The official sequel can make no effort to match the scruffy integrity of its 1994 forerunner, least of all an effort to match the black-and-white photography. Not that the forerunner set any sort of mark to shoot for, but at least it accepted its limitations and worked within them. The …
Clunk. Patented Adam Sandler blend of juvenile misconduct and remorseful moralism. In the Beyond department at a Bed Bath and Beyond, an angel (Christopher Walken, looking more like a mad scientist) gives a "universal remote" to a harried workaholic, allowing him to mute the barking dog, fast-forward through a marital …
Formulaic John Grisham legal thriller (a little bit of lawyering, a lot of dashing about), in which the author adopts an underdog or two, and throws them a steady diet of bones, biscuits, hamburger, filet mignon, as they dodge and run circles round the powerful and the baleful. The latter, …
Serviceable, not overly salacious, perhaps not sufficiently salacious, summary of the sex scandal that brought down the Governor of New York and former State Attorney General, alias “The Sheriff of Wall Street.” (Spitzer himself dutifully takes a spot in the rotation of talking heads: “This goes back to the days …
The ten-minute prologue, of the Rocky Mountain Rescue team in action, should drench the palms of the mildest acrophobe. From there, it's pretty much downhill (so to speak), despite a plane crash, three scattered valises containing $30 million each, and a gang of bad guys who keep trying to outdo …
An over-imaginative eleven-year-old (Henry Thomas), with a superhero named Jack Flack as his imaginary playmate, stumbles upon a real-life espionage plot and is unable to impress the fact on his no-nonsense father (Dabney Coleman, who, with less gray in his hair, also plays Jack Flack). Australian filmmaker Richard Franklin, who …
Spike Lee offers the prospect of a couple of new angles of interest. First is the open acknowledgment of his debt to, or kinship with, Martin Scorsese, who co-produced the movie, and whose frequent actor Harvey Keitel has a leading role in it, and whose two-time scriptwriter Richard Price authored …
Bertrand Tavernier's debut movie is literary perhaps to a fault; his, at this point, uncertain directing style is somewhat in the William Wyler manner of approaching each new scene as a separate strategic problem. The results he gets are uneven, but not devoid of inspiration. His largest success is in …
Tom Swiftian science fiction about a clean teen who comes into possession of a wristwatch which essentially can freeze time, or more accurately can transport its wearer into "hypertime," so that everything around him seems to slow to a standstill. Apart from one escapade of youthful pranks, there's little imagination …
Four temps form a square of friendship in a hostile office environment. Some well-observed minutiae, but the minutes do indeed crawl. Toni Collette, Parker Posey, Lisa Kudrow, Alanna Ubach, Bob Balaban; directed by Jill Sprecher.
A simple and painless diversion about a tortuous and torturous detour. The time-budgeting, second-squeezing headmaster of Thomas Tompion Comprehensive School, and the first such non-posh headmaster ever in history to be selected as chairman and keynote speaker of the Annual Headmasters Conference at Norwich University, gets aboard the wrong train …
Anthony Burgess's vision of the ultraviolent future (the novelist's linguistic inventions are carefully preserved and provide the movie with its strongest prop) becomes, in film form, wholly a pander to the youth market. Stanley Kubrick's frost-bitten, arm-waving, gimmicky direction seems very nearly distraught, willing to try almost anything, just so …
Steven Spielberg surpasses all of his sci-fi forerunners in the only way he knows how in material things. He has costlier, more spectacular special effects, including some really wonderful nighttime skies; he has bigger and brighter spaceships; he has louder sound effects and background music; and he has the largest …
Steven Spielberg surpasses all of his sci-fi forerunners in the only way he knows how in material things. He has costlier, more spectacular special effects, including some really wonderful nighttime skies; he has bigger and brighter spaceships; he has louder sound effects and background music; and he has the largest …