A ravishing young Swiss governess lowers herself to the job of baby-maker, a broodmare for a British blueblood of concealed identity ("I have a reputation to protect"), so as to liberate her father from debtors' prison. A baby is produced on schedule, a girl, to be spirited away as if …
Run-of-the-mill action film, the first directing effort (why bother?) by cinematographer Dean Semler. Howie Long, the former Oakland (and Los Angeles) Raider defensive lineman and current TV football commentator, a mere second-banana bad guy in Broken Arrow, makes a smooth transition into the hero's slot as a Wyoming "smokejumper," one …
One of the nicer compliments payable to first-time filmmaker Jesse Peretz is that his background in TV commercials and music videos is nowhere evident on screen. Even the interesting selections of pop songs on the soundtrack (with heavy representation by a group calling itself Shudder to Think) are for the …
Dishonor among thieves, two Brits and two Yanks to be exact, plus a proper bewigged barrister who's drawn into the mess. There are plenty of fresh and funny ideas: the use of foreign languages as an aphrodisiac, a gunsel who reads (but doesn't understand) Nietzsche and will fly off the …
British film noir, sufficiently nightmarish and fatalistic and grade-B to merit such classification, and shot in gloomy black-and-white to boot. The storyline, to do with an unemployed would-be writer who makes a practice of "shadowing" anonymous pedestrians for purposes of research, and who one day makes a mistake of shadowing …
John Boorman's underworld drama in old-style black-and-white (Seamus Deasy, cinematographer), mustering a wide range of grays on a wide screen, with subtle gradations and occasional spots of harsh glare on the polished surface. The title figure is the real-life Dublin crime boss Martin Cahill (we learn to say it CAH-hill, …
A strange-bedfellows suspense thriller: the unstructured director Robert Altman at work on an original screen story by the formulaic novelist John Grisham. The former, even though tempering his self-indulgent mannerisms, generates little in the way of tension or excitement, but a great deal in the way of atmospheric weather: Savannah …
Fictional speculation, from the Christopher Bram novel Father of Frankenstein, on the final days of the ostracized Hollywood director James Whale, his incomplete recovery from stroke, his haunted memories of World War I, his hankering for his well-built gardener ("You have the most architectural skull"), his suicide in his swimming …
Well, she's big all right. As advertised. But not really as big as you might have expected. The otherworldly spacecraft in Independence Day, Roland Emmerich's hommage to the alien-invader fables of the 1950s, was sufficiently larger than any previous such vehicle as to carve out a special niche for itself …
Heavily politicized Gothic romance about an undercover Jew in the employ of upper-crust Scots. The intrepid heroine breaches the inner sanctum of the lord of the castle, shows him the undiscovered way to preserve his pioneering photographs, and even gets a one-century jump on Playgirl magazine with a full-frontal pin-up …
A dream of overnight success on the New York art scene, as well as of a longer road to written-in-the-stars true love, realized in the dreamiest cinematic style: the dizziest, the dopiest. There are a number of recognizable points of connection with the Dickens novel on which the movie is …
Seventh entry in the holiday horror series, although the third had nothing to do with the intermittent killing sprees of Michael Myers. The whole idea of a resumption is so tiresome beforehand that the thing could easily be ignored if not for some idle curiosity over the return of Jamie …
Todd Solondz's cruelly evenhanded comedy, tougher and subtler than his Welcome to the Dollhouse, with sophistication now outbalancing (but not eliminating) sophomoricism. The bitter little vignettes in illustration of aloneness, alienation, despair, maladroitness, malformation, and similar human conditions, are structured rather like a TV soap opera, centered around three grown …
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 …