Ethan Hawke, with his hair framing his face like parted curtains, works very hard at being fumblingly innocent and ingratiating on a first date with his Dream Girl, while also having to dodge crooked cops and the Chinese Mafia. It's too tough a job. With Teri Polo; directed by Jonathan …
Busy, undiscourageable cop comedy, with helpfully low standards, and more often ingratiating than truly amusing. Particularly ingratiating in its readiness to barge onto the op-ed page, with trigger-happy views on current events, politics, ecology, education ("You're part of a dying breed, Hapsburg. Like people who can name all fifty states"). …
David Cronenberg carries on his dubious search to find "straighter," more respectable outlets for his creature-feature schlock tactics: this time, the William S. Burroughs novel of the same name, although the movie is not a direct adaptation of it, but rather a reconstruction of the (highly drugged) state of mind …
Alleged football alleged comedy about the great satisfaction of putting together a season with a record of 1-8-1. The filmmakers themselves aim no higher. Scott Bakula, Robert Loggia, Hector Elizondo; directed by Stan Dragoti.
The same lesson -- the neverending lesson -- on the value of fiction. ("I've already read that book." "But have you ever read a book twice? Books change, each time you read them!") It's taught with some of the same hideous creatures, but with some new hideous ones as well …
The crack king of Harlem takes over a square-block apartment house and converts it into a factory, a fortress, a whole kingdom. This concept elevates him almost to supervillain status, shoulder-high to Fu Manchu, but the movie doesn't make the most of it, in fact abandons it altogether and then …
Unforeseeably dark comedy -- unseeable at any time as funny -- about a speed trap off the Jersey Turnpike, operated by a modern-day Hanging Judge who holds court in a combination junkyard, amusement park, and haunted house. Saturday Night Live alumnus Dan Aykroyd, in his directorial debut, has picked up …
Feminist (or American, or comprehensively Western) nightmare about an Iranian immigrant doctor who, in 1984, takes his happy Michigan family to visit his homeland, reverts there to the "primitive," and refuses to allow his wife and daughter to leave: "Islam's the greatest gift I can give my child." The factually-based …
A pampered American couple with a serious cash-flow problem consider liquidating their best asset: a salt-shaker-sized Henry Moore bronze. But first it gets stolen from their London hotel room by a deaf chambermaid who covets it purely for aesthetics: a touch of schmaltz in a frostily "sophisticated" comedy. There is …
Family life (including three weddings and one baptism), with a high degree of wackiness. Into the fold, via the recently jilted elder daughter, comes a glad-handing, dirty-mouthing salesman, with no levelling-off of wackiness. There are some acute moments of awkwardness around tossing a loose screw into a tight family, and …
One bad actor. Michael Keaton, giving a hard workout to his one-and-a-half expressions, is a dedicated narc who must provide a happy and stable home for his slain partner's three children while coming within a hair's-breadth of death every day on the job. Things get a little sticky when he …
A wider, as distinguished from broader, role for John Candy: friendly Irish cop, devoted live-at-home son (to crotchety Maureen O'Hara), vaguely unfulfilled bachelor. His acting style does not expand in proportion. It's a stretch for writer-director Chris (Home Alone) Columbus as well. He's striving for something in the neighborhood of …
For those who like their anime unhurried, elegiac, and episodic, here is the story of Taeko, a Japanese working girl in her late twenties who decides to spend her vacation working on a farm in the countryside. Possibly because, as a child, all her friends took vacations in the country, …
Optimistically titled gangster farce. (Hoped-for critical blurbs: "Oscar's a winner!" "Oscar is the best!" "Oscar, meet Mr. Price and Mr. Waterhouse.") Some of the actors -- Peter Riegert, Tim Curry, Chazz Palminteri, particularly -- get a lot of chewing out of the driest old bones: mistaken identities, switched satchels, etc., …
Time ambles on. Danny DeVito is now the star, Gregory Peck the supporting player. What's more, no one has tipped off Peck that the movie is supposed to be a comedy. He's the head man at the homegrown New England Wire and Cable Company; DeVito is the doughnut-wolfing shark, the …