Something like the fifth movie adaptation of Erich Kästner's kiddie crime classic. The 1931 version was scripted by a young Billy Wilder.
The harrowing tale of that aborted and rerouted attempt to cross Antarctica on foot, just after the outbreak of the First World War. It's quite a tale, all right, and documentarist George Butler puts it into a tidy little package of tinted footage and still photos taken by the party's …
The Battle of Stalingrad, reduced ridiculously to a personal "duel" between superstar snipers, a Russian peasant and a German aristocrat. ("It's the essence of the class struggle," opines the editor of a propaganda newsletter.) The telescopic shootouts are meticulously diagrammed, and there are several spectacular shots of aerial attacks, and …
Derivative and undemanding and slightly diverting s-f spoof to do with a single-cell alien species that touches down in Arizona and evolves at an accelerated rate into computer-animated worms, bugs, lizards, and ultimately, thanks to a massive intake of napalm calories, into a humongous amorphous chewing-gum blob. Foremost among the …
Steven Seagal fighting age, weight, and dirty Detroit cops. Putting up no resistance to wretched excess, mindlessness, and egomania. With DMX, Anthony Anderson, Isaiah Washington, and Tom Arnold; directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak.
The world of street racing (vroom-vroom) intersects with that of truck hijacking: your basic drive-in movie (if there were still drive-ins), souped up with headbanger music (thunk-thunk), some chest-flattening effects of speed, and a honey-glazed cast of hot bods. (Michelle Rodriguez, among them, makes the jump from the low-budget, independent …
Affectionate, almost gooey, look at the world of gay pornography, though with harsh sound and image, cheap and brassy. It's the unsavory depraved heterosexual -- a hunky gay-for-pay hophead -- who causes the dramatic turmoil. With Scott Gurney, Michael Cunio, Roxanne Day, Robert Walden, Deborah Harry; co-directed by Richard Glatzer …
An early novel by Arthur Miller becomes an outmoded message movie, set back in the Second World War to excuse its squareness, dealing with a middle-aged Presbyterian whose new spectacles make him "look Jewish." For some unapparent reason, his even newer blonde-bombshell wife (Laura Dern, a Marilyn Monroe figure, if …
MTV jester Tom Green spreads his wings, directing himself in the role of the idiot offspring of Rip Torn (matching facial hair), taking up the gross-out gauntlet (umbilical-cord jokes, paraplegic S&M jokes, child-molestation jokes), and thus initiating a hairsplitting debate as to which he has less of -- talent or …
An earth-shaking — or shaky, anyway — hypothesis as to the identity and motives of Jack the Ripper. It issues not from hell, exactly, but merely from a "graphic novel" by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. The Hughes brothers' adaptation, taking its cue, is extremely graphic, in addition to gruesome, …
Lesbian gas-station attendants hit the road, with a body in the trunk, after one accidentally kills the other's mother. Meager budget and narrative, but resourceful direction within those limits by the first-time Italian filmmaker, Monica Lisa Stambrini. With Maya Sansa and Regina Orioli.
Space opera by John Carpenter -- a tatty patchwork of his previous films, most prominently Assault on Precinct 13, The Fog, The Thing (a line of the script even quotes the title of the original short story, "Who Goes There?"), Prince of Darkness, and Vampires. It has a choppy plotline …
The heroine, out of a comic book by Daniel Clowes, is someone a critic could love. Not only a critic, rest assured. Fresh out of high school — or rather, jaded out of high school — she can produce an equal sneer for the wheelchair-bound valedictorian ("High school is like …
Feature film debut of writer-director Sande Zeig, who happens also to be president of the independent-film distributor, Artistic License, which happens to have distributed this one. It must be nice to have your virgin effort assured of circulation, no matter how inept, how inert, how awkward, how amateur. All of …
Slow-moving, contrived, and (to make matters worse) obvious thriller about two powerless orphans (particularly the lightbulb-fragile Leelee Sobieski), their $4 million inheritance, and their scheming guardians. With Stellan Skarsgard, Diane Lane, Bruce Dern, Kathy Baker; directed by Daniel Sackheim.