Extremely ambitious and incredibly pretentious. Also false. A brainy, yappy New York boy (Thomas Horn) feels guilty about not answering the WTC calls of his doomed dad (Tom Hanks) on 9/11/01. He walks around New York looking for fishy clues, and a mute, grizzled man (Max von Sydow) tags along …
Medical detective problem in the pursuit of which an ER doctor uncovers an improbable experimental program dependent on homeless human guinea pigs (stopping short of uncovering the source of the funding). Michael Apted engineers a couple of grindingly effective suspense sequences -- in the subway, in an elevator -- and …
A team of "extreme" athletes, on location in the Alps to shoot a commercial, cross paths with a band of fugitive terrorists: just something else to get the adrenalin pumping and the rock music pounding. Extreme stupidity. With Rufus Sewell, Rupert Graves, Devon Sawa, Bridgette Wilson-Sampras; directed by Christian Duguay.
An undercover Western by Walter Hill, with Vietnam vets doing duty as old-time cattle rustlers, train robbers, renegade Apaches, or whatever, and a white-suited drug kingpin standing in for the self-anointed south-of-the-border generalissimo, or neo-Confederate diehard, or United Indian Nations messiah. For all the heavy technologizing of the Western, what …
Robert M. Young, who thought it was a good idea to film Miguel Pinero's play Short Eyes, makes an even bigger mistake with this William Mastrosimone piece. It begins at the level of the average slasher film: first some cross-cutting between a sinister motorcyclist (opaque visor, snakeskin boot) and his …
The one that got away. OR DID THEY?
Ho-hum Hollywood re-do of a Hong Kong horror, wherein a blind classical violinist receives corneal transplants and, along with them, blurry visions of the world around her, other worlds, past happenings, ghosts, and whatnot. (Is it normal, doctor, to see the souls of the departed being escorted by shades to …
Actually, it's lots of eyes for a couple of eyes, when Chuck Norris's narcotics-squad partner gets bumped off and, shortly thereafter, so does the deceased's girlfriend. Formula action film, with such ingredients as dewy damsel, comic-relief martial-arts master, crooked cop, corporate villain, and invincible henchman "built like a Sherman tank." …
Tales of A Mother's Vengeance, preferably Based On Fact, are mere grist for the TV-movie-of-the-week mill. What lifts this one a head -- not shoulders, too -- above the general run is the time it takes with, and genuine concern it shows for, the characters' feelings. But then John Schlesinger, …
A sober but not-quite-somber drone drama that ably portrays the complicated moral calculus involved in modern warfare. (General Sherman said that war is cruelty and there is no use trying to reform it, but there persists the sense that we have to try anyway, especially when we’re firing missiles into …
Simple small-town tragedy, complicated a little by a pingponging nonlinear narrative, and an ambivalent view of the Almighty. What's the connection, we want to know, between the dumbstruck, blood-soaked teenager and the religiose ex-convict who meets and marries his prison pen pal in dismal Oklahoma oil country? The answer is …
The strange, twisted, incomprehensible bond between a female serial killer (who had traumatically lost her father) and a high-tech detective (who had traumatically lost his daughter). Gimmicky thriller -- souvenir snow globes to mark every change of scene, ghostly visitations from the vanished daughter, guardian-angel symbols, computer graphics galore -- …
The premise is hard to swallow and harder to digest. A fashionable fashion photographer (Faye Dunaway), who shoots sadomasochistic pictures with an imperceptible moral purpose behind them, periodically blanks out the world in front of her face and sees momentarily through the eyes of an anonymous killer as he stalks …