At long last: an action movie rendered in the manner of a First Person Shooter video game, right down to the regeneration of characters, humorous and/or expository cutscenes, the acquisition of bonus life packs along the way, and the endless final battle against the taunting big boss and his minions. …
The worst day of a man’s life is about to take a turn for the macabre. Bounding home from his mother’s funeral, homicide detective Gu-Soo (Lee Sun-kyun, gracefully piling on the frustration) accidentally strikes and kills a pedestrian. Wondering where to stash the stiff, the remarkably resourceful Lee converts mom’s …
The Beatles’ hyperthyroid first film, directed by Richard Lester with a sense of comic and cinematic inventiveness — funny, silly, and stupid, by turns — that never stops asserting itself for a minute.
A P.T. Anderson Picture, it says right at the top. More precisely, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson's first picture, a contrived yet underplotted piece about a gentleman gambler (Philip Baker Hall, suit, tie, white shirt, tremendous air of authority) and his hapless protégé (John C. Reilly). It is not without ambitions, …
The first movie exported from Jamaica, a genuine curiosity among black exploitation movies. The story might have been thought up by a wistful adolescent who can't, or won't, make up his mind between two different Hollywood-clichédreams of glory. For a while it follows a struggling-young-artist pattern (in this case, a …
Jerry Lewis's first movie in a decade, not counting the aborted The Day the Clown Cried. This one itself hardly seems a finished and polished and publicly presentable piece of work. Plenty of the gags in it could be transplanted in old Jerry Lewis movies without positively contaminating the surrounding …
A social worker at a youth facility assembles an unlikely cycling team of juvenile convicts for a transformative 1,000-mile bike ride from Denver to the Grand Canyon. Directed by R.J. Daniel Hanna, starring Cynthia Kaye McWilliams, Matthew Modine, and Sean Astin.
Flood compounded with armored-car robbery. Some fantastic scenic effects of a world awash, and a standout action sequence of a chase through school hallways on jet skis. But the action rises to more extreme heights than the water, getting sillier and sillier as it goes: a whole house will be …
The heaven-made or at least computer-made match of martial-arts star Jean-Claude van Damme and Hong Kong action director John Woo (The Killer, Hard-Boiled, et al.) seemed as if it would have been beneficial to both parties -- higher production values for Woo, higher style for van Damme -- but it …
Charles Bronson is the archetypal transient loner, stealing in and out of big cities aboard night trains, on a placid, vacant Panavision screen. This is a far-fetched ballad about he-man virtues, both physical and ethical, surviving in a difficult, debasing underworld — it's about Depression drifters pummeling one another for …
After seven years in a coma, a bullet-riddled detective rises from the dead, looking a lot like Jesus Christ but thinking only of bloody vengeance. Steven Seagal handles a gun quite nicely, and his technique in hand-to-hand combat is fast and exciting. But his aura of coolness is about the …
Pansy, angry and depressed, lashes out at family and strangers. Her constant criticism isolates her, except from her cheerful sister Chantal, who remains sympathetic despite their differences. Directed by Mike Leigh, starring Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin.
Vision of the future, virtually unseeable amid the monochrome, the shadows, the smoke, not to forget the mattress feathers. The story, about a junked robot who's incorporated into a metal sculpture and comes back to life, could hardly be plainer. With Stacey Travis and Dylan McDermott; written and directed by …
Hollywood action hero researches his next role in the company of a tough New York cop: "capturing the essence of the police experience." A good idea for a comedy, good enough to have been given to a real artist instead of a Hollywood hack. The whole thing is thrown hopelessly …