Uninventive variation on Speed: an experimental chemical weapon (code name: Elvis) will detonate when it hits fifty degrees Fahrenheit, if two civilians with an ice-cream truck can't fend off a crack team of mercenary terrorists. The civilians -- Skeet Ulrich and Cuba Gooding, Jr. -- are personable, but that hardly …
Very serious comedy, but very funny, about a man who thinks he has found the perfect woman and pursues her accordingly, and a woman who knows she is not that and wants him to stop. They and a host of other characters are thoroughly particularized by age, by speech, by …
The script is a patchwork of five plays by Shakespeare, principally Henry IV, Parts I and II. Its richest vein is the elegiac, and accordingly it makes a fitting last gasp for Orson Welles as a director (it was, after all, the last full-length feature completed by him) — and, …
Very slight variation on West Side Story: no singing, and Juliet is now Chinese, but Romeo's still "Tony," and there's dancing at the disco if not in the streets. The parallels drawn between life in Chinatown and life in Little Italy are decently liberal in intent, but the doomed-lovers angle, …
Back into James M. Cain territory: the decent average joe turned indecent and aberrant, and cherchez la femme. That isn't to say it's outdated -- not so long as men continue to make fools of themselves over women. But the old form needs a little something more than modern dress …
The portions that have to do with "happy talk" television news programs have more of a critical edge than you usually meet up with in a movie theater, but this movie's stature as a critical organ is cut down considerably by its taking a romantic, almost reverential view of the …
Lack of conviction vies with lack of tension for ultimate supremacy in this messy private-eye case, written by Robert Towne and directed by Roman Polanski, set in the 1930s, fashionably. What you comprehend of the case seems not at all correct, and the rest rushes right past you, out to …
Wayne Wang's you-are-there coverage of the final days of British colonial rule in Hong Kong, a story of crushingly heavy symbolism: there's the dying Englishman (Jeremy Irons), the beautiful kept woman from the mainland (Gong Li), the scarred local with an illusional past and a cloudy future (Maggie Cheung). Part …
A comical Common Man, a pulchritudinous spirit, a pack of wolves with glow-in-the-dark cartooned eyes, an attic of ambulatory mummies, a kung-fu wizard with a stick-on beard, a thousand-year-old tree monster with a tongue as long as the entire Leviathan. Never more than silly, often less than fun -- not, …
A spaghetti Western that appears to have cut corners in both its pre-production and its post-production work (the color quality fluctuates so erratically from shot to shot that the film looks as though it is still awaiting a turn in the processing lab). It is given some moral backbone, though, …
A renaming and reworking by Atom Egoyan of the French film Nathalie by Anne Fontaine. Despite the pedigree (Egoyan, if you need reminding, has signed such tony items as Ararat, The Sweet Hereafter, Exotica, among others), this would fit comfortably on the Lifetime Movie Network: a suspicious wife sics a …
The last and probably least of Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales. Rohmer always had to guard conscientiously against the tendency to shed weight, and here, in the tale of a bright-blue-eyed office worker's erotic caprices, he has trouble even keeping his feet on the ground. With Bernard Verley, Zouzou, Beatrice …
The traditional French semi-autobiographical first film, set untraditionally in colonial Africa (Cameroon). Claire Denis, the debuting director, had worked as an assistant to Wim Wenders (and received here some support from his production company), and she has something of his placidness and detachment. She also has something of his effortless …
Another art-house food film: an agnostic chocolate-maker opens her Little Shop of Temptations during the Lenten fast. Director Lasse Hallstrom follows his discreet pro-choice propaganda (The Cider House Rules) with a smug, complacent, liberal-minded broadside against the smugness, complacency, and narrow-mindedness of a French-Catholic provincial village circa 1959. The motley …
Catholic boys' school as a foretaste of hell: a sadistic teacher, a secret society among the Seniors, an extracurricular chocolate sale that soon becomes all-consuming. It's not believable for an instant, but it has a loony logic that catches you up and pulls you in. The direction by Keith Gordon …