Intolerably twee romance that fudges the border between madness and daffiness. A clinical nutcase (breakfast of milk, peanut butter, Cap'n Crunch in the blender) "wins" a semiliterate, Chaplin-and-Keaton-emulating clown during a poker game, and discovers in him a true soulmate (cheese sandwiches grilled by clothes iron, potatoes mashed by tennis …
Fiery display of rhetoric: persecutors of gays are Nazis. Literally, in this case. A frenetic opening-up and pushing-around of the Martin Sherman stage play about the end of the free-and-easy decadence of Berlin between the wars, the S.S. crackdown on "deviants," and the flowering relationship of two prisoners in Dachau. …
Computer-animated comic-book transcription of the unloved epic poem of the 8th Century. Director Robert Zemeckis goes even further with the motion-capture technique of The Polar Express, staking out the borderland between live action and cartoon, and throwing in 3-D to boot. Ray Winstone, voicing the dragon-slaying hero, has been prettified …
Besides the prefix and suffix of its title, this shares with Beloved the spectacle of Thandie Newton peeing on her own feet, puking, and behaving generally as if possessed by Linda Blair. Her character is that of a refugee from an African dictatorship, now a maid in Italy. Her master, …
Barry Levinson and Valerie Curtin, scriptwriting partners who are also husband and wife, have written a semi-private joke about scriptwriting partners who become husband and wife, and about what happens next. The various topics that are ambled through are hardly very private: Hollywood producers, health-food restaurants, wedding chapels, trains, weather, …
Christopher Guest's gallery of caricatures of the people at and around the fictitious Mayflower Kennel Club Dog Show: funny, yet disappointing. Or in other words: not as funny as his Waiting for Guffman, and lavishly overpraised in the reviews. (It gives reviewers a chance to be funny, in turn, by …
What's this? Quarrelling already? You don't waste much time. That's a mouthful from the screenplay by Ingmar Bergman (directed by the Danish-born Bille August of Pelle the Conqueror) based on the courtship and early married life of his actual parents, a pious Lutheran pastor in a Godforsaken rural outpost and …
The stage musical Burt Reynoldsized (and Dom DeLuisized). Dolly Parton is fine (despite doing a pointless and less good rendition of one of her best songs, "I Will Always Love You"), and Charles Durning prances onto the scene too late and too briefly to do much good, and Colin Higgins …
An arranged marriage disarranged, due in large part to the electrical charge between the sullen bride and the somber best man, just returned to his Italian hometown from America, with advanced ideas on social equality. Nicely detailed as to customs and period (the last day of the 19th Century), but …
A Joseph Wambaugh-ish policeman-author, run up against a Himalayan-sized writer's block, collaborates with a professional hitman to expose a bloody corporate head. ("Corporations don't have people killed!" proclaims the much-to-learn author in the early stages of his researches.) Brian Dennehy, who speaks all lines the same way, with total conviction …
Claude Miller, in his first directing assignment, exhibits much sensitivity, restraint, neatness, and thoroughness in dealing with what used to be spoken of as a Gide-ian relationship in a summer boys' camp. It's a relief that the focus of attention in such a locale is on the counselors rather than …
A triangle tale related in reverse chronology, starting, that is, with the breakup of the pertinent marriage and working backwards nine years to the first extramarital embrace. The effect of this arrangement is to ensure that every step of the way we know more, and better, than the principal trio. …
Laurence Olivier must have been drawn to this by the same force that impelled him to do Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for television. Again, he's Big Daddy, or actually Big Great-grand-daddy, the tyrant of a Detroit automobile empire. Speaking in an unidentifiable accent that sometimes, perhaps, is in …
Mushrooming complications in the nuptial plans of a nonreligious Italian-Jewish girl and her WASP fiancé. One of the complications -- the father of the bride's unwitting involvement with the Mafia -- is not only irrelevant to the wedding but bumps it down to the status of a subplot. (Anthony LaPaglia, …