He who summons the magic, commands the magic. Unless he's a film director, and slave to special effects, whose name is removed from the credits and replaced by the fictitious "Alan Smithee." With Bruce Ramsay, Valentina Vargas, and (once again as Clive Barker's Pinhead) Doug Bradley.
Kids-on-top pipe dream that pictures the grownups locked in the cellar till they learn their lesson. TV-grade comedy by a TV-graduate director, Harry Winer. With Kyle Howard, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Pollak, Jennifer Tilly, Wallace Shawn.
Disney animated literary adaptation, with songs. And, despite the track record of Victor Hugo as a begetter of hit musicals (Les Miz), not a good idea. Not even if you have the "vision," the nerve, the self-servingness, to see clear to how the twice-told tale of the bell-tower hermit Quasimodo …
A concert film that's also a cogent piece of interview journalism, telling a sad story, with good humor and philosophical detachment, about how the fun and innocence of the Seattle music "scene," pre-1992, got spoiled by the infusion of money and publicity. (Many of the interviewees -- from such groups …
A conscious and conscientious throwback to the invaders-from-space fables of the Eisenhower era: simply and straightforwardly War of the Worlds with updated hardware. But it won't do to be too blasé over the derivativeness. Film, as we've all been instructed but haven't all yet learned, is a visual medium, and …
The first love of physicist Richard Feynman (not counting science), a childhood sweetheart doomed to an early tubercular death while her new husband helped build the A-bomb. There is plenty of sweetness; plenty, thanks to the main character, of eccentricity (his bloodhound experiment to detect the scent of his beloved …
A former merchant seaman, now adrift on land, gets himself in a tight squeeze between his sex-starved landlady and her pubescent daughter. Supercilious snigger over the wormy underside of Fifties-era England: "You're a hyp -- a hyp -- what's that word? You're a bloody hippo!" With Julie Walters, Rupert Graves, …
A bad idea about a bad idea. The second idea, purely hypothetical, is to do a French remake of Louis Feuillade's silent serial, Les Vampires, with Hong Kong action star Maggie Cheung as the criminal ringleader, Irma Vep. The first idea is to do a pseudodocumentary film about the making …
This could be about no one but Valerie Solanas, the militant lesbian, founder of the one-member Society for Cutting Up Men (S.C.U.M.) and author of its "manifesto," would-be playwright, part-time panhandler and streetwalker, full-time chainsmoker, who in 1968 pumped a couple of slugs at point-blank range into the then King …
Second remake, at the least, of the H.G. Wells fable of the beast in man and vice versa, originally made in the early Thirties under the name of Island of Lost Souls. Marlon Brando, as the mad doctor-slash-dictator, makes a splashy entrance half an hour into the action, in Tiny …
Before completely losing his mind, vision, and looks, an AIDS sufferer throws a two-day goodbye bash to be capped by his suicide. Inadequate writing and directing (Randal Kleiser, both jobs) transform a painful and complex subject into a simple embarrassment. With Eric Roberts, Gregory Harrison, Margaret Cho, Bronson Pinchot, Lee …
Mixed-media adaptation (live action, cartoon, stop-motion animation) of the Roald Dahl children's book, from the Disney studio, and more specifically from Henry Selick of Tim Burton's The Nightmare before Christmas. The self-consciously "dreamlike" narrative concerns an unloved orphan who, accompanied by oversized English-speaking insects, sails off for the Big Apple …