Soft-headed heroics from Joe Blow, a student machinist who outruns, outfights, outshoots, outsmarts the combined forces of the Chicago Police Department, the FBI, the CIA, et al., most of whom don't understand that he has been framed for terrorism. The apparent terrorist act -- an explosion that levels eight city …
Foolhardy American assault on the Japanese martial-arts tradition. The story concerns the thirty-seven-year feud between rival siblings for possession of two matched swords that have been in the family for generations. One of the brothers is without honor, head of a vast corporation that dwarfs (we are told) General Motors, …
Deficient adaptation of the John Grisham novel about an eager young urban lawyer who takes over the death-row appeal of his Klansman granddad, convicted of bombing the offices of a Jewish attorney and killing his two sons. (The bomb, we are told, was "timed to kill," just to remind us …
The title identifies the room number of the Hotel Martinez in Cannes, in which Wim Wenders entertained a gaggle of his fellow filmmakers one at a time, sat them down in front of a camera and with their backs to a soundless television (the enemy), and confronted them with the …
Franco Zeffirelli's remake and update of King Vidor's 1931 tearjerker of the same name, with Jon Voight and Ricky Schroder taking the places of Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper, and mopping up, so to speak, on their elders. The characterization of the little boy is rather like a repressive, authoritarian …
Goodly awful. A reincarnation fantasy about a recycled soul, processed too quickly and not properly inoculated, who begins to remember his past life once he runs into his former wife -- not before he has already met, by a stupefying coincidence, her best friend and her now nubile daughter (who …
Clint Eastwood was due for a dud, and this stacks up as his flattest film, his stumpiest film, since Blood Work, bookending his hot streak of Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, and the Second World War diptych, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Time once again to …
Middle-aged college professor cheats on wife with nubile young co-ed, and wife follows suit with virile young handyman, thus setting the stage for a ménage-à-quatre in a cozy Vermont cabin. Enter the married couple's daughter; enter the co-ed's father; enter the daughter's fiancé -- all of whom, showing as much …
Samuel L. Jackson and Ben Affleck get into a fender-bender on the FDR on their separate ways to the courthouse, the one to divorce court, the other to probate court. The first, an operatically repentant alcoholic, unable to drive away from the scene of the accident, loses custody of his …
Half mystery, half documentary, adding up to half a movie. We are free, of course, to see in the title an allusion to that famous fictional representative of the Chinese people, Charlie Chan, and to interpret the title as a somewhat less provocative version of "God Is Dead." We are, …
Based on a true incident, the story concerns a light-skinned half-caste whose sunny countenance is gradually clouded over by contact with white society in turn-of-the-century Australia. "Do you have any religion other than nigger?" -- this asked by a rustic during a brief recess from chopping off the heads of …
Feminist revenge fantasy about a mutually liberating alliance between a neglected French wife and a battered Algerian streetwalker. The sharp observations of modern life, and the blunt and bludgeoning ones alike, are coated in a debilitating DV image. With Catherine Frot, Rachida Brakni, Vincent Lindon; written and directed by Coline …
Not just another "biopic," but one that requires colossal gall for any actor or director to undertake. And Robert Downey, Jr., and Richard Attenborough, respectively, may reasonably be described as any old actor and director -- supremely uncharismatic in the first case, surpassingly pedestrian in the second. To their credit, …
Neil Simon re-creates more or less the circumstances of his real-life marriage to Marsha Mason, he a recent widower and she a recent divorcee. The badinage between these two, who, as one of them observes, "talk in the same rhythm," is on a more lifelike level than usual in a …