The slant is heavily toward love, but the lovers -- next-door neighbors since elementary school -- have no personalities other than as basketball players. If the movie itself were a ballplayer, the scouting report would read, "Slow afoot, with limited mobility and telegraphed moves." Christine Dunford has the right attitude …
Routine, if diligently executed, cops-and-mobsters stuff. In the name of "characterization," the Mafia chieftan is given a stutter, his muscleman is given a hearing aid, and his mistress is given a Tammy Wynette record and an assortment of Tammy Wynette wigs. Jill Ireland warms to this last role, putting on …
Woody Allen makes an unexpected retreat, taking along his eyeglasses and neuroses, to Russia of the Napoleonic era and to the social circles charted by Tolstoi, Turgenev, others. He presides over more props, more extras, more budget than ever before (the movie was shot, furthermore, in Paris and Budapest); but …
British literary light Giles De'Ath -- "Dr. Death" to the chipper delivery boy at his front door, "Erstwhile fogey, now cult" to the BBC program guide in its write-up of his guest appearance on a radio chat show -- takes an unaccustomed plunge into the cultural mainstream when he ventures …
Perhaps you've been asking yourself why they don't make more two-and-a-half-hour video documentaries about African-American rehabilitated crack addicts who recover their children from foster care after six years of separation and who then lose them again after their daughters give birth out of wedlock to HIV-positive babies. Or perhaps not. …
Generation X, Canadian chapter: a large cast of characters of various sexual orientations and disorientations. One of them is a serial sex killer. Which one? The mystery-suspense element is a total bust, but the hip-cool element ("Honey, I'm homo!") is a far cry from a gold mine. The first English-language …
Campus frolic from Down Under and the Bargain Basement (hence, perhaps, the jaundiced image). Youthy tribulations probed with youthy glibness. The focus on the Cinema Department -- the "Doris Day As Feminist Warrior" thesis, the donut-munching professor's introductory lecture on Hitchcock-As-Auteur -- yields less fun than might be expected. With …
Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal play two attractive people who enjoy having sex. But it turns out that while both are nice to look at, neither is particularly appealing. She’s sick and getting sicker, coping with the pain by diagnosing everyone else. He’s an aspiration-addled jerk who’s never said “I …
The writing and directing debut of lower-crust actress Valerie Breiman, a "relationship" comedy, and damn near the epitome of a "chick flick," all the way to the folky songs on the soundtrack ("Don't worry, it's all right./ We're all in the dark, lookin' for the light"). The subject is of …
The title for Garret Price’s documentary about gone-too-soon actor Anton Yelchin is carefully chosen. It’s how the immigrant's child closed his frequent and heartfelt letters to his fiercely devoted mother Irina, and the film plays a bit like her loving reply: a tribute to the son whose grave she still …
George Hamilton has his moments in the role of a Count Dracula who migrates to New York when the Romanian government commandeers his castle as a training facility for Nadia Comaneci and the rest of the Romanian Olympic team. But on balance, this vampire spoof, with its ignorant and arrogant …
Prior to his enlisting, a young carpenter’s (Kévin Azaïs) only brush with the military was showing up at recruitment center drives to load up on door prizes. Then one day, the complaisant lad decides to follow the daughter of a client – the survival-driven, sardine-smoothie guzzling doomsday prophet of his …
Private-eye pastiche written and directed by Alan Rudolph, and seemingly a companion to his Choose Me and Trouble in Mind. The story is farcically promising -- the dick is tailing the wrong man, and is being tailed himself -- but it's cloaked in so much mood and atmosphere and attitude …