As sopping-wet a love story of the why-can't-society-leave-us-alone variety as anything to come along since "Patches" and "Town Without Pity" disappeared from the Top Forty hit list. The lovers in this case are a couple of Blueboy-ish homosexuals, having to take separate turns in prison for their sexual predilections, and …
Let’s return to a time when the sponsor’s name was still built into the show’s title and kids across the land tuned in to watch Marlin Perkins’ weekly animal adventures on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Young Tim Harrison was one of the flock inspired by Perkins — and later, …
A very bad Bad Day at Black Rock, with a Desert Storm hero missing a leg instead of an arm, and a super-patriotic, super-stereotyped bad guy at the head of a war-profiteering corporation modelled on Halliburton, thinly disguised under the name of Hallicorp. With Val Kilmer, Jennifer Esposito, and Gary …
Paranoia thriller without a milliwatt of power to compel belief. Mel Gibson, reunited with his Lethal Weapon director, Richard Donner, is an addlepated Manhattan cabbie, loonier than Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle, who puts out a newsletter of exposés on the order of "The Oliver Stone-George Bush Connection." (Number of subscribers: …
What does Robert Redford have to do to make you people understand how un-American the War on Terror really is? Does he have to plop you down into post-Civil War America? Will you make him hash out every possible parallel between the trial of Mary Surratt for her role in …
An adaptation of a John le Carré suspense novel, and a long stride for filmmaker Fernando Meirelles (City of God) from the slums of Rio de Janeiro. Le Carré, to be sure, has always had an elevated social consciousness, and a missionary zeal to match, and so the stretch for …
Soporific supernaturalism, notwithstanding some startling special effects, with Keanu Reeves as a cool-dude demonologist in a long coat, doomed to Hell for a momentarily successful suicide attempt, and ticketed to an early grave, even now, for a pack-a-day smoking habit. Tilda Swinton, of all people, is cast as the angel …
Starry-eyed science fiction, seemingly designed or destined to be blurbified into a "2001 for the Nineties" — complete with otherworldly light show and a solarized encounter with a Higher Intelligence. The very opening of the movie lays out the fictional terrain — light-years and light-years of it — as we …
A global plague quickly dispatches Gwyneth Paltrow, but Marion Cotillard and Kate Winslet carry on the fight as noble doctors. Lawrence Fishburne is the solemn voice of humane science, like Dennis Haysbert intoning for Allstate Insurance. Steven Soderbergh directed with brisk, methodical care for the big vista and small details, …
David Byrne salutes the Color Guard in this musical documentary.
Godard described his movie as an Antonioni subject done in a Hitchcock style. That's a start. A French couple, out of an Alberto Moravia novel, drift apart, glumly, passively, uncommunicatively, after they travel to Italy in order for the husband to patch up the screenplay of a troubled Fritz Lang …
Topical, pot-stirring political melodrama in the vein of Advise and Consent. In fact it tells the same story (pruned of subplots and subordinate characters), with the slight difference that whereas that one was about the midterm nomination of a new Secretary of State, this one is about the nomination of …
Rocky romance: rocky as in shaky, bumpy, stormy; also Rocky as in Mountains. The sort of newspaperman whom Paul Sorvino brought back to life in Slow Dancing in the Big City -- the Jimmy Breslinesque Voice of the People whose column is avidly devoured by every mugger, hooker, and cab …
The camera looks for extremes in this action caper about transport ship smugglers. We are jilted between oppressive closeups and panoramic helicopter shots. Mark Wahlberg plays the reformed smuggler who is compelled back into crime to protect his family. Giovanni Ribisi, as the villain, rehashes his addled weasel performance from …