Can a movie with this title possibly have a sense of humor? Well, not much of a one: but not everyone involved can be kept totally in line, and there are flashes of humorousness -- or at least humannness -- from Beau Bridges, Tess Harper, Patrika Darbo, and Molly McClure …
Kevin Costner's three-hour-and-one-minute Western, his first directorial effort, readily brings to mind Sam Fuller's Run of the Arrow, which likewise tells of a Civil War veteran -- more interestingly, a die-hard Confederate -- who attempts to find a new home, a new nation, among the Sioux. There are several points …
Just another Batman, but with all due modesty. And beyond modesty, all due shame. (Modesty on the production level; shame on the level of the plot.) The demands of bloody revenge, it develops, have taken their toll on his inner self; and the Phantom-of-the-Opera scar tissue over three-quarters of his …
It may indeed be Top Gun on the ground, or Top Gun without wings, or Top Gun without guns. But it is also a Crowd Roars or -- closer in every respect -- a Red Line 700 for 1990, just as Top Gun was a Dawn Patrol or a Ceiling …
The amiable and pitiable Chuck Norris surrounded as usual by bumblers and incompetents. Chief among them his director and brother, Aaron. With Billy Drago and John P. Ryan.
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 …
Warren Beatty had long contemplated playing the comic-strip cop (under assorted directors), but only after a screen version of Batman had pulled in a zillion dollars, give or take, did he at last discover the wisdom, the ingenuity, the genius, the vision, to go ahead on the project, and with …
"How could the same shit happen to the same guy twice?" marvels Det. John McClane (now of the LAPD). Clearly the filmmakers do not lack self-awareness. If anything, the shit is a bit deeper this time, in that the single-handedness of McClane's heroics makes less sense at a Major Metropolitan …
A synthetic man (Johnny Depp) has been left unfinished by his creator: twelve-inch blades in place of fingers, and hence a bit of a punk-rocker's look, with an untended tangle of black hair and some fashionable self-mutilation over the face. This — the imperfection of creation and the danger thereof …
Agnieszka Holland, who directed Angry Harvest, here again seeks out the gray areas of the Holocaust: a survival tale of a pragmatic young Jew who first passes himself off as a Communist, then as a Nazi. It is based (here also again) on a true story -- that of Salomon …
The sentimental journey of a Sicilian pensioner (Marcello Mastroianni, his eyes magnified by coke-bottle lenses) to the mainland to visit his five grown children. The children, all named after opera characters, appear to him periodically as juveniles; and there's a recurring nightmare about a predatory hot-air balloon; and Fellini-isms litter …
A private-eye case that pounds away at that old punching bag, City Hall corruption, but from a moralist's perspective, or an editorialist's, rather than a genre writer's. Because the writer is Arthur Miller (yes, that Arthur Miller), it pounds hard and relentlessly, without a lot of niftiness -- a sort …
The movie and its publicity did their best to pretend the prior sequel never existed -- a sign of bad (or at best, conventional) taste. And odd, because this one is much less a sequel than II, despite the reappearance of Father Karras (Jason Miller) in a mental ward, an …
The Irish psyche unfurled in a squabble over a patch of green, which an "outsider" from America wants to cover in concrete. For all its smallness, a movie of tall corn -- of mechanical dramaturgy (see the auction scene, where the American hides under an umbrella until "Fifty pounds once, …