Although the title sounds like a Hong Kong shoot'em-up by John Woo, the subject is actually straight-A suburban Asian-American teens, who use exclamations like "Sweet" and "Whatever," listen to rap music, get wasted, and escalate from classroom cheating to petty crime to big-time. It's nice to know, in case you …
Youth comedy, slightly loonier than most: teenage suicide as a running gag, anthropomorphized hamburger buns, a Living Dead horde of paperboys. And, with a couple of direct lifts from Woody Allen and Albert Brooks, loftier in artistic aspirations, too. But no funnier, for all that. And there is still the …
Chabrol's oblique, ironic, politically incorrect, or politically independent, or simply apolitical, account of one woman's roundabout liberation. (The "unpleasant" movie about an abortionist, to which one character prissily refers, could well be Chabrol's own Story of Women.) Adapted from a Simenon novel, and a definite improvement on it. Interesting effect …
Young love, French love, crazy love. Well, one of them's crazy at least: the one who throws things out the window ("Your pad will look very Zen now," a neighbor remarks), and who sets the house afire on moving out, and who stabs a pizzeria patron with a fork, and …
A different and diffident sort of movie comedy, which takes up the limited-interest subject of a Boston underground newspaper, why it lost its aim in the post-Nixon Seventies, and how it finishes the good fight not with a bang, but with a whimper. The style is realistic caricature, and it …
Another cast of characters (but not cast of actors) rounded up in TV re-run heaven (or the Other Place) and brought back to life. Why? To what purpose? For whom? The how of it offers no clue. Dialogue excerpt: "What's smog?" And after a pause for the "Final Jeopardy" melody: …
The consuming ambition of this movie, whatever else it might be up to, is to pass off Eddie Murphy as a black Clint Eastwood. The Dirty Harry series comes first to mind, propelled there by the plainclothesman's independent ways, his catastrophic results, and his snippiness to his superiors in the …
Any mote of urban grit in the forerunner, or anyway in the opening credits sequence of the forerunner, has been neatly whisked away by Kleenex. And since the brash Detroit detective (Eddie Murphy) has already made the acquaintance of Frick and Frack on the Beverly Hills police force (Judge Reinhold, …
Grind-it-out sequel: just something to keep Eddie Murphy busy. The opening action sequence is well assembled, though it sets up a pattern of schizoid alternation between comedy and drama that persists throughout: immediately after the hero's boss expires in his lap, we plunge onward to airbag gags in the ensuing …
A shipwrecked foundling raised by ninjas grows up to be tubby Chris Farley. Whence commences a steady barrage of clumsy-loud-stupid jokes: jokes, that is, about clumsiness, loudness, and stupidity, clumsily, loudly, stupidly told. With Nicollette Sheridan, Chris Rock; directed by Dennis Dugan.
The enlistment of Nora Ephron, director and (with her sister Delia) cowriter, assures a level of smartness unexpected in a transplant from the small screen to the big. Not at all a reasonable facsimile of the Sixties sitcom about the witchy housewife with the twitchy nose, it is rather a …
Sanctimonious slush surrounding a dedicated doctor and an uncommitted wife (somebody else's) who make a deep connection while fighting famine in Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Chechnya. The high ideals amount to no more than emotional blackmail. With Angelina Jolie, Clive Owen, Linus Roache, Teri Polo, Noah Emmerich; directed by Martin Campbell.
John Boorman has long shown a fine eye in concert with an unfine mind. And even in so half-hearted and half-baked an effort as this one, the wide, deep, full, lush, colorful, teeming, sudoriferous images form an impressive parade. But the typical disparity between eye and mind in a Boorman …
The daughter of deaf parents finds her way in the world as a clarinettist, in the footsteps of a glamorous, childless, possessive aunt. Schmaltzy but well shy of nauseating. The details of family life (the daughter sitting at the foot of the TV, translating an old movie into sign language …
Interlocked and overlapping stories, joined together through the roamings of a ruminative film director: "I only discovered reality when I began photographing it." (The actor in the part, John Malkovich, can make a hello sound like a difficult thought.) A tensionless collaboration between two compatible Gloomy Gusses, the infirm eighty-something …