Siegel, that is -- the vain gangster, the "visionary" gangster, the lovesick gangster, the henpecked gangster, the moonstruck, the loony, the buggy gangster. He makes a wide-ranging acting portfolio for the narrowly talented Warren Beatty, but he never really comes into focus as a character. And the movie on the …
A novelty act: an all-juvenile cast, dolled up with double-breasted suits and slicked-down hair, re-enacts the underworld passions played out on the Warner Brothers lot in the Thirties by Cagney, Robinson, McHugh, Blondell, et al. The kids break into periodic song-and-dance routines, and the guns are loaded with lethal whipped …
Mythologizing documentary, although not much of a recruiting film for the agnostic, on the scurrilous poet, novelist, postal worker, boozer, and cult hero, Henry Charles ("Hank") Bukowski, pieced together out of testimonials from friends and admirers (Taylor Hackford, Tom Waits, Sean Penn, Bono, et al.) and candid footage of the …
A baseball comedy about life in the lowly Carolina League. Some of the sidelong glances at ballpark ambience are perhaps (just about) enough to get on the good side of any fan of the sport. But scriptwriter and first-time director Ron Shelton doesn't do much to flesh out the various …
Gary Busey, who looks to be a credible enough roughneck, is asked instead to be another boringly invincible One Man Army. (He keeps a Mason jar of bullets he's dug out of his own flesh: thirty-nine by actual count.) The supporting cast has been assembled with a certain regard for …
Facetious hard-boiled romantic thriller about the percolating passion between an Angst-ridden celibate hitman, Anthony LaPaglia, and his fatalistic target, Mimi Rogers (amused, amusing). You can see the ending coming miles away, and you go slower and slower the closer you get. A couple of warmish woman-on-top sex bits. With Matt …
Hong Kong action hero Chow Yun-Fat is required to share honors and screen time with the crinkled brow and lopsided smirk of Seann William Scott (American Pie), as a New York pickpocket who learned his martial artistry by projecting and mimicking kung-fu movies in a Chinatown grindhouse. ("The most undisciplined …
Woody Allen's continued exploration of his beloved New York: the mythical past of Roaring Twenties speakeasies, the Broadway of Ziegfeld and O'Neill, the chorus girls, the Lost Generation café intellectuals, all that. New territory, for him. Once over lightly. For all its frothiness, though, it nonetheless gnaws on the Big …
Self-important exploitation film based on a 1993 case of murder among rudderless adolescents in suburban South Florida: a hundred decibel wake-up call to a slumbering America. (Rap music and gory video games, for post-Columbine relevance, help crank up the volume.) The noted still photographer Larry Clark, back on the turf …
Comedy without laughs. "Satire" might be the optimistically preferred word of the director, co-writer, and star, Warren Beatty, and he might want to add, for commercial as well as critical purposes, the immediate qualifier of "Capra-esque." (The presence of the name Frank Capra III in both the opening and the …
But was there ever really a Bunny Lake? Otto Preminger's urbane kidnap thriller rises to an over-the-moon climax, but the rest of the journey is enjoyable enough -- under the guidance of an unusually human and charming Laurence Olivier as a Scotland Yard inspector. Carol Lynley and Keir Dullea make …
A satire, one supposes, on the average American suburb, with the targets drawn so broad as to be all but unmissable -- and so broad, too, as to be all but unrecognizable. A double-twist ending cancels out the last-minute moralizing after first cancelling out the endless-minutes storyline. Tom Hanks, Bruce …
Documentarist Les Blank, who earlier recorded Werner Herzog in the act of eating his shoe (never mind why), here follows the German director's misadventures in the Peruvian jungle on the set of Fitzcarraldo. Perhaps most useful as a sort of subtext or appendix to the finished Herzog film, this is …
Comedy thriller, although really not much of either, about a part-time cat burglar and rest-of-the-time bookseller who falls under suspicion of murder. The character is tailored so snugly to the personality of Whoopi Goldberg that it stops being a character anymore -- or actually never starts. Bobcat Goldthwait is not …
Gimmicky thriller whose single gimmick, if you have not been tipped off beforehand, dawns on you with a mounting sensation of hopelessness and resignation. Ryan Reynolds, in a word, is to be the only human being to appear on screen for the duration, entombed underground in a wooden coffin in …