Ersatz Spielberg. (Meaning that the Great Man himself -- the Great Overgrown Boy -- the Great Escaped Inner Child -- was only a co-executive producer and was wise enough to leave the directing to an apprentice called Brad Silberling.) The titular "Friendly Ghost" resembles a fattened-up, but see-through, version of …
Italian zombie film (practically like saying Italian lasagna). For some unknown reason, the dead are rising a week after being laid to rest, and the impassive graveyard watchman must split open their skulls, one way or another, to lay them back down. Fine all-around production -- sets, lighting, color -- …
Italian zombie film (practically like saying Italian lasagna). For some unknown reason, the dead are rising a week after being laid to rest, and the impassive graveyard watchman must split open their skulls, one way or another, to lay them back down. Fine all-around production -- sets, lighting, color -- …
First love, and true, and trite too, of a convent-bred, moon-faced, and plushly upholstered Irish lass in the mid-Fifties: "I know I may look like a rhinoceros, but I've quite a thin skin really." Every bump, dip, and detour on the rocky road is clearly marked. Every virtue is rewarded, …
Bloated fantasy, set in a dark dank Nowheresville, further removed from the World As We Know It through the overuse of wide-angle lenses. A mad inventor -- isolated on a man-made floating island in the company of identical sextuplets, a matronly midget, and a disembodied brain inside a tank of …
Spike Lee offers the prospect of a couple of new angles of interest. First is the open acknowledgment of his debt to, or kinship with, Martin Scorsese, who co-produced the movie, and whose frequent actor Harvey Keitel has a leading role in it, and whose two-time scriptwriter Richard Price authored …
Amy Heckerling returns, more or less, to the scene of her Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). It's now Beverly Hills High, but it's still contemporary So-Cal youth — that's the important thing. And there are important social changes to document: "God, skateboards! That's like so five years ago!" The …
Underworld comedy, veering between deadpan and stone cold dead, about a dweeby bookie who gets promoted to hitman and, under the caring tutelage of an old pro ("Remember. Guns don't kill people. We kill people"), discovers hidden natural talent. A crush on his lactose-intolerant yoga teacher steers the comedy down …
Under pressure from his traditionalist grandfather, a Japanese junior executive revises his vacation plans (golfing in Hawaii) so as to perform the proper memorial ritual for his long-gone parents at the site of their accidental deaths: Iceland. (The image in the opening scenes in Japan is compressed to boxy TV …
Old-fashioned (as old at least as Rider Haggard) African safari adventure, from a Michael Crichton novel: restless natives, defecting porters, a hippopotamus attack, a Lost City, an angry volcano. A few newer-fashioned touches, too: a talking gorilla (her sign language computer-translated into an audible voice), a leech attached to a …
Two top actresses in low-to-medium-level material, a slavering serial-killer thing, with an overdrawn finale and a checklist of unanswered questions. Sigourney Weaver, as the traumatized agoraphobic brandy-swilling psychological expert, comes too close to repeating herself too soon after her victim role in Death and the Maiden. But Holly Hunter forges …
Literary cinema, civilized, conservative, a trifle fusty, from writer-director (and actor) Michael Blakemore. The project was, as stated in the printed preamble, "suggested by Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya." In fact quite strongly suggested by it. In fact quite tightly tethered to it, notwithstanding the transplant to post-WWI Australia. Louis Malle's …
Continuing to circulate among the heroes of time-honored action genres — aviators (Top Gun), car racers (Days of Thunder), private detectives (The Last Boy Scout) — director Tony Scott here moves on to submariners, complete with map-and-pointer briefings, locker-room-style inspirational speeches ("Go, 'Bama!"), sonor-screen blips of incoming torpedoes, and so …
Sean Penn's second effort behind the cameras, after the narrowly released Indian Runner, is an effort indeed. It shows the writer-director at full stretch and on tiptoes, even though in artistic terms he is not yet a mature and well-developed adult. A heavy dependence on slow-motion for extra emotional and …
Itty-bitty independent film attempts to stir up some Twin Peaks-ian malignancy around an unbalanced Kansas housewife, an unfaithful husband, an enigmatic grease monkey, and a menacing bar owner. Nothing much comes of it, beyond some nice footage of an approaching thunderstorm at night. With Jennifer Taylor, Aaron Shields, Bob Peterson; …