Or How America Gained Its Independence Even Though Tom Dobb of New York Looked Out Only for Himself: "Ain't my fight." It becomes his, however, after his son has the soles of his feet lashed to the bone. But even then -- even when the son gets his musket sights …
Complacent political-paranoia thriller in the footprints of The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, et al. George P. Cosmatos, the director of Tombstone, Rambo, et al., shows glimmers of competence. The action is every bit as fast-moving as it is confusing. And the Wellesian deep-focus shots, too occasional to add …
Canadian superproduction of the Eskimo epic, Agaguk, about a renegade Inuit with white man's blood on his hands. ("You turned your back on the people! The spirit of the White Wolf will hunt you down!") Outside of the whale hunt, with its echoes of Jaws, what unfolds is as short …
Archive footage and present-day interviews revive the memory of G.I. protests of the Vietnam War. The physical changes in the protesters, between then and now, add visual interest to an interesting but not very visual subject. The best-known protester to take part is Jane Fonda, who brought the troops an …
Fred Schepisi's filmization of John Guare's stage play is a nervous and brittle New York comedy, of limited export value, about a high-rolling art dealer and his wife who let into their apartment a bleeding young black man claiming to be a mugging victim, as well as a college chum …
Clint Eastwood's forty-sixth starring role is a sufficiently proper and plausible one for an actor of seventy years of age. Or anyway it has been made sufficiently so. Ample thought and talk have gone into the script to persuade us that Eastwood and no one else on earth can fix …
Bud Yorkin's highly inventive, highly inebriated spoof on the preposterous intrigues of Dumas-esque historical fiction, with Gene Wilder, often a scream, and Donald Sutherland each portraying mismatched twins — dimwit peasants on one side and cruel nobles on the other — who are all brought together by Destiny's design on …
In the eye of Typhoon Leiah, a salvage boat happens onto a derelict satellite-tracking ship, worth $300 million to its Russian owners, or one-tenth of that to its salvagers. Trouble is, there's an alien life form on board, infesting the mainframe computer, assembling a battalion of robots, and steadily whittling …
Robert Towne's "biopic" on middle-distance runner Steve Prefontaine was beaten to the finish line early in 1997 by Steve James's prosaically named Prefontaine, and it then fell back an extra year in the reasonable hope that the competing film would have been forgotten. Without question this later arrival is a …