Would-be big hoot. A loud, obnoxious, sophomoric action spoof cum black comedy about a Maalox-gulping hitman (Mark Wahlberg) who has a deep psychological need for everyone to like him. Lou Diamond Phillips, as his disloyal confederate, manages to work himself up into a rabid lather, but it's a waste of …
Two industrial-lubricant salesmen and a junior accountant in a hospitality suite in Wichita. In three acts. Kevin Spacey's automatic-pilot smugness and snideness underline the staginess of the piece. Danny DeVito minimizes, doesn't eliminate, the problem. And Peter Facinelli sounds as if he wants to be Tom Cruise, and certainly looks …
The most deglamorized portrait of Hollywood by Hollywood, not only for its vision of power, manipulation, enslavement, but for its stagy confinement to a single beach house. (Also for its casting of Jack Palance as a representative box-office idol.) Clifford Odets wrote the original play, so the fist falls heavily …
There are actually two Lebowskis, a big one and a little one, a multimillionaire philanthropist and a lazy, laid-back bowler, both christened Jeffrey; and when the latter — who prefers to be addressed as "the Dude" — is mistaken for the other by a pair of dim-bulb thugs, he is …
There are actually two Lebowskis, a big one and a little one, a multimillionaire philanthropist and a lazy, laid-back bowler, both christened Jeffrey; and when the latter — who prefers to be addressed as "the Dude" — is mistaken for the other by a pair of dim-bulb thugs, he is …
Although snugly at home in the burgeoning genre of the food film (Babette's Feast, Like Water for Chocolate, etc.), this is much more food for thought than food for tummy, an "issues" movie about the artist versus the businessman in the American marketplace. The metaphor for this takes the amusing …
Michael Moore's seat-of-the-pants travelogue on his forty-seven-city tour to promote his best-selling book (nonfiction), Downsize This! After Roger and Me and his small-screen series TV Nation, there is nothing really new to say for or against his journalistic methods. They remain as unfair and confrontational and cranky as ever. But …
Christopher Guest's directorial debut, a corruption-of-innocence comedy solipsistically set in Hollywood. The opening awards ceremony, with clips from four nominated student productions at the National [sic] Film Institute, puts him back comfortably in the parody mode of This Is Spinal Tap, which he co-wrote and starred in. (The intermittent fantasy …
Marching through World War II under the command of Samuel Fuller and in the company of a charmed infantry unit that survives North Africa, Sicily, Normandy, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia, and somehow missed out on the mop-up operation in the Pacific. (Robert Carradine, chomping on an unending cigar and narrating the …
The Bogart-Bacall team's playful, pattycake exchanges are quite dated now, although at times still quite salacious, and the adaptation of the labyrinthine Raymond Chandler mystery novel is not as baffling as it is reputed to be. However, there is also a grand confidence in the allure of film noir atmospheric …
Although relocated in modern-day England, this stays closer to the letter of the Raymond Chandler original than Howard Hawks's 1946 version did. And yet, hastening through the labyrinthine plot in well under two hours, it turns brusque and unfeeling. Not all is a loss, though. There's a nice counterpoint effect …
Cut-rate caper film (both film and caper are cut-rate) about a transparent scam to separate a bum-kneed third baseman from his $130,000 insurance settlement. If this devout Catholic ("Forgive me, Lord, but I've indulged my wife in pursuit of carnal fulfillment -- again") were disposed to fund the church renovations …
Overeager-to-please comedy about a gay Glaswegian hairdresser (Craig Ferguson) who travels to L.A. to take part in the annual Platinum Scissors competition. The "mockumentary" format permits the movie literally to make faces at the camera. With Frances Fisher, David Rasche, and Mary McCormack; directed by Kevin Allen.
Pee-wee Herman's second feature film, a sodden misfire. What went wrong? He's a gentleman farmer this time (still with his white loafers, red bowtie, etc.), and an "inventor" after the fashion of George Washington Carver ("the father of the peanut"), who plays host to a travelling circus and especially to …
Namely Chicago, as of 1957, and as seen through the eyes of an Indiana country boy. The setting is permeated with the romance of the wild side -- hotels, bars, strip clubs, gyms, and the literal and figurative tumble of the dice -- and only slightly demystified by the rough-grained …