Animator Richard Williams simply took too long at the drawing board. Peter Cowie's annual International Film Guide reported in its 1977 edition — repeat, 1977 — that "The Thief and the Cobbler [as it was then known] is especially dear to Williams's heart. Although it has been in active preparation …
Just what the world needs: more bugs! Better bugs, besides: a lethal prehistoric spider from Venezuela, imported in a coffin and mated with the common American house spider. Frank Marshall, who had often enough served in the Producer role for Director Steven Spielberg, reverses the arrangement here, but has prudently …
A stilted history lesson on the ethnic cleansing of Armenians by Turks during the First World War ("Do you know what Adolf Hitler told his generals to convince them that it would work? 'Who remembers the extermination of the Armenians?' "), this is evidently a subject close to the heart …
Omnibus movies -- those composed of several individual segments by several individual directors -- can pose a special critical problem, presenting works of wildly different merits under one unifying title. But it perhaps is silly to worry about this, or even to mention it, when the overriding idea is as …
The first Disney animated feature put into production after Uncle Walt's death; and the decline, while not teeth-rattling, is definitely felt. O'Malley the Alley Cat (with the hep-cat voice of Phil Harris) does the most to uphold the tradition. Directed by Wolfgang Reitherman.
The first Disney animated feature put into production after Uncle Walt's death; and the decline, while not teeth-rattling, is definitely felt. O'Malley the Alley Cat (with the hep-cat voice of Phil Harris) does the most to uphold the tradition. Directed by Wolfgang Reitherman.
Paul Provenza's talking-heads film rounds up a herd of well-known and less-known comedians to tell and to analyze an old gray blue joke, the punch line of which is the film's title. (Alternate and not-as-good punch lines: the Sophisticates, the Debonairs.) The joke seems to be something of a private …
Topical paranoia thriller about an expert in terrorism on the faculty of George Washington University, who comes to suspect that his smarmy new suburban neighbor with the Stepford wife and the Village-of-the-Damned daughter is himself a terrorist. That would be quite a coincidence if it were just a coincidence, but …
Just two months after Earth was threatened by giant comet in Deep Impact, it gets threatened again by giant meteoroid. Too near in time; too distant in tone. The total focus of our attention here, to say nothing of our hopes and our prayers and our desire to identify with …
“There’s no bad guys, only good guys”: an inside job among armored-car guards, thoroughly and lethally botched. Compact caper film, all business, worked out with an overabundance of closeups and occasional cracks in credibility. With Columbus Short, Matt Dillon, Laurence Fishburne, Jean Reno, Skeet Ulrich, and Fred Ward; directed by …
Sam Raimi's slap-happy sequel to his Evil Dead II: the one-handed hero (how he got that way is explained in a cumbersome recap at the outset) is sucked through a time tunnel to the Middle Ages (and a different continent), armed with a custom-fitted chainsaw and a shotgun that more …
Falling between Le Samourai and Le Cercle Rouge, this would appear in some ways, at least superficial ways, to be Jean-Pierre Melville's most "personal" project, deviating from the archetypal, abstract, imitation-American gangster films with which he is most identified, veering instead toward his first-hand experiences as a Jew in the …
A little doodle by Jacques Rivette to do with a capricious Italian tagalong (Sergio Castellitto) of a French travelling circus and in particular of a haunted older woman in the troupe (Jane Birkin, looking like turning into Mick Jagger). If only because it clocks in at under an hour and …
Old Henry's last will and testament includes an ashes-scattering map for the three succeeding generations of males, Turner, Jason, and Zach. An insufferably cutesy salute to family ("A family carries each other"), regularly interrupted by ads for Kentucky Fried Chicken: mandatory stops on the map. With Christopher Walken, Josh Lucas, …
A remake of the Jules Verne circumnavigatory adventure, converted into a vehicle for a Jackie Chan plot about a stolen jade Buddha. (The voyage is a mere getaway from the police and a passage to China.) No doubt the Mexican comedian Cantinflas, in the 1956 version, was no more faithful …