Lifeless reincarnation of Here Comes Mr. Jordan (or, for a newer generation, 1978's Heaven Can Wait). The gimmick is that the man we see as Chris Rock -- the man temporarily installed in another man's body -- is seen by everyone on screen as a portly, gray-haired, middle-aged white guy. …
Early on in this upstairs-downstairs story built around the King and Queen of England’s overnight visit to the titular country estate, a kitchen girl tells a footman to get the soufflés upstairs before they collapse. A soufflé is a light and airy confection of unvaryingly smooth consistency, and so is …
New era, S.O.S. When Francois Truffaut famously called British cinema an oxymoron, he had this in mind. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t spend over 2 years under quarantine only to emerge and find television scrawled across the screen of my local multiplex. Send season tickets to the …
Dishonor among thieves, with modestly mod trimmings, primarily a metronomic score by Berlin Game that just won't quit. There are shades of Diva, not least in its incoherence, and shades of Romancing the Stone, and just plain shades -- i.e., dark glasses. In a cast of little-knowns, Carey Lowell, a …
The mating dance of a trailblazing, best-selling feminist author and a men's-magazine hedonist revives the Rock Hudson and Doris Day series of bedroom comedies, right down to the re-creation of the original period (1962) and the presence on screen of Tony Randall (although David Hyde Pierce takes the role that …
It might have proved a viable idea to emphasize the lock-up-your-daughters (and sweethearts) theme of the Dracula story, identifying the Count as an object of male sexual rivalry and envy. But this idea, if that's what the idea indeed was, is lost in the general turmoil, the swirling atmospherics, the …
Resurrection again! Writer-director Patrick Lussier, under the imprimatur of Wes Craven, has some genuine ideas to fiddle with. Dracula, pronounced "Dra-COOL-ya" by one who should know, does not register on camera any more than in a mirror. And his invisibility in mirrors, speaking of which, is used against him in …
Mostly tired vampire spoof, but pleasantly so, contentedly so, not ill-humoredly so. The fast-moving and soon-ending storyline confines itself to the various versions of the Bram Stoker prototype, and doesn't wander off on discursive side trips. The cast has plenty of fun with the accents, British, German, and Lugosian (Peter …
Guy Maddin's spinoff of, or takeoff from, a Mark Godden production for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. The Canadian filmmaker has retained several remnants of dance (along with an Asian Count Dracula and nonstop excerpts from the first two Mahler symphonies), but not enough of them for the film to be …
aka The Lightly Fictionalized Rehabilitation of the Historical Vlad III "The Impaler" Tepes of the House of Draculesti, Prince of Wallachia, Former Hostage of the Ottoman Empire, and Defender of His People against Same, aka Maybe They Do Make 'Em Like They Used to, Sometimes. (The "lightly fictionalized" part involves …