At the same time, …
Drugs, gang war, diminished academic performance -- the whole sordid scene, with a cinematic style to match it. Top-billed Jim Brown waits in the wings for half the movie before making his grand entrance: "This is my bitch. I don't want you fuckin' around with her." Cheryl Kay, Gregg Gomez …
Woody Allen's serio-tragi-quasi-semi-comedy switches between two concurrent plotlines, one about an eminent ophthalmologist with romantic problems (for one, horrible, heart-stopping moment, when the opening awards dinner is interrupted by flashback, we fear that this could turn into a knockoff of Bergman's Wild Strawberries), the other about an obscure documentary filmmaker …
Hot-shot lawyer with a Fifties rock-and-roller's pompadour starts to have twinges of conscience when an acquitted rapist-murderer taunts him with a fresh mutilated corpse. A moral dilemma thrashed out in frenzied action and frosty light. Two ludicrous performances by Gary Oldman and Kevin Bacon, who don't seem to have settled …