Serviceable action-adventure despite frequent interruptions for sermonettes on human rights and capitalist wrongs. The ripped-from-the-headlines story (yesterday's headlines: civil war in Sierra Leone, 1999) features the stock figures of a self-interested soldier of fortune, in league with slaughterous rebels and unscrupulous jewellers, an engagé foreign correspondent, and a hapless native …
Furiously winking Jazz Age comedy, in the Damon Runyon idiom. That means the characters will have names like Regret, Feet, The Brain, Lovey Lou, Hortense Hathaway, and Handsome Jack. (Ouch! Ow! Oof!) The job of keeping up the pace and the tone, shirked by the writing and editing, falls chiefly …
As incompetent a movie as you are ever apt to come across in the upper-crust economic bracket. It appears actually to be missing several pieces, including most of its marbles. The fun-ness that sometimes accompanies badness is felt on very few occasions, the only sustained one being Ben Gazzara's guided …
Post-Rollerball, post-MAD MAX, post-apocalypse science fiction about a sport of the future called The Game, played by athletes called juggers, with a dog's skull for a "ball." Very minimal, except in the amounts of makeup. (These juggers are more beat-up than any professional hockey player.) With Rutger Hauer and the …
This, the first feature of Minnesota-based independent filmmaker Joel Coen (who co-wrote the script with his producer, and brother, Ethan), has something of the old B-movie spirit at its most lofty: that groaning desire to find out how much can be achieved on how little, how near to Francis Ford …
Live-action replay of a Japanese anime dated 2000, a license for a swordswoman in a sailor dress, or swordsgirl more accurately, to slice-and-dice a legion of humanoid demons en route to “the oldest, vilest demon of them all,” who killed the heroine’s father. Moderately stylish and extravagantly mindless, the movie …
In a way, this is a filmed record of Antonio Gades's flamenco ballet (i.e., ballet with shoes) based on the Garcia Lorca play of the same name. Only it is a stripped-down version of that ballet (no scenery, no lighting effects, nothing but a barren studio with a mirrored wall …
The original novel by Michael Connelly seemed to have been written with a movie in mind: one of those overblown, overheated thrillers whose villain is a taunting, string-pulling, game-playing archfiend of boogeyman dimensions. Clint Eastwood (cited, for unspecified services, in the book's acknowledgments) has made a better movie of it …
Paul Greengrass's masochistic re-enactment of the costly collision — thirteen dead, fourteen wounded — between outlawed Catholic protest marchers and itchy-fingered English peacekeepers in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, 1972. The English are not demonized, but you can tell whose side the filmmaker is on, long before the obligatory airing of the …
The biography of George Jung (don't beat yourself up if you've never heard of him) is just another boring drug story: the easy, breezy path of a working-class Massachusetts white boy, not to mention montage-happy and goldie-oldies-strewn path, to $60 million as a cocaine entrepreneur, and then his swift and …
Leaden comedy, with intermittent heavy drama, about a cut-throat hairdressing competition in an English blue-collar town. An insufficiently good cause for Natasha Richardson and Rachel Griffiths to have had their skulls shorn. With Alan Rickman, Josh Hartnett, Bill Nighy, Rachael Leigh Cook; directed by Paddy Breathnach.
Stephen Hopkins's ostensible salute to the Boston P.D. Bomb Squad frankly (and a tad hypocritically) hopes to hold its audience in their seats only with the promise of a forthcoming explosion. And another and another and another. Five major ones in all, padded a little by flashback replays. The bomber …
Antonioni tackles Swinging London, and the city is shaken up on the play. Not much swinging among the natives; a large amount of imported Antonioni sobriety (pantomime revelers acting out the truism that life is a game, a Yardbirds concert at which the audience appears to be in the grips …
Antonioni tackles Swinging London, and the city is shaken up on the play. Not much swinging among the natives; a large amount of imported Antonioni sobriety (pantomime revelers acting out the truism that life is a game, a Yardbirds concert at which the audience appears to be in the grips …