Comedy remake of a classic Fifties sci-fi thriller, with a King Kong motif tacked on toward the end, and a last-gasp intimation of Attack of the 50-Foot Woman. Any good taste exhibited in the choice of source material is evident nowhere else. Except for the passable special effects and the …
Cross-cultural interracial lesbian teen romantic comedy. One of the girls is a rock-and-rolling, pot-smoking, math-failing, blue-collar tomboy, the other an opera-listening, poetry-reading, college-bound, spoiled little rich girl. On the one hand, we're supposed to notice that these two girls in love are just like two anybodies in love. On the …
Unthrilling game of cat-and-cat, a beautiful young confident manipulative brunette and a beautiful young confident manipulated blonde, on a sketchily drawn playing field of posh Southern country club. With Susan Ward, Lori Heuring, Matthew Settle, and Daniel Hugh Kelly; directed by Mary Lambert.
Well-directed (John Hough's standard array of wide-angle shots and shock cuts, and the worst of the violence occurs discreetly off-screen) but not so well-plotted horror movie, from a Ray Russell novel. Two-thirds of the tale is allowed to roll by before a grisly series of sex crimes is begun to …
One of our finest Holocaust dramas. Robert Wieckiewicz is wonderful, but not posingly wonderful, as Poldek. The Catholic sewer-worker saved some Jews as the Nazis wiped out the ghetto in Lvov (then Poland, now Ukraine) in the year of hell, 1944. Capping a fine career, director Agnieszka Holland shows sewer …
The edifying and entertaining spectacle (not in the ways intended) of Hollywood high rollers wrestling with a Moral Question. Here's the question: What if a perfect stranger were to offer a happily married couple a million dollars for one night with the wife? Or to put it another way: Does …
Twelve or thirteen years earlier, in the Easy Rider aftermath, this sort of movie was coming out every time you looked up: the modest, humanistic, Middle American "location" movie. With the subsequent retreat to Hollywood studios (and special-effects labs), this sort of movie might seem a bit more special. Even …
A conscious and conscientious throwback to the invaders-from-space fables of the Eisenhower era: simply and straightforwardly War of the Worlds with updated hardware. But it won't do to be too blasé over the derivativeness. Film, as we've all been instructed but haven't all yet learned, is a visual medium, and …
Just imagine: 264 minutes of Independence Day-style Americans vs. Aliens action. Now stop imagining, because IT'S REAL.
Independent from original thinking. Director Roland Emmerich and his band of four co-screenwriters waited 20 years to crap out a sequel, and this is the best they can come up with? Even the updated CG effects effects aren’t an improvement. If Independence Day was, as my predecessor Duncan Shepherd observed, …
Independent from original thinking. Director Roland Emmerich and his band of four co-screenwriters waited 20 years to crap out a sequel, and this is the best they can come up with? Even the updated CG effects effects aren’t an improvement. If Independence Day was, as my predecessor Duncan Shepherd observed, …
HOW ON EARF ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DEFEAT THE ALIENS WITHOUT WILL SMITH? We better think of something, Jeff Goldblum, because they are coming back, and they are angry. Directed by Roland Emmerich.