On-the-run documentary about American paparazzi, mainly one Victor Malafronte, a conscienceless mercenary if there ever was. (Invasion of privacy? "I don't ever think about questions like that.") Sketchy and superficial, the movie itself stands not on the outside, but right in the thick, of the celebrity hunt: the motion-picture camera …
A paranoid scientist takes his pregnant wife into a gymnasium-sized fallout shelter during the Cuban Missile Crisis and, under the impression the bombs have begun to drop, waits thirty-five years for the radiation to blow over. Boy, is the joke ever on them: there never was a bomb, only an …
Leading off with fiery credits in the color of cheddar cheese and a whip-cracking parody of Frankie Laine's Rawhide theme song, Mel Brooks bursts onto the Western plains; but the terrain gives way, unpredictably, and opens up to allow any whim: a street brawl that spills across the Warner Brothers …
Leading off with fiery credits in the color of cheddar cheese and a whip-cracking parody of Frankie Laine's Rawhide theme song, Mel Brooks bursts onto the Western plains; but the terrain gives way, unpredictably, and opens up to allow any whim: a street brawl that spills across the Warner Brothers …
The forces of Good versus the forces of Evil in modern Manhattan, more specifically the forces of radiant serene ethereal CG imagery versus those of dark dirty squirmy CG imagery. Kim Basinger, a pair of worried eyes in a face of geisha-like immobility, inherits the newborn of her drug-addicted sister: …
Sufficient idea for a Harold Lloyd two-reeler: a blind date, on an important business occasion, with a woman who mustn't be allowed to drink. It sets up all right, and the joke-making is thoroughly, dispassionately professional. But the idea is depleted by the time the woman begins to sober up …
As hard to accept as a blind swordsman may have been in feudal Japan (the Zatoichi series), it is many times harder among the guns and cars and machinery of modern-day America. The flashbacks to Vietnam and the relationship with an orphaned towhead don't make it go down any easier. …
Serious-minded science fiction, allegorical as you like, about an epidemic of “the white sickness,” a new form of sightlessness that plunges the sufferer into blinding light instead of traditional darkness. We experience this from the point of view, so to speak, of several dozen people left to their own devices …
Soft warm cozy sports story from the maker of The Rookie, John Lee Hancock, about a headstrong well-to-do white Memphis housewife who takes under her wing and under her roof a homeless black gentle giant, an irresistible force meeting an immovable object. Sandra Bullock stays obstinately on the surface of …
Grind-it-out romantic thriller centered around a blind violinist who, no sooner than she receives a corneal transplant, becomes an eyewitness to a murder, albeit a blurry eyewitness, and hence a potential victim. In that nutshell, it sounds about right for Ingrid Bergman or Ida Lupino, if Ingrid or Ida swore …
With tentacles, and an accusatory finger pointed at the U.S. government. The remake, thirty years after the nugatory original, has grislier ways for the blob to kill people, but at the same time obscurer physical laws for it to obey. Where are those tentacles whenever the teenage hero and heroine …
Dietrich, in her fifth film for von Sternberg, strips off a gorilla suit (to reveal a platinum Afro, among other things) and sings "Hot Voodoo." That aspect of her character is more swallowable than the aspect of Self-Sacrificing Wife and Single Mom. The hallucinatory vision of America's seamy side is …
Woman who runs with the werewolves. In specific, a young American in Bucharest, where the werewolf, or loup garoux as it is known to French-speaking Romanians, is better understood, properly revered. Any true horror fan should be open to a bit of werewolf revisionism, but this bit of it is …
Hip, flip, cool, modern film noir keeps pulling up lame. He: "Could you help me please?" She: "Actually I was trying to kill myself." (Ta-tum.) He: "Could you put it off?" (Ta-tum-tum.) Or this one: "I've had my share of problems with men, and the last one made the Marquis …
Bob Rafelson's next-generation film noir re-establishes, to a noteworthy degree, the connection of the genre to reality and realism. It is not an hommage. It is not an imitation. It is not a hand-me-down. It is a legitimate continuation in a contemporary setting. And if it has lost something in …