Deprived of parenting as a lad, reared by television ("I learned the facts of life from watching The Facts of Life!"), he's now a lisping cable installer with a flypaper personality: he wants to be best friends with his new customer. Despite some side trips -- Court TV, "theme" restaurants, …
With Philippe Torreton, Samuel Le Bihan, Bernard Le Coq, and Claude Rich; directed by Bertrand Tavernier.
From a Jim Harrison novel (with plenty of hunting rifles and a phantasmic wolf to prove it), a slice of American Gothic carved out of a farming community in upstate Michigan where the two middle-aged teachers in the two-room schoolhouse -- Dennis Hopper, adopting Dennis Weaver's limp from Gunsmoke, and …
Updated paraphrase of James M. Cain (never really outdated), to do with a handsome young drifter, a fishmonger with a bad heart, and the latter's unsatisfied wife. Between the first-person voice-over ("It's amazing the way you get into things"), the lonely muted trumpet during the credits, and the Young Brando …
Director Fina Torres injects a pop sensibility (brightness, coolness, breeziness) into a traditional Cinderella story about an aspiring classical singer -- a Venezuelan mezzo in flight from the altar to the garrets of Paris. Loopy dialogue ("A Brazilian who does yoga is like a Russian bullfighter"). Adoring photography of the …
Following the lead of the Vito Russo book of the same name, documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman propose to trace the whole history of the depiction of homosexuality in American movie houses. The outcome is highly entertaining in the usual way of compilation films in the vein of That's …
Maladroit basketball fantasy that speaks to the current miseries of the Boston fan: the Celts are back in the NBA finals, in the old Garden, and two local zealots kidnap the opposing team's surly star (the shaven-headed as well as shaven-armpitted Damon Wayans) before Game Seven. The actual effect is …
Soft-headed heroics from Joe Blow, a student machinist who outruns, outfights, outshoots, outsmarts the combined forces of the Chicago Police Department, the FBI, the CIA, et al., most of whom don't understand that he has been framed for terrorism. The apparent terrorist act -- an explosion that levels eight city …
Deficient adaptation of the John Grisham novel about an eager young urban lawyer who takes over the death-row appeal of his Klansman granddad, convicted of bombing the offices of a Jewish attorney and killing his two sons. (The bomb, we are told, was "timed to kill," just to remind us …
Pierre Richard, older, slower, subtler than in The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe (et al.), as a French gastronome in pre-Communist (but not for long) Georgia, an ambassador of that certain joie de vivre, that haute cuisine, that toujours l'amour, that raison d'être, that je ne sais quoi, …
In an inexplicable street-corner shootout between a cop and a probationer, a stray bullet hits a six-year-old child and (in a poetic turn of phrase) it keeps travelling -- up and up through the New York City power structure. A foursome of wordy screenwriters -- Ken Lipper, Paul Schrader, Nicholas …
Difficult to put a finger on why this is so much more cold than comfort. The premise, from Stella Gibbons's "beloved" novel, seems promisingly amusing: Miss Flora Poste, just orphaned at age twenty-three, means to live off the charity of relatives until, thirty years or thereabouts hence, she gets around …
Big Bangs, black holes, and the development of our Solar System on a domed IMAX screen. Cosmic Voyage was nominated for the Best Documentary Short Subject Oscar of 1997.
Long overdue Hollywood solemnization of the Gulf War. The investigation of the first woman nominated (posthumously) for a combat Medal of Honor is expected to be a rubber-stamp procedure, leading posthaste to a photo-op at the White House, with the President draping the ribbon round the neck of the dead …
The new girl in school, revealing an ability to stand a pencil on its point, completes the circle of an extracurricular coven. An "empowerment" fantasy, for feminist teens in particular. But power corrupts, doesn't it? The inevitable falling-out (with the tranquilized Robin Tunney representing Good, the flamboyant Fairuza Balk representing …