Pleasantly inane political thriller, with Charles Bronson a reluctant bodyguard to the First Lady -- or as she is known in the trade, "One Mama," or as she is more informally known to those aware of her views on women's rights, "Madame Battle-axe" and "the Iron Maiden": "Let's just say …
Rather tardy anti-Western (at least a couple of decades out of style), with a decidedly unheroic Jesse James, brutal, bullying, backshooting, paranoid, and suicidal, and a slightly more sympathetic Bob Ford, conflicted in his feelings toward the legendary outlaw, idolizing yet inferior, intimidated, frightened, resentful, envious. There are some gripping …
Robert Duvall, directing and writing in addition to starring, indulges here his personal passion for contract killing. No, wait. That's not what the publicity said. It's his personal passion for tango dancing that he indulges. And what better, what more personal, way to express that passion than to have the …
The world's No. 1 hitman, contemplating retirement, going soft, refusing to kill innocent bystanders, developing an amorous attachment to his latest "mark," has been targeted for elimination by the ambitious, amoral No. 2. (Where are these rankings published? Soldier of Fortune magazine?) Something so silly ought to be more fun. …
Remake of the John Carpenter shoestringer of 1976, about an armed siege on a police station à la the Alamo. But the revised plot, just to give the new team of filmmakers some Creative Input, has been altered for minimum interest and sense. The besiegers are no longer an insatiable …
An effective cinematic antidote to Valium: from the first ominous musical strains to the final smoke-clearing, it exercises an unslackening tug on the viewer. The upper-crust British critics responsible for enshrining this classically styled Hollywood B-picture have been quick to draw parallels to Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo, but Assault on …
Remake of the John Carpenter shoestringer of 1976, about an armed siege on a police station à la the Alamo. But the revised plot, just to give the new team of filmmakers some Creative Input, has been altered for minimum interest and sense. The besiegers are no longer an insatiable …
Unutterably tedious comic proposition to do with a Wall Street hoax in which a female financial wiz, in order to get her independent investment firm over the hump and off the ground, invents a fictitious male partner -- one Robert Cutty, whose surname is stolen off a bottle of Scotch …
Even if you knew nothing else about it, the title alone would prevent you from getting sucked in by the film's opening image, a silhouette of a horseback rider on the crest of a hill at sunrise, an evocation of a complete screen mythology and a prompt of happy moviegoing …
Is it another I Married a Monster from Outer Space, or is it only the paranoia of an expectant mother? The movie is too slow and ponderous for the one, and too hoked-up for the other, but it has a nice big fat role for Charlize Theron, who takes it …
David Mackenzie's encore to Young Adam is not noticeably a step up, nor is it a significant step removed from the selfsame era of repression, the late Fifties. The discontented and dangerously idle wife (Natasha Richardson) of a buttoned-down madhouse director (Hugh Bonneville) starts up a sort of Lady Chatterley …
Not very well distributed, this is nonetheless an important movie for those who have been otherwise diligent and want to keep a complete mental record of Sean Penn's haircuts: a field of study known to its more serious scholars as Sean Penn's Coiffography. The thatch in question is straw-colored this …
The F-grade. Smug quartet of rogue commandos on a noisy, chaotic, impossible mission to — besides recover some Ben Franklin engraving plates from Baghdad — clear their records and start a film franchise. Based on the Eighties TV series. With Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Sharlto Copley, Quinton “Rampage” Jackson, Jessica …
Sappy but carefully crafted romance between the blind masseur of Bear Mountain Inn and Spa and a type-A architect from the Big Apple. Nice scene of experiencing a rainstorm from purely an audio perspective, and the experimental cataract surgery that confers sight on a well-adjusted blind man raises some interesting …
Out of this elegiac comedy on Old Age and the Changing Times, Burt Lancaster's fans ought to get the same sort of sentimental tingles that John Wayne's got from True Grit. His role here is as a small-time numbers runner (and part-time poodle walker) who disdains the swanky new casinos …