Contemplation of the end of the world seems to be just about enough to compel seriousness from a Hollywood filmmaker. And certainly the bigger-than-Everest comet herein hurtling towards Earth compels more seriousness from Mimi Leder than the prospect of a mere nuclear detonation in the heart of Manhattan in her …
Computer-cartoon sea monsters slurp up most of the cookie-cutter humans aboard a pleasure ship in the Western Pacific. (Commonly asked questions: "What the hell is/was that?" and "Now what?") Gore galore; fun none. With Treat Williams, Famke Janssen, Kevin J. O'Connor, Wes Studi, Djimon Hounsou; written and directed by Stephen …
As tedious, as self-indulgent, as inert, as exasperating as the typical Henry Jaglom talkathon may be, at least we can feel the filmmaker is in his element. Here he is hopelessly over his head with the forces of destiny, the occult, eternal love. The repetitive semi-improvisatory delivery of lines, the …
Another tasteful collaboration of director Barbet Schroeder and his faithful photographer Luciano Tovoli, working chiefly in cool blues and battleship grays, with a subtle spreading of shadows. The taste ends there. The project -- the only known bone-marrow match for a policeman's leukemic son is an incarcerated psychopath -- is …
Alfre Woodard, with her sparkling fencing match of emotions, is good to see in a role of almost any size, and better to see in a bigger one. For a change, she has the lead, a substance-abusing Chicago single mom who glues herself and her family back together in the …
Droll Japanese film about a small-town sawbones who, in the last days of the Second World War, wages a single-track battle against the spread of hepatitis (earning him the alias of "Dr. Liver") while the army medicos are overly concerned with typhus. The unprepossessing hero cuts an amusing figure, bustling …
Eddie Murphy talks to the animals. More coarsely, and to commoner animals, than Rex Harrison talked. And they more coarsely in return: "Why do they call me a guinea pig, anyway? I'm not Italian, and I'm not pork." And no less boringly, in just more than half the time. With …
Title aside, this is a scruffily realistic French film about the friendship of a pair of assembly-line seamstresses (a friendship founded, so far as we can tell, on mutual disdain for combed hair), two of society's outsiders, one of whom secretly wants "in." These two form a friendship in turn …
Historical costume drama, stronger on the costumes than on the history or drama. Those two elements come down to a kind of Late Renaissance Godfather, in which a feminist-revisionist Elizabeth I is installed in the part of Michael Corleone, evolving from a frolicsome carefree girl (no virgin, she) into a …
Going-through-the-motions paranoia thriller that goes through them like greased lightning. Plenty of high-tech whoosh and whirl, in other words, but no emotional impact. The governmental Goliaths, who want to institute a Surveillance Society (the inclusion of Gabriel Byrne and Loren Dean in the cast helps to call to mind Wim …
Director Andy Tennant's application for membership in the Peter Pan Club. It purports to be the True Story of Cinderella, as told to the Brothers Grimm after publication of their own fanciful account, to "set the record straight." The teller (the imperious Jeanne Moreau) proclaims herself a direct descendant, with …
Or: I Was a Teenage Body Snatcher. Scriptwriter Kevin Williamson (Scream, Scream 2), a dehumanized cine-cannibal in his own right, seems to feel that self-conscious acknowledgment of his pilfered sources constitutes sufficient originality: here, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which in turn was "a blatant rip-off of The Puppet Masters." …
Or: I Was a Teenage Body Snatcher. Scriptwriter Kevin Williamson (Scream, Scream 2), a dehumanized cine-cannibal in his own right, seems to feel that self-conscious acknowledgment of his pilfered sources constitutes sufficient originality: here, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which in turn was "a blatant rip-off of The Puppet Masters." …
Down-to-earth flatfoot (Denzel Washington, always good to look at, to watch closely, to study) on the trail of an otherworldly serial killer, a fallen angel called Azazel, who has the ability, while manifesting no form of his own, to move from body to body at the merest touch. This makes …
Hunter S. Thompson's well-thumbed war stories or fish stories from the drug culture have licensed director Terry Gilliam, a late replacement for the original director, Alex Cox, to shovel together a junkpile of repulsive visual effects in illustration of assorted altered states (distorting lenses, off-balance cameras, computer animation, gaudy lights, …