For a guy who has spent the better portion of his life playing cinephilic matchmaker, this about-face ring-up endures as a marriage made in “Hell.” “Quick! Turn on channel 9,” the voice on the other end of the line commanded. “You gotta see the way the dad catches the football.” …
The first couple of tinted, misted shots aboard an aircraft carrier capture what was most ludicrous about Top Gun. But after the credits the grim business of joke-making goes into slave-driving mode. Best notion for a scene: the heavily foreshadowed death of one flyboy as he strides across the runway …
This does to Rambo what the original Hot Shots did to Top Gun: shot a bushel's worth of peas at the hide of a rhino. Sample gag: the hero knees an adversary in the nuts -- keep in mind, the nuts -- and immediately afterwards the adversary spits two walnuts …
The story comes from an early-Fifties novel by Charles Williams, a dead ringer for any number of direct translations or approximate paraphrases of the works of James M. Cain: it's conventional, in other words, all the way, unless you can count having a wicked blonde and a demure brunette as …
But damp ammunition. Rich bored beautiful housewife, with ruthless stuffy domineering husband, tumbles for brash boyish overconfident thief. "I didn't know I was like this," she says. (She hasn't seen enough movies, then.) Shot in New Zealand; with Simone Griffeth; directed by Denis Lewiston.
In an egregious example of shoot-now-figure-it-out-later filmmaking, documentarian Brett Story spent the month crisscrossing the five boroughs of New York, asking regular folk to comment on the future. It would have taken some doing to find a less engaging group of interview subjects. Or is it the lack of time …
A talking-horse comedy whose script is credited partly to Stephen Neigher: is this a joke? is anything here a joke? how can anyone tell? With Bob Goldthwait, Dabney Coleman, Virginia Madsen, and John Candy as the horse's voice; directed by Michael Dinner.
Guy-jinks involving three middle-aged buddies and a nephew who, for R&R, repair to a rundown mountain resort, the playground of their salad days, where a malfunctioning hot tub transports them magically (as opposed to science-fictionally) back to 1986. They still look middle-aged to us and themselves, but everyone else sees …
Apparently, the hot tub time machine from the first movie was real, and John Cusack used it to go back in time and remove his contractual obligation for the sequel.
Deborah Kampmeier’s quasi Carson McCullers coming-of-age tale, set in rural Alabama in the late Fifties, attained some small notoriety, too small to amount to a full-blown controversy, as the Dakota Fanning Rape Movie. That boils it down a bit too far. Needless to say, thirteen-year-old girls have been known to …
At least the ninth screen version of the Sherlock Holmes story, this can be seen as a continuation of the road Paul Morrissey travelled in Andy Warhol's Dracula and Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, a road that has taken him further and further from his mentor, Warhol, despite the latter's figurehead position …
A kidnap victim (Ashleigh Cummings), kept under lock and key in a spare bedroom by an experienced pair of married abductors (Emma Booth and Stephen Curry) slowly — and I do mean slowly — sizes up the couple’s relationship and decides to try pitting captor against captor to enable her …
Meticulous character study of a homely, uneducated, nineteen-year-old virgin from the Brazilian Northeast, working now as a below-minimum-wage typist in São Paolo ("She wouldn't take the job if she were smart"), and an awfully slow and sloppy typist at that. The details are as excruciating as they are convincing: her …
A horror film from Ingmar Bergman. While vacationing on a remote Scandanavian island with his younger pregnant wife, an artist has an emotional breakdown while confronting his repressed desires.