Robert Rodriguez's big-budget Hollywood followup to his teensy-tiny El Mariachi: a faked folk tale, with a bubbling-over level of mirth, to do with an angelic avenger (the preening, posturing Antonio Banderas) who lugs around a private arsenal inside a guitar case. In spite of the newfound gloss, it still seems …
The Joseph Hayes stage thriller about the middle-class home invaded by three murderous thugs. Except the happy home of William Wyler's version (1955) is now the broken home of Michael Cimino's, with a consequent loss of emotional focus. It's Anthony Hopkins's tortured, philandering man of the family vs. Mickey Rourke's …
John Waters, facing the unenviable task of topping previous heights of grossness, suffers from the what-do-you-do-for-an-encore problem. It is hard to dish out shocks when the cult audience is expecting them, craving them, clamoring for them. Nothing is as shocking, in this generally slipshod fairytale about a kingdom of crooks, …
We are asked to swallow several horse-pills of improbability. A yuppie Madame Bovary (Rosanna Arquette), who reads the Personals the way an earlier generation read novels, and who has identified herself with a recurrent character named Susan (pop singer Madonna), receives a bump on the head and wakes up thinking …
Another tasteful collaboration of director Barbet Schroeder and his faithful photographer Luciano Tovoli, working chiefly in cool blues and battleship grays, with a subtle spreading of shadows. The taste ends there. The project -- the only known bone-marrow match for a policeman's leukemic son is an incarcerated psychopath -- is …
A genuine curiosity co-written and co-directed by New Zealanders Stewart Main and Peter Wells, a Victorian-period bodice-ripper about a romantic hexagram (i.e., overlapping triangles), spectacularly camped up with operatic acting, baroque camerawork, Expressionistic color (liberal splashes of cardinal red in particular), and artificial studio sets. It has something of the …
Computer cartoon available, but not imperative, in 3-D. Admittedly the Universal logo, our planet on a blanket of stars, looks good in 3-D, and the closing credits have some fun with the extra dimension, trying with the aid of an outthrusting steel tape measure to see how far off the …
Harmless fun, like a machine gun that shoots jelly. The plot is as innocuous as the most cookie-cutter sitcom - former bad guy Gru must go undercover to expose current bad guy, and must also deal with personal issues. (One of his daughters wants a mom, another falls in love.) …
Three times the despicability and — for the first time in franchise history — shot in widescreen! That oughta impress the kids.
A new chapter has begun as Gru, Lucy, and their girls —Margo, Edith, and Agnes welcome a new member to the Gru family, Gru Jr., who is intent on tormenting his dad. As Gru faces a new nemesis in Maxime Le Mal and his femme fatale girlfriend Valentina, the family …
A new chapter has begun as Gru, Lucy, and their girls —Margo, Edith, and Agnes welcome a new member to the Gru family, Gru Jr., who is intent on tormenting his dad. As Gru faces a new nemesis in Maxime Le Mal and his femme fatale girlfriend Valentina, the family …
A new chapter has begun as Gru, Lucy, and their girls —Margo, Edith, and Agnes welcome a new member to the Gru family, Gru Jr., who is intent on tormenting his dad. As Gru faces a new nemesis in Maxime Le Mal and his femme fatale girlfriend Valentina, the family …
To paraphrase Capote’s line about the author and his murderous subject growing up in the same house, with one walking out the front door and one out the back: Ethan Hawke and Winona Ryder starred in the same 1994 rom-com, Reality Bites, and it’s as if one day, he strolled …
A terrible title, although as such an accurate forecast of the movie in its entirety: arch, pretentious, mystical-magical malarkey ("You are seriously underestimating the power of the forces aligned against us") in which an escaped convict chases his lost loot and his lost lady around the city where, as we …
After what appears to have been two decades spent sleeping face down on a power sander, martyred Detective Erin Bell (Nicole Kidman) awakens to the harsh light of day and decides to take control of her rebellious daughter while also making amends for an undercover job gone bad. In The …