Contrived concentration-camp fable, from the novel by John Boyne, about the budding friendship, through barbed wire, between the eight-year-old Aryan son of the camp commandant (in his innocence, he thinks it’s a farm) and a same-aged, shaved-headed Jew. It roughly recalls Life Is Beautiful in its mixture, or collision, of …
It is difficult to locate the director of Smithereens and Desperately Seeking Susan in this multicharacter romantic comedy (original title: The Boynton Beach Bereavement Club) that targets an audience of seniors and is accordingly toothless and bland. Rather than "targets," perhaps we should say "patronizes." Susan Seidelman, the director in …
The true story (told before in a documentary, The Brandon Teena Story) of a young Nebraska woman in a "sexual identity crisis," and on the dodge from the law, who reversed her first and last names, attempted to pass as a man in a redneck corner of the state, and …
The Lone Ranger Nazi-hunter, modelled on Simon Wiesenthal, is made to seem a worryingly feeble hero, afflicted in his dotage by the world's growing indifference, his own infirmity, his leaky plumbing, and his overdue rent; but the sympathy evoked by the role is more than cancelled out by Laurence Olivier's …
In the event you have been a little late on the uptake, here are laid out (a,b,c,d, etc.) all the horrors and lunacies of the U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia, beginning with the sheepshearing in Marine bootcamp and extending to the body counts in the Vietnam rice paddies. Some …
A homosexual birthday gathering, organized a little like a formal congress, where each invited guest represents one of the many shades of gay -- a midnight cowboy in darling blond curls, a closet case in gray flannel, a transvestite, etc. Psychotherapeutic party games, with predictable echoes of Albee, peel away …
Low-grade video documentary, by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, on a Baltimore educational experiment to send twenty "at-risk" black students per year to an all-male boarding school in Kenya. It's an interesting project, whether as education or as documentary, but the students and filmmakers alike are left high and dry …
Buddy film, feminine gender. Three dissimilar single women -- Jane, the black lesbian cabaret entertainer; Robin, the uptight HIV-positive white-bread yuppie; Holly, the abused pregnant white-trash coquette -- share a van driving westward. (Road-weary cinematic technique: a montage of fast-food and gas-station signs, cut to the beat of the pop …
He has never spoken a word. He sits on his windowsill at all hours of the day, arms stretched out at his sides. He thinks he's an airplane. And as the title divulges straightaway, while the script plays it catty, he actually can fly. This situation is worked out in …
Peace entreaty for a gang-ridden L.A. ghetto, made by twenty-three-year-old writer-director John Singleton -- his first feature. Very simple and direct in style (to match the intentions), and almost unformed as a narrative. Larry Fishburne is imposing, though limited, as a Positive Role Model, and the movie feels more comfortable, …
Affectionate cheek-tweak of the Seventies sitcom and perennial re-run. The premise is a little far afield -- the conformist family of the TV show is now radically nonconformist: custodians of Seventies clothes, hairstyles, language, music, etc., in blissful defiance of their Nineties surroundings -- but the artificiality of the world …
Artificial respiration on 1930s slapstick, particularly the Marx Brothers, particularly A Night at the Opera. The patient -- the corpse -- surprisingly still has some life left in him ("You know The Great Volare?" "Ah, I knew him back when he was The Pretty Good Volare"). This is, above all …
What a way to go. Director John Flynn has left behind the adult action of The Outfit and Rolling Thunder, never mind the social "issues" of The Sergeant and Touched, and has taken up pandering to adolescents: gadgets and special effects and hard-rock musical tracks. He manages to bestow a …
Science fiction of the Imaginary Invention type: a piece of headgear, in this instance, able to record and transmit subjective experience, memory, emotion, and it's not clear what all. Indeed, the movie is quite carelessly thought out in terms of what the device can record and particularly from what point …
A misnomer. Bram Stoker's Dracula, as we all are aware, is a book, and the film called Bram Stoker's Dracula does not concern itself with a man called Bram Stoker and his relationship to a book called Dracula. This is Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula and no mistake. (Yes, it claims …