David Spade's "white-trash idiot" looks all right in the externals: the metal-band T-shirts, the haircut "like Jane Fonda in Klute." But his creamy-nougat center seems dictated by Adam Sandler's Secrets of Success (Sandler, indeed, is one of the executive producers); and the hot blonde in blue-jean cutoffs (Brittany Daniel: she …
Nothing much. A white-collar cog becomes a sudden celebrity when he challenges the company bully to a rematch. Occasion for sitcom moralizing ca. 1959. With Tim Allen, Julie Bowen, Hayden Panettiere, Kelly Lynch, Patrick Warburton, and Jim Belushi directed by John Pasquin.
Cheerfully corrupt, toothless satire on teenage consumerism and conformism, as dictated by subliminal messages in pop music. The movie is as much an accomplice as a commentator, with special prominence granted to Target, Revlon, Bounce, MTV, among innumerable others. The titular rock trio, wearing leopard ears and sounding a lot …
A pair of female cavers risk their lives for the thrill of discovery in this IMAX documentary.
A sort of retro-tech thriller, a nice change from high-tech thrillers, in which two brothers, driving cross-country in a vintage '71 Chrysler Newport equipped with a CB radio, play a practical joke on a trucker self-dubbed "Rusty Nail," sending him for a romantic rendezvous to the motel room of a …
The big splash of writer-director Joel Hopkins is actually more of a small plop: a would-be sprightly road movie cum buddy movie about a reluctant Nigerian fiancé and a rejected French suitor who travel together to the former's appointed wedding in Niagara Falls, the Capital of Love as well as …
Elementary and elemental spectacle of ravening dinosaurs and edible humans. Beyond that, it pretty much eludes criticism or comment. A small objection might be raised at the way dinosaurs, for live-action purposes (which is to say live-action humans, but computer-generated dinosaurs), have become the monopoly of the Jurassic Park franchise. …
Who woulda thunk that The Covenant would get its own doppelganger a la Deep Impact and Armageddon? But here we are: an undercover CIA operative gets stuck in hostile territory in Afghanistan after his mission is exposed. Accompanied by his translator, he must fight enemy combatants as he tries to …
Timely exposé of the plight of women under the Taliban. The narrative peg -- an exiled Afghan journalist sneaking back into the country to reach her sister before the latter's pre-announced suicide in concert with the final eclipse of the 20th Century -- may be overly contrived and corny, and …
Time-travel romance (or in the words of the whiz-kid Cupid who makes it happen, "a 4-D pretzel of kismetic inevitability") uniting a Type-A Manhattan career woman and a 19th-century British duke, who tumbles through a time-portal into the present day. The matching of Meg Ryan -- tossing around and peering …
Graceless comedy about the gathering of the Slocumb family to put Daddy Bud in the ground. The funeral parlor is named Depew's, and the lisping pastor breaks wind in the middle of his oration -- just for instance. With LL Cool J, Vivica A. Fox, Jada Pinkett Smith, Anthony Anderson, …
Hong Kong goes to Paris. The buildup to the first big explosion of action is beautifully sustained, and Jet Li has an impeccable businesslike demeanor. But then all hell breaks loose, and that's where the movie goes straight to. With Bridget Fonda and Tcheky Karyo; directed by Chris Nahon.
The Dark Ages lightened up: a rock-and-roll songtrack (Queen, Bowie, BTO, others), a spontaneous eruption of disco dancing at court, a Nike insignia on a suit of armor, a Mademoiselle cover girl for a fair maiden, and a centuries-ahead-of-his-time democratic hero, a lowborn squire who skyrockets to superstardom in the …
Eric Rohmer, practically the poster boy for Verbal Cinema, tries his hand at a special-effects movie. That's not to say that it's any less talky, stilted, static, and stagy than Rohmer's norm: a fact-based tale of the French Revolution, taken from the memoirs of one Grace Elliott, an English aristocrat …