A Vietnam atrocity film about the kidnap, gang-rape, and murder of a pitifully coughing village girl by four American foot soldiers, with one abstainer. David Rabe's screenplay is compactly constructed in its setting-up phase, so that everything we need to know about relations between the Americans and natives, as well …
As to the plot, the best you can say is that, well, you can see, sort of, what it is getting at. Really a cleverly conceived policier, it follows the tracks of Inspector Lechat (French for "the cat") as he hacks through the thicket of subsidiary crimes that complicate and …
Sympathy for the terrorist. Not, heaven forbid, the Islamic terrorist, but the South African terrorist circa 1980, the hard-working family man who, falsely accused of terrorism, turns to terrorism for real. Parallels to other sorts of terrorists can be drawn all the same, and that would be the only avenue …
Romantic seriocomedy to do with a scheduled wedding turned funeral and the stranded bride's posthumous discovery that her intended groom had a secret big bank account and a secret small child. (They had seemed such a perfect couple: she's called Gray, he was called Grady.) If writer and director Susannah …
Lightweight Spielberg (as compared, say, with the immediately preceding Minority Report, never mind Schindler's List or Amistad), an admiring, even envying portrait of a real-life teenage imposter and check forger in the late 1960s, Frank Abagnale, Jr. His excuse: his father's financial woes, his move to a new school, his …
Miss this movie. Teen rock climber, go-kart mechanic, and photographer turn their talents to bank robbery -- flattery will get them everywhere -- in a good cause, of course: a $250,000 surgery in Denmark. (Origin of the movie of which this is a remake.) One could wish the focus were …
An adolescent rube, transplanted with her parents to teeming Rome, faces an array of life-changing choices: communism, materialism, classical music, boys. The filmmaking style is more hectic than it needed to be to convey the confusion. Roberto Benigni and Michele Placido pop up in as-themselves cameos, and Sergio Castellitto is …
An is-it-or-isn’t-it documentary on the perils and pitfalls of Facebook friendships, or anyhow one particular one between a New York photographer (Nev Schulman) and a supposed eight-year-old Michigan girl who makes paintings of his photographs. That doesn’t sound like much of a subject for a documentary, and you’re asked to …
A no-holds-barred Upton Sinclair-ish expose of social injustices in the Netherlands of the 1880s, and none too soon. The titular character, a strong-boned but sensitive farm girl uprooted to urban Amsterdam, encounters her first rude shock midway through the credits when she discovers her older sister in the ship's hold, …
The untested director Bo Welch, trained as a production designer, tries out the tested formula of How the Grinch Stole Christmas: a sententious Dr. Seuss book, a sampling of voice-over recitations from the actual text ("Then something went bump. How that bump made them jump!"), and a major comedy star …
First (and most profitable) in the line of horror films produced by Val Lewton for RKO in the early Forties, as competition with Universal Studios, at that time dominating the horror field. This one set the pattern for those to follow: no more than seventy-five minutes in length (ideal for …
Beastly spy spoof (intermixing live animals, puppets, and computer animation) focussed on a feline world-domination conspiracy and the vigilant watchdogs who oppose it. An overblown lead balloon, heavy on Bondian gadgetry and cartoon violence. With Jeff Goldblum, Elizabeth Perkins, Alexander Pollock, and the voices of Tobey Maguire, Alec Baldwin, Susan …
A let's-put-on-a-show musical, set in Golden Age Hollywood and among a cartoon cast of primarily animals. Tolerably lively and clever, especially in view of the energy-conserving animation, but the nostalgia element (throwaway caricatures of Laurel and Hardy, Bette Davis, Mae West, etc., as in an old Looney Tune) will overshoot …