Drearily prolonged situation involving a distinguished black scholar (and "thorn in the side of the white man") who is mistaken for a thief in his posh new summer home. Drearily photographed, too. Nicolas Cage's goofy self-amusement and Samuel Jackson's smoldering intensity are wasted. With Michael Lerner, Margaret Colin, Dabney Coleman, …
Divorced Palestinian single mother (Nisreen Faour, a good actress in bad photography) moves to Illinois for a better life at the worst time — the thick of Operation Iraqi Freedom — and settles for a demeaning job at White Castle ("Support our oops" on the signboard outside), meets a sympathetic …
An attractively shabby Robert Mitchum, a pleasurably befuddling plot, and a gleefully wanton piece of destruction at the end when Mitchum steers a monstrous Caterpillar willy-nilly through a greenhouse. With Bradford Dillman, Richard Egan; directed by Robert Clouse.
A me-myself-and-I film, starring as well as written, directed, edited, and co-produced by Julie Davis (I Love You, Don't Touch Me). For all her outward independence (or anyway, lack of big-studio support), Davis adheres to the strictest conventions, a balmily optimistic romantic comedy that brings together two opposites, a "feminist …
Elementary (primitive, primeval) creature feature centered around a documentary film crew searching the Amazon for the People of the Mist, but first finding their reverenced reptile instead, thanks largely to a half-crazed, fully leering snake hunter (Jon Voight, having a ball) who is more hijacker than guide. The creature itself, …
The rare Perennium Mortalis blooms but once every seven years in the jungles of Borneo, harboring behind its beauty a "pharmaceutical equivalent to the Fountain of Youth." ("That'd be bigger than Viagra!") Bad luck for the botanical team, then, that it's blooming during mating season for a strain of giant …
The obligatory token of respect and appreciation for 1999's Analyze This. In a word, the sequel, likewise directed by Harold Ramis. The revised concept: the vulnerable mobster gets himself released from prison, and into the custody of his former therapist, by singing the entire score of West Side Story nonstop. …
One thing to be said for the comedies of Harold Ramis is that they always have a concept. The better ones (Groundhog Day, Multiplicity) have a more complicated one. The concept this time -- a Mafioso in therapy for anxiety -- is pretty simple, and the jokes pretty predictable. (Psychiatrist: …
Fox Family Films presents an animated alternative to current Disney, but as little an alternative as possible: a spunky feminist heroine (but why, at age eighteen, does she have no memory of herself at eight?); a callow ineffectual hero; a stentorian villain (Rasputin raised from the dead); cute animal sidekicks; …
Merely the best courtroom drama ever committed to film, with its lively theatrics tempered by sober and unbudging moral ambiguity. It is hardly less remarkable as perhaps the most mature consideration of rape (least polemical, least hysterical) ever put on film. And in the semi-retired asexual backwoods lawyer who really …
Promising comic premise -- a swinging single San Diego newsman in the Seventies, and his personal attraction but professional resistance to a female colleague -- subjected to a strategy of anything-for-a-laugh: wild exaggeration, improbability, impossibility, fantasy, absurdity, ribaldry, animal abuse, cartoon interlude, musical numbers, celebrity cameos (Vince Vaughn, Jack Black, …
Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra as a couple of happy-go-lucky sailors with whom you would not be afraid to trust your sister. They take so shilly-shallyingly long to figure out who loves whom, and to land an important audition with Jose Iturbi, that you sooner or later get your fill …
Roger Vadim's update of his own 1956 film, but not of the haystack hairdo on the heroine -- now a budding rock-and-roll singer in New Mexico (and in fact, with that hairdo, she does look a little like David Lee Roth). In the thirty-year interim, Vadim has forgotten a lot …
This case against the American legal system is so ill-prepared and ill-presented that it ought never have been brought to court. Add to that the whimpering liberal piety of Al Pacino and the aggressive ugliness of the image, and you have sufficient cause to slap it with a contempt citation. …
Abbas Kiarostami's semi-quasi-pseudo-documentary sequel to his Where Is the Friend's House?, an all-day quest for the all-day quester of that earlier film (an equally Kafka-esque quest in its failure to satisfy our natural curiosity as to the outcome), in the aftermath of a catastrophic earthquake in the area. Complexities and …