An American businessman abroad (Christopher Lambert, French accent and all) commits the faux pas, punishable by death, of glimpsing the unmasked face of Kinjo the Ninja, head of the Makato clan, and he finds himself in the crossfire (or under the crossed swords, rather) of a centuries-old feud. Allowing this …
Cross-cultural interracial lesbian teen romantic comedy. One of the girls is a rock-and-rolling, pot-smoking, math-failing, blue-collar tomboy, the other an opera-listening, poetry-reading, college-bound, spoiled little rich girl. On the one hand, we're supposed to notice that these two girls in love are just like two anybodies in love. On the …
Simple, schmaltzy, moralizing kiddie film, from a novel by Lynne Reid Banks, about a boy who, through the agency of a magic cupboard and/or magic key, has the power to animate miniature plastic figures of an Iroquois Indian, a Texas cowboy, a WWI medic, among (very briefly) others. But a …
Unglamorous romance and espionage in mid-Fifties Berlin, with a smoothly negotiated turn to black comedy near the finish. Classy, well-made, but undermined by dubious casting choices: Anthony Hopkins, a Welshman, playing the Yank, sporting a loud, aggressive, unconvincing accent (topped off by a jumbo cigar); and the American Campbell Scott …
Self-flattery masked as self-criticism. Readers of the horror novels of Sutter Cane ("You can forget about Stephen King. Cane outsells them all") are not, let us say, unaffected by them. And readers of his latest, not coincidentally called In the Mouth of Madness (soon to be a major motion picture), …
Part-Prince and the Pauper, part-Parent Trap. Look-alike (but act-different) little girls break up one match and make another. Nothing to it. With Kirstie Alley, Steve Guttenberg, Mary-Kate Olsen, and Ashley Olsen; directed by Andy Tennant.
Screenwriter Joe (Showgirls) Eszterhas follows his standard procedure of hiding a rudimentary, amateurish, nonsensical narrative behind a diversionary smokescreen of salaciousness: a flayed corpse, a collection of sex-partner pubic hair, an envelope of blackmail photos of the Governor of California in flagrante delicto, a beachfront love nest equipped with hidden …
A movie for those who just want to be transported to another time and place, never mind what there is to do upon arrival. Lacking a renowned novel as a guidebook, the team of James Ivory (director), Ismail Merchant (producer), and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (writer) jump off from a base …
Anything-for-a-laugh homosexual romantic comedy, under the cloud of AIDS. Among the many-things-for-laughs: asides and soliloquies to the camera ("Why is the idea of a simple dinner now like an evening of Russian roulette?"); recurrent appearances by a Mother Teresa look-alike (on the spot after a gay-bashing incident, etc.); a fantasy …
So this is "cyberpunk," duly authenticated with a script by the Bard of the genre, William Gibson. To the layman, it may just look like your basic race-against-the-clock and run-from-the-mob ("Shit, it's the yakuza!"), augmented, not to say enhanced (to fall into the prevailing computerese), more truthfully overloaded, with arbitrary …
Early American historical piece that shares the attributes — modesty, stolidness, benevolence — of its reluctant hero, a simple Carolina farmer and widower ("I am not one for big adventures") who conducts a fugitive slave girl on a clippity-clop, low-speed flight to freedom. Also like the hero (Jason Patric), it …
A screen-filling spread of comic-book covers clue us in at the outset -- those of us, anyhow, who were unacquainted with the series of British "graphic novels" from Fleetway Publications -- as to the provenance of the titular superhero, a test-tube lawman in the anarchic Third Millennium, with as rigid …
Another excuse for Robin Williams to behave as an overgrown child: he's been trapped inside a magical game board since boyhood, until his release twenty-six years later. (A cumbersome premise that delays his arrival on screen by half an hour.) But the movie, however designed as a vehicle for Williams, …
A case of miscasting. Pauly Shore on a jury, whereas he ought to be on trial. Initial charges: indecent exposure and fraud, for appearing in a padded G-string as an auditioning stripper. (Fraud, for that matter, for appearing as a movie star.) Subsequent to that, innumerable counts of shooting off …
Copycat thriller: part Silence of the Lambs (Ed Harris in the Anthony Hopkins role), part In the Heat of the Night (Northern cosmopolite nosing into a cracker backwater, with the racial roles reversed), part Cape Fear (lawyer's wife and daughter imperilled by a past client). It's all done by rote, …