Boys' night out becomes boys' nightmare out, when they take a wrong turn en route to the boxing match and witness a gangland killing. An action film in the Walter Hill mold, a sort of combination of Trespass and The Warriors, but reduced even further: a Walter Hillock, if you …
Spielberg. Dinosaurs. What more need be said? You get what you expect. Or in blurb-ese: "It delivers the goods." But it nowhere exceeds or confounds expectations. The premise, from the Michael Crichton novel, is essentially that of Crichton's Westworld with dinosaurs in lieu of robots: amusement park gone haywire. And …
Spielberg. Dinosaurs. What more need be said? You get what you expect. Or in blurb-ese: "It delivers the goods." But it nowhere exceeds or confounds expectations. The premise, from the Michael Crichton novel, is essentially that of Crichton's Westworld with dinosaurs in lieu of robots: amusement park gone haywire. And …
Spielberg. Dinosaurs. What more need be said? You get what you expect. Or in blurb-ese: "It delivers the goods." But it nowhere exceeds or confounds expectations. The premise, from the Michael Crichton novel, is essentially that of Crichton's Westworld with dinosaurs in lieu of robots: amusement park gone haywire. And …
A serial-murder aficionado and would-be bestselling author, about to set out on a cross-country tour of historic murder sites in preparation for a book (with photos by his girlfriend, a specialist in chic black-and-white erotica), advertises on a campus bulletin board for a ride-share couple (his Lincoln convertible gets only …
At heart -- and you will not need to probe deep to find that body part -- this account of the hardships and humiliations of growing up poor in St. Louis during the Great Depression is conventional, unadventurous, conservatively "well-made," a period piece of fussy and impeccable production, with an …
The accumulation of corpses and clues -- sexually unmolested young women with the blood neatly drained from their bodies, sloppily lipsticked and eyeshadowed faces, and a different cryptic word scrawled in blood at each crime scene -- might whet the appetite of the undiscriminating mystery addict. But the stridency of …
Arnold Schwarzenegger being a good sport and making fun of himself. But as a manufacturer of fun the movie has the same limitations as, only on a larger scale than, the Schwarzenegger torso: too grotesquely pumped-up, bulging, strained, top-heavy to produce an effect of "lightness." And in making fun of …
Chez Nous, for you monolinguals, is a French expression meaning an Australian household made up of a French husband (the German-accented Bruno Ganz), his Aussie writing wife (Lisa Harrow), the latter's would-be writing sister (Kerry Fox), presently on the rebound from an affair abroad and pregnant ("You know the arguments …
Tony Gatlif's musical travelogue traces the present-day music of the Gypsies along their historical migratory route from India into Iberia. The music itself (no less than the surrounding scenery) is diverse and engaging, though the cinematic "purity" of the presentation is very sparing of information, even as to such basic …
A foreign film to alienate practically everyone. It concerns a French-Canadian lad of twelve who's convinced that his real father is not the sluglike drudge at the head of the household, obsessed with bowel movements and "regularity," but rather an anonymous Sicilian who had spilled his seed, or rather purposely …
Cute-kid comedy. Number-one cutie is Christina Vidal, a Brooklyn pickpocket who, after getting discovered by (i.e., picking the pocket of) a talent scout on a street corner, becomes the Sunburst Cookie girl. Michael J. Fox counts as a cutie too, a former child actor who hasn't quit acting cute just …
It commences in the summer of '42 and continues for a period of ten months, the length of stay of two early-teen brothers with their tyrannical grandmother in the wake of their mother's death and while their father is away on business. Uncle Louie, a shady underworld character, drops in …
The directorial debut of John Turturro, who also handles the title role, is a memorial to his father (1925-1988), a first-generation Italian immigrant, carpenter, and then independent contractor in Queens, N.Y., in the mid-1950s. Under the circumstances, it's a marvel of objectivity, or maybe not quite such a marvel of …
Akira Kurosawa's final effort is plainly not one of his better ones: simple, spare, slow, sentimental. And there is something slightly embarrassing about seeing so much adulation heaped from one old master onto another -- from one sensei onto another -- from Kurosawa, that is, onto his central character, a …