Big surprise is that John Cassavetes would want to direct so conventional a Hollywood project: a reunion of the stars of The In-Laws, Peter Falk and Alan Arkin, with pretty much the same personas, but this time in a comic twist on Double Indemnity (with a dash of Les Diaboliques). …
The all-purpose title tells little about a slender, strenuous comic caper adapted from a novel by Dave Barry: a lengthy eighty-odd minutes. (Its release was postponed after the attacks of September 11, 2001, owing to worries over the black-market nuclear bomb smuggled aboard a jetliner: heh-heh.) The opportunities are spread …
Terribly confusing action-comedy, set in and under San Francisco's Chinatown. ("You know what this is?" poses an eye-witness news reporter, not too helpfully. "This is like some radical Alice in Wonderland.") Not just the mumbo-jumbo about Chinese black magic, about the Lords of Death versus the Wing Kong, about Lo …
John Milius's epic-scale treatment of three surfing buddies and their California Casual lifestyle is always pleasantly absurd, but its most side-splitting possibilities, in the mock-heroic mode, are not realized until the lugubriously nostalgic second half, when the three blond beachniks must face up to the problems of Aging, the Changing …
Vroom-vroom-vroom-VROOOOM! Noisy nonsense about mostly black motorcycle clubs that get together for ritualized drag races ("We got a strict code about hustling") or else, on one occasion, for a charity bike-wash to raise money for schoolbooks. There are no real bad guys, and only one dead guy. (But don't try …
Their Excellent Adventure was an unexpectedly big hit, so its sequel is expectedly bigger: lavish visions of the future, heaven, hell, and points between. The premise is a Terminator-type mission: two "evil twin robots" (twins of Bill and Ted, not of each other) sent back from the future to murder …
An exaltation of stupidity, a trait the filmmakers would seem to know intimately. Two low-denominator high-school students -- heavy-tongued, heavy-eyelidded heavy-metal types -- get their hands on a time machine to round up some helpers for their pending History report: Lincoln, Socrates, Freud, Beethoven, Genghis Khan, Billy the Kid, Joan …
Any gangster film that can dredge up something so old as to appear almost new again -- namely, cement footwear for swimming -- has done enough to justify itself. A craftsmanly run-through of the most elementary and elemental material, this one (adapted from the E.L. Doctorow novel) homes in especially …
Fluffy and forgettable bit of uplift about an unlikely lad in Margaret Thatcher's England, who drops out of the local boxing club, drops in on the all-girl ballet class that convenes in the same gym, and proves himself (not to the untrained eye, which might concede his potential as a …
A showcase for the talent-impaired Adam Sandler (co-written by him), in the impossible part of the idiot son of a hotel magnate, obligated to repeat grades one through twelve (two weeks apiece) if he hopes to inherit the family business. He -- it -- they -- are lazy and unimaginative …
A Tommy O'Haver Trifle, truthfully self-described. Good-looking, colorful, bright romantic comedy about the lust of a homosexual photographer for his newly discovered straight model -- Pygaylion, if you will, and his Gaylatea. The gas runs out before the end, even with long stretches of low-speed coasting. Sean P. Hayes, a …
Boot-camp comedy, through which Neil Simon glides and dances, landing the occasional light jab of self-pitying wit ("It was hard to believe that these guys had mothers and fathers who were worried about them"). The script, adapted by Simon from his original stage play, is purportedly autobiographical, though it hardly …
A dog and his boy, separated when the latter's father, a barefooted placekicker, gets traded from Denver to Green Bay. Matthew Robbins wants to make a kiddie movie and be hip at the same time: ham acting, cute canine, impossible feats, but also suburban satire, sick jokes, sexual innuendo, and …
A strange Bird indeed: two and a half hours of total commercial hopelessness, commercial suicide even, commercial self-sacrifice (to put the noblest face on it), directed, but not appeared in, by perhaps the single biggest box-office star of the prior two decades. Clint Eastwood, co-opted by the country-western crowd for …