A retired rock-and-roller is trussed to the headboard and stabbed with an icepick in the middle of lovemaking. (Hard-bitten homicide cop: "He got off before he got offed.") All signs point to his current girlfriend, a provocatively smirking heiress who happens to have written a novel about a retired rock-and-roller …
Sharon Stone, pushing fifty, takes her femme fatale act to London, along with her sandblasted face and helium-inflated boobs. There is an exculpatory spirit of self-parody in it, but then there already was, in the 1992 predecessor. The thing about any sort of parody, self- or otherwise, is that it …
To hell and back with a teenage heroin hero: an uncomfortable contemporary transplant of the Jim Carroll autobiographical cult novel. (Can we look at shared needles in the Nineties without thoughts of AIDS?) It does not avoid the danger of so many junkie war stories, of sounding as much like …
The short life and big splash of the Haitian-born artist, Warhol satellite, and drug addict Jean-Michel Basquiat (played with Sabu-like gentleness and innocence by Jeffrey Wright), as commemorated by his fellow artist, his friend, and first-time filmmaker Julian Schnabel. This voice of authority, for all its contentment with cliché, conveys …
A true Vietnam War story, safely apolitical, celebrating individual effort and lamenting any loss of life on either side. It hovers (literally at times) around Lt. Col. Iceal Hambleton, who's downed on a reconnaissance flight in V.C.-occupied territory and makes his way back through the jungle under the protective eye, …
The DC Comics superhero, inadequately incarnated in Michael Keaton. (Batbrat, maybe. Batpunk, perhaps. Batguy, at best.) Even so, the movie is indisputably an impressive thing to look at. The production (with its feel of futurism circa the 1940s: sort of what Brazil ought to have looked like) doesn't suffocate the …
Introducing Batgirl, the worst yet of the Caped Crusaders, a mush-mouthed motorcycle daredevil (Alicia Silverstone) over from Oxbridge University to visit her ailing Uncle Alfred, manservant to the heretofore Dynamic Duo. As if to make her feel at home, the movie overall has more and worse of just about everything. …
With a new director (Christopher Nolan) and a new star (Christian Bale), the fifth entry in the Batman series, true to its title, returns to square one: how and why Bruce Wayne came to be Batman; the psychological root of his fixation on flying mammals; the part this played in …
Batman for a third time, to be more precise. Val Kilmer, even taking into account the overprocessed reproduction of his speaking voice, is an improvement over Michael Keaton in the title role. Or at least an improvement in the alter-ego role of Bruce Wayne, billionaire philanthropist. Once he's inside the …
Batman for a third time, to be more precise. Val Kilmer, even taking into account the overprocessed reproduction of his speaking voice, is an improvement over Michael Keaton in the title role. Or at least an improvement in the alter-ego role of Bruce Wayne, billionaire philanthropist. Once he's inside the …
Seventy-some-minute cartoon. The square-jawed, trapezoid-torsoed hero is more credible, certainly, than Michael Keaton, and the graphic style throughout is convincingly comic-bookish. But the animation is not really all that animated, and the story is slowed by flashbacks and romance. Voices by Kevin Conroy, Dana Delany, Mark Hamill.
Unfortunately he is still Michael Keaton. Or Michael Keaton is still him. And as long as he's in the lead role, any Batman movie will have to hobble along in leg irons. On the other hand, both The Penguin (Danny DeVito, unrecognizable) and Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer) have imposing physical presences, …
And not just any ordinary old bats, but great big Texas-sized omnivorous bats. (Actually, laboratory-enhanced Indonesian imported bats.) Perfectly harmless s-f mutation stuff, apart from the stupefying conformance to convention. (And guess what's playing these days at the main-street bijou in Gallup, Texas? -- Nosferatu.) With Lou Diamond Phillips, Dina …
Pretty effective piece of sentimental fantasy (in science-fiction clothing), with an interesting inversion of the usual sense of scale. A couple of self-reproducing flying saucers (a mama and a papa, with babies on the way) come to the aid of tenement dwellers threatened with eviction. The odd twist is that …
Murky vision of the future, from a novel by the founding father of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard. John Travolta, a Hubbard disciple, co-produced, and also portrays the iron-fisted alien colonist on planet Earth in the year 3000, though his ham Shakespearean diction hardly indicates he's taking it seriously. Roger Christian …