Namby-pamby apolitical comedy about America's First Daughter, who, on a diplomatic mission to Prague, pulls an Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday and gives the slip to the Secret Service on the back of the handiest motorcycle. Unbeknownst to her, the biker (Matthew Goode, like a young Rupert Everett) is an …
Charles Bronson as a half-breed (which accounts for both the stealthiness and the mustache) who lures a white man's posse into the wilderness. Out there, he makes every last man feel absolutely miserable. The audience feels likewise. Directed by Michael Winner.
Fearless exposé of the deplorable conditions in a state mental institution -- as of three decades earlier and no longer. It has the zeal of not so much a social reformer as an old I-told-you-so. The opening scene of the actual crackup (it's based on a true case) retains some …
Neil Simon's Bogart parody gets underway with a verbose prologue which reads more like Woody Allen and which brings a smile to one's lips only by misspelling the Philippines. Simon's unnatural marriage of medium-good, cutie-pie Bogart (The Maltese Falcon) and medium-bad, bleeding-heart Bogart (Casablanca) is necessitated not because Simon has …
Unrecognizable update of the 1950 film (and 1949 book) of the same name, set originally around the turn of the century, now a sort of Fox-TV sitcom quadrupled. The messiness of the family life (in a family of fourteen) is neither adequate camouflage nor alibi for the messiness of the …
A family feud, over Labor Day at Lake Winnetka, between the twelve-kid Bakers and the eight-kid Murtaughs, or anyway between their hotly competitive dads (Steve Martin, Eugene Levy). Humor and sentiment every bit as cheap as Cheaper One. The only notable change is in the suddenly sculpted Hilary Duff, who …
Surely the title ought to have been seen to be applicable only during production, and immediately upon release should have been altered to Cheech and Chong's New Movie, thus creating the world's first evolutionary movie title, turning into Cheech and Chong's Latest Movie on the second-run circuit, then into their …
Pierre Richard, older, slower, subtler than in The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe (et al.), as a French gastronome in pre-Communist (but not for long) Georgia, an ambassador of that certain joie de vivre, that haute cuisine, that toujours l'amour, that raison d'être, that je ne sais quoi, …
First half of Steven Soderbergh’s four-and-a-half-hour worship service in honor of Che Guevara, conducted in Spanish with English subtitles, really two distinct movies. This first, in wide screen and in roomy frames, operates a time shuttle between vivid color re-enactments of the overthrow of Batista in the late Fifties and …
The free-standing second half of Steven Soderbergh’s worship service, in narrower screen than the first half, and in less vivid color and no black-and-white, unfolds a contrastingly chronological account of Guevara’s final year, 1966-67, his ill-fated attempt to do in Bolivia what he had done in Cuba. As in the …
A compaction of two Colette novels, written by Christopher Hampton and directed by Stephen Frears, about the grand amour between a brink-of-retirement Parisian courtesan and the androgynous bastard son of an already retired courtesan, the older woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) hitching her wagon to the younger man (Rupert Friend), who after …
Little more than an accompaniment to an eclectic soundtrack of pop songs (Hall and Oates, Modern English, America, 10cc, Soft Cell, the Human League, the Turtles, and of course the title tune by the Association), though the songs are better integrated than in most such cases. Which is to say …
Modest, quiet, contemplative, bittersweet tale of the loss of a life partner and the living-on of the departed one (however briefly) in the surviving one. The partners are a cozy old Bavarian couple, a stick-in-the-mud husband chained to routine and resistant to change, and his self-repressed Japanophile wife whose abandoned …
His trademark fast-shuffle editing does wonders to disguise the fact that one-third of this Russ Meyer film was accidentally destroyed in the laboratory. A slight setback, that. To plug up the gaps, Meyer belatedly added a voluptuous mute pixie named Haji, who flits mischievously through the movie and establishes a …
How quaint: a Broadway musical transferred to the screen! (Directed and choreographed by Rob Marshall.) Apologetically self-conscious and campy, despite the present-day "relevance" of the courtroom antics and media manipulation in a sensational murder trial of the Jazz Age. (Commemorated already in William Wellman's rambunctious Roxie Hart.) There's a good …