This revival of Arthur Miller's witch-hunt allegory, set in 17th-century Salem but really about McCarthyism, comes along far too late to retain a scrap of its original courage. It has a hard enough time retaining a scrap of seriousness. The all-girl gang of devil-raisers, scurrying and screeching with carefully rehearsed …
Effects-laden urban disaster thriller -- an explosion and cave-in in an underwater commuter tunnel -- with a dreamlike freedom of imagination, freedom from logic, freedom sometimes from comprehensibility. Sylvester Stallone, Amy Brenneman, Viggo Mortensen, Stan Shaw, and Claire Bloom; directed by Rob Cohen.
Cynical piece of Christmas capitalism concerning a cynical con man who, sentenced to one year of steady nine-to-five employment, lands a postal job in the Dead Letter Office and starts to answer God's mail. The con man predictably regains some idealism. The filmmaker, Garry Marshall, no less predictably retains his …
Arturo Ripstein's remake of The Honeymoon Killers, a true story of multiple murder, has been flourishingly transplanted into a Mexican setting (genteel shabby interiors, barren parched landscapes) and thoroughly individualized. We still have the corpulent nurse -- a perfectly pear-shaped single mother to two small children, and a romantic fantasist …
Hal Salwen's high-concept, low-budget comedy about a circle of friends, or friends of friends, too busy ("besieged," "deluged") to get together face to face. It's close to encyclopedic on telephone culture (answering machines, call waiting, conference calls, faxes, cel phones, phone sex), and it's a cinematic challenge: no two characters …
The first remake of the Clouzot Diabolique under the same name. (But see Games, see Reflections of Murder.) The retention of the French title emphasizes that this is frankly a film for those who refuse to read subtitles, or who are blind to black-and-white, or who can find no way …
A Knight of the Old Code and a computer-generated talking dragon (cultured voice of Sean Connery) join forces to rid the realm of the evil ruler. Do all dragons talk? We don't know, because this is The Last Dragon, but no one in the late 10th Century seems taken aback …
Garden-variety orangutan comedy (ee-ee-oo-oo) about a simian cat burglar on the run from his human confederate (Rupert Everett with a Terry-Thomas tooth-gap) in a five-star Manhattan hotel. Many felicitous directing touches, courtesy of Ken Kwapis (Vibes and He Said, She Said). Essentially, though, and inescapably kids' stuff. With Jason Alexander, …
Moderately interesting and handsomely photographed examination of homosexuality and its stigmatization in modern China. The central storytelling strategy -- a night-long interrogation, illustrated with flashbacks, of a flauntingly gay writer by a conflicted cop -- is stagnant and tiresome. The film has since been adapted for the stage, rather than …
Small-town geneticist seeks soul mate in big city. Conventional fish-out-of-water comedy, but pluckily low-budget and semi-professional -- and newcomer Matt Ross registers as almost pathetically and pitifully "nice." With Callie Thorne and Kevin Carroll; written and directed by John Walsh.
Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's early-19th-century period piece, from a Goethe novel, traces the realignment of affections among a newly married couple and their two houseguests of opposite sexes. The application of the laws of chemistry, the rigidness of geometry, and the precision of mathematics, to the fathomless vagaries of human …
In the fresh footprints of Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility, another Jane Austen adaptation. And in a word, it "delivers," in every bit as predictable a way as a Schwarzenegger action thriller. Or in a few other words, it meets but never exceeds expectations -- with the solitary exception of …
A kind of anti-Casablanca wherein there is no nobler cause than the fortress of love. It has mystery, romance, two romances in fact, a period setting, desert scenery, a backdrop of war, though none of these in sufficient quantity to necessitate nearly two-and-three-quarter hours of screen time. Neither of the …