Hi-yo, Silver, stay away! Johnny Depp stars as Tonto, the vengeful Native clown without a tribe, in a film that is inexplicably named after his sidekick (Armie Hammer). Well, perhaps not inexplicably: the white man often gets top billing in these buddy pics. Still, it's Tonto who gets the backstory, …
Warhol and his crew appear perfectly pleased to be identified as loathsome vermin from the counter-culture, as they invade the Western genre and a stock Hollywood replica of a frontier town, with clear intent to desecrate. They also appear far too low on inspiration and energy to be able to …
The true story of Jackson Harlow as he returns home from war, as he goes from young dreamer to haunted war veteran.
Ostensible, possible murder mystery. Two souvenir hunters on a long-deserted rifle range in a remote corner of a nonessential military base discover, among the cacti and yucca, a single set of human remains. Initial indications -- the Mason's ring that got the attention of the metal detector, a rusted tin …
The Passion of the SEAL. Peter Berg, having humiliated the American military by involving it in the ludicrous nonsense of Battleship, attempts to make up for it by telling the (based-on-a-true) story of a four-man mission gone very bad in Afghanistan. The desired response to the action onscreen seems to …
His Texas Ranger commanding officer admonishes Chuck Norris for not having enough "style" -- an accurate assessment, if not exactly in the way intended, of the shortcomings of Norris's cinematic oeuvre. Hence, he has good reason to take, here, a few pages from the Clint Eastwood stylebook (starting with the …
Terence Davies's followup to his autobiographical Distant Voices, Still Lives. Although every bit as severely stylized, it is not so much the mere repetition of the earlier film as the absolute perfection of it. The monstrous father is now well out of the picture, and there's no sizable antagonist to …
A good version of a great play, about the destructiveness of the family. Dean Stockwell is a little lightweight as O'Neill's autobiographical stand-in, and Katharine Hepburn is a little too Katharine Hepburn. But Ralph Richardson is all you could want of the wanting patriarch, and Jason Robards, Jr., is pretty …
A lone wolf (Jue Huang) returns home after a twenty year absence armed with a modicum of fatalistic narration with which to underscore his search for a love lost. Director Bi Gan credits Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity as his inspiration for this Chinese puzzler. A protagonist carting around a photo …
Not one unintentional gibber, eye-roll, or check of the watch during the 139 minute running time makes it impossible to slam what by all rights should have been a slam-dunk awful Nicholas Sparks rodeo romance. Director George Tillman knows where to place the camera to make the schoolgirls swoon, but …
Dumbing-down of Robert Aldrich's 1974 prison-cum-football film, the Sadistic Guards versus the Avenging Convicts, not one of Aldrich's smarter ideas to begin with. (It's now the ESPN era, and the game is broadcast on national television.) Burt Reynolds, the star of the original, is given a token role and his …
Ambitious young actress Holly Sloan agrees to help her boyfriend Richard Metzger scam Hollywood legend Mariah McKay, but the two women strike up an unlikely friendship instead. Soon Holly must decide where her true loyalties lie.
Ambitious young actress Holly Sloan agrees to help her boyfriend Richard Metzger scam Hollywood legend Mariah McKay, but the two women strike up an unlikely friendship instead. Soon Holly must decide where her true loyalties lie.
Robert Altman's provoking revision of a late, intricate Raymond Chandler detective novel is devoted less to creating a mystery than a muddle. The impenetrable darkness, the stealthy zooms and circuitous tracks of Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography, and the ceaseless buzzing or humming of the actors, conspire together to cover up the …
"Eric blown to smithereens, Colin carved up, a bomb in my casino -- and you say 'nothing unusual'!" An empire-building British gangster, who envisions himself as the spearhead of London's emergence as the new capitalist capitol of Europe, unwittingly makes an enemy of the Irish Republican Army and is tremendously …