Improbably heterogeneous group of high-school students at an improbable all-day (Saturday) detention hall, improbably unsupervised. A detention hall, without all the improbabilities, would not seem to have much chance at drama. But with all the improbabilities it does not have much chance at Albee-esque group therapy, either. And in point …
Odyssey of a transvestite, self-christened Saint Kitten, from postwar Irish Catholic orphanhood to Swinging London in the Sixties and on through the Disco Daze into the Thatcher era. Cillian Murphy, speaking at the breathy top of his range, is so obnoxiously overconfident, dauntless, irrepressible, etc., as to not only renounce …
The familiar Alistair MacLean strategy (lie, cheat, and conceal as long as possible, and finally deliver the revelations in staggering flurries) is put to work in a Wild West setting. The sense of exasperated mystification --- what the hell's happening here? -- is nicely set up in the briskly edited …
The only, and ample, reason to see this is the dancing. And even that, as directed by Joel Silberg, is often badly framed and parcelled out in mere snatches rather than fully formed sequences. One such sequence, in which a dancer identified as Michael "Boogaloo Shrimp" Chambers performs a pas-de-deux …
Adolfo "Shabba-doo" Quinones and Michael "Boogaloo Shrimp" Chambers, promoted to the status of break dancers emeriti, are content for the most part to rest on their laurels. Or as one of them expresses it at one point: "Look, we're not gonna waste any of our moves." They do dole out …
Filmmaker Anthony Minghella rounds up a cast from past Anthony Minghella films, Jude Law from Cold Mountain and The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ray Winstone from Cold Mountain only, Juliette Binoche from The English Patient, Juliet Stevenson from Truly Madly Deeply, plus new recruits Robin Wright Penn and, in an entertaining …
A nice subject, the tensions between the natives and the university students in the industrial town of Bloomington, Indiana. The acute class-consciousness of the treatment, however, seems somewhat Europeanized or Medievalized, owing presumably to the origins of the British director, Peter Yates, and the Yugoslav scriptwriter, Steve Tesich. Those two …
Major disappointment. Past fans of director Bill Forsyth (Local Hero, Comfort and Joy, Housekeeping), and not of writer and usually director John Sayles, will have the option of attempting to lay the blame on the latter. (Past fans of both of them seem to have no other option than to …
One hundred and fifty-nine minutes are a very long sit when it takes only one or two to turn against a movie. The floating, bobbing, yawing camera, intermittently going woozily out of focus, is as immediately irritating as the one in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives. And the mud-in-your-eye monochrome …
The Bad News Bears sequel isn't so much a follow-up as it is an Instant Replay -- the same ground is gone over in order to get the same laughs, and these kids come off as disturbingly slow learners. The grim prospect at the fadeout is yet a third installment, …
An appeal to ethnic pride and to very little else -- especially to anything much in the aesthetic realm. The fact-based story of Pedro J. Gonzalez, Mexican-born balladeer on L.A. radio in the Thirties, who began to use his platform to flex some political muscle and was promptly framed for …
To provide a big finish, the villain steps in the path of an airplane propeller and bursts apart like a firecracker. This startler, which must certainly look foolish in slow motion, arouses a general desire for Instant Replay and sends the audience home buzzing. But it doesn't redeem a prison …
Battle-of-the-sexes romantic comedy accurately hits numerous notes of stridency, nastiness, pain, and so on, and next to none of laughter. More of an unromantic uncomedy. (The screenwriters, Jeremy Garelick and Jay Lavender, and the director, Peyton Reed, are all male, so no equal representation.) Vince Vaughn, Mr. Glib, comes across …
What Jim McBride has done with the Jean-Luc Godard original, whether by conscious choice or by native temperament, is to translate it back into the film noir idiom from which Godard first snatched it. It is a pretty straight Americanization, in other words, of what was a Frenchification of something …
Jean-Luc Godard's jazzy, highbrow homage to Monogram gangster movies, which of course it only remotely resembles; in fact it is nearer to being the Citizen Kane of the Sixties, if you measure it by reputation and influence and don't let its improvisational style obscure the comparison. It features Jean-Paul Belmondo …