Batman for a third time, to be more precise. Val Kilmer, even taking into account the overprocessed reproduction of his speaking voice, is an improvement over Michael Keaton in the title role. Or at least an improvement in the alter-ego role of Bruce Wayne, billionaire philanthropist. Once he's inside the …
Richard Linklater, of Slacker and Dazed and Confused, has unmistakably entered the mainstream: a "date movie" (according to Rolling Stone magazine) about a young Frenchwoman and American man who meet on a train, get off in Vienna, and pass one sleepless night together before the man catches a plane back …
John Boorman has long shown a fine eye in concert with an unfine mind. And even in so half-hearted and half-baked an effort as this one, the wide, deep, full, lush, colorful, teeming, sudoriferous images form an impressive parade. But the typical disparity between eye and mind in a Boorman …
A showcase for the talent-impaired Adam Sandler (co-written by him), in the impossible part of the idiot son of a hotel magnate, obligated to repeat grades one through twelve (two weeks apiece) if he hopes to inherit the family business. He -- it -- they -- are lazy and unimaginative …
Amorphous, garrulous, largely improvised, largely sedentary companion piece to Smoke, centered again around the Brooklyn Cigar Co. (Harvey Keitel is the only returning big-name star, so you get to hear the word "Auggie" spoken aloud another thirty or forty times.) Co-directors Wayne Wang and Paul Auster should have quit while …
Buddy film, feminine gender. Three dissimilar single women -- Jane, the black lesbian cabaret entertainer; Robin, the uptight HIV-positive white-bread yuppie; Holly, the abused pregnant white-trash coquette -- share a van driving westward. (Road-weary cinematic technique: a montage of fast-food and gas-station signs, cut to the beat of the pop …
Affectionate cheek-tweak of the Seventies sitcom and perennial re-run. The premise is a little far afield -- the conformist family of the TV show is now radically nonconformist: custodians of Seventies clothes, hairstyles, language, music, etc., in blissful defiance of their Nineties surroundings -- but the artificiality of the world …
Three-hour epic, directed by and starring Mel Gibson, forged from the pages of Scottish history (turn of the 13th Century) that deal with William Wallace, a personage who emerges in this account as part Spartacus (the band of guerrillas that grows to an army), part Jesse James or Josey Wales …
Clint Eastwood grappling, both behind and in front of the camera, with the Robert James Waller bestseller about a four-day affair between a nomadic National Geographic photographer and an Italian-Iowan farm wife (Meryl Streep). Whatever has been or could be said about this being an American Brief Encounter, and about …
Odd to see the colossal 20th Century-Fox logo on a blown-up 16mm shoestringer, whose image is all but obliterated by dust-storm graininess. Beneath the surface static, the film elucidates the decently complicated private lives of three Long Island Irish Catholics at various stages of romantic involvement: married, tentatively engaged, totally …
Daniel Stern the executive producer assigns Daniel Stern the actor a role that blends the Daniel Stern of City Slickers with the Daniel Stern of Home Alone: an innocent fugitive from justice who takes refuge as an imposter scout leader on a camping expedition in the mountains. Quite a workout …
Feature-length sitcom: three divorced dads on their weekend with the kids. Canned wisecracks, cAnned wisdom, canned ruefulness. Some well-attuned performances, chiefly from sitcom vet Paul Reiser and, in a more marginal part, Janeane Garofalo as the Blind-Date-from-Hell. But the best thing in it (a telling cinematic comment) is the Mary-Chapin …
The original Candyman, minus colon and subtitle, was something a bit special among contemporary horror films. The follow-up is nothing special. Not even with the change of scene to atmospheric New Orleans, birthplace of the "urban legend," christened Daniel Robitaille. A few gruesome homicides (thick dark molassessy blood), with many …
More literary stargazing by writer and first-time director Christopher Hampton, much preferable to the almost concurrent Total Eclipse, on which he was writer only. No doubt it helps that he's back on his native soil, turning his gaze to the homosexual Bloomsbury belletrist, Lytton Strachey. His ear for high-toned Wildean …
Scorsese, doffing the ill-fitting penguin suit of The Age of Innocence, goes back to gangsters and to the scriptwriter of Good Fellas, Nicholas Pileggi. One major drawback here is the same drawback as there, only bigger (or rather, at three hours, longer): the brunt of the storytelling is entrusted to …