Catholic boys' school as a foretaste of hell: a sadistic teacher, a secret society among the Seniors, an extracurricular chocolate sale that soon becomes all-consuming. It's not believable for an instant, but it has a loony logic that catches you up and pulls you in. The direction by Keith Gordon …
Felicitous comic conceit: a community-theater production of The Beggar's Opera as a microcosm of small-town tawdriness. It affords Anthony Hopkins a role in which he can really let loose without unbalancing the ensemble: a moonlighting director (a solicitor by day) who thinks he can be a caustic, eccentric genius with …
Soap opera with a Jamaican patois — that of the black housekeeper in a fractured, then broken, Baltimore home. The housekeeper herself, notwithstanding a deep dark secret, is too good to be true: supremely self-possessed, wryly patronizing, witty, wise, and Whoopi Goldberg. But the Only Child of the household (since …
Part public-service message and part private love-triangle. It covers twenty-one days at a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center and nine days of after-care; but despite the roughly proportionate allotment of screen time, it feels nearer to nine days inside and twenty-one days out. Or better, it feels near enough to …
What Tom Cruise did for military recruitment in Top Gun, he tries to do again for bartending school. Enroll now, for a unique opportunity to travel, to meet people (young women, rich women), and to learn the arts of synchronized drink-mixing, bottle-juggling, and dimple-flashing. Philosophy is no longer a curriculum …
Cocoon: The Regurgitation. Cocoon: The Old Folks Acting Like Kids Again. Cocoon: The Transgalactic and Nontactile Romance. (Goodness, gracious, great balls of fire!) Cocoon: The Endangered Alien Species. Cocoon: The Suspenseless Suspense. Cocoon: The Major Life-Altering Snap Decisions. (So what was life like on Antarea anyway?) The director, Daniel Petrie, …
Prince Akeem of Zamunda -- a kind of African Shangri-La -- selects Queens, N.Y., to seek out a bride who will love him for himself, and "who will arouse my intellect as well as my loins." He finds one of those, right enough, but a dearth of laughs. Eddie Murphy, …
An escapee from the loony bin, passing himself off as resident psychiatrist thereof, gets to sit in for a radio psychologist on leave of absence: an "idea" comedy with nothing much to back the idea up -- nothing beyond putting Dan Aykroyd in the starring role (where Chevy Chase or …
Whatever slender charms this character (or its creator and incarnator, Paul Hogan) possessed the first time around have been nudged off the screen by his widening smugness. This is partly an effect of simply trying to keep him the same while time marches on around him. Rustic naiveté, for example, …
A New York romantic comedy that's truly romantic and truly comic -- and truly New Yorkian for that matter. Can a pretty, early-thirties, somewhat starry-eyed bookstore manager (and personal organizer of "the most prestigious reading series in New York City") find happiness with a second-generation pickle vendor on the Lower …
An excuse for Meryl Streep to do an Australian accent, and it goes without saying that she does it uncommonly well, better, that is, than the common Australian. "Oy thank it's toyme we statted air holly-dyes," etc., etc. Of course there is also a story around all this, a true …
An expatriate Irish playwright hashes things over with the ghost of his father -- literally, and in stiltedly literary language: "You spent your life sitting on brambles, and wouldn't move for fear someone would take your seat," etc. He also gets to have a generation-gap spat with "himself" -- though …
A full recital of misgivings about the casting would run the risk of descending to John Simon-esque rudeness. Let it suffice that John Malkovich is not altogether persuasive in the part of an infamous and irresistible roué that Michelle Pfeiffer is only slightly more persuasive as the demure embodiment of …