Low-pressure comedy about the human urge to be somewhere or someone else. The contrived and self-conscious eccentricity of the set-up somewhat removes the theme from its rightful universality. Wayne, sarcastically nicknamed "Mad Dog" for his nonviolent tendencies, is a crime-scene photographer who would really rather be an art-gallery photographer. And …
Artificial-insemination screw-up: a black high-school girl, breaking into the sperm-bank computer, discovers that her real father is not as requested ("black, smart, not too tall") but is instead a white man (worse, a car salesman modelled on Cal Worthington: cowboy duds, circus animals, everbody's buddy). Richard Benjamin directs with an …
A nosy-neighbor fable about the mounting suspicion that the brand-new widower in the apartment down the hall may also be his wife's murderer. During a routine condolatory visit, the wife next door (Diane Keaton) discovers what looks to be an urn of ashes while searching in the kitchen cabinets for …
Vacillating bit of make-believe about a genetically improved guard dog, alternately cuddly-cute, silly-corny, pitiful-pathetic, snarly-scary. A brief liaison with a domestic collie (to the Paul Anka tune, "Puppy Love") opens the door to a sequel. Ally Sheedy, Lance Henriksen; written, directed by John Lafia.
Mel Gibson with a lot of makeup. He's a horrifically scarred recluse, shut away in his two-story seaside sanctuary with his poetry, his classical music, his paintings, but distantly hounded by nasty rumors and nastier nicknames: "Hamburger Head," "Pizza Head," "Puke Head." And then one day a backward junior-high student …
A half-Eskimo boy and half-Indian girl, thrown together and then torn apart in childhood, are reunited and re-separated as adults, in the thick of World War II. They are almost, not quite, reunited again in the mid-Sixties. Vincent Ward's culture-clash epic is vaultingly ambitious in scope though curiously uninvolving as …
The production cost of $7,000 has been mentioned with such frequency and insistence in conjunction with this title that one had begun to wonder whether it was a boast or an advance apology. Or a part of the title. Or a big fib. Presumably the $7,000 figure does not include …
Schoolmarmish social comedy about three disparate couples -- ex-hippies, yuppies, fat cats -- united on a school-pageant planning committee. Beau Bridges and Stockard Channing do best at bringing the abstractions to life. Cybill Shepherd does bad enough by herself to undo almost everybody else. The finale at the Sixties-themed pageant, …
Documentary portrait of two professional nannies, both born in the first years of the century, both without children of their own, but in other ways quite unalike: Martha, the German Catholic, trained as a baby nurse, and a rigid disciplinarian by temperament and philosophy (preferred instrument of enforcement: the wooden …
Thanks, presumably, to the success of Wild Reeds, this slightly earlier and better André Téchiné film gets its chance -- although, lacking the nostalgic, coming-of-age, homosexual, and political hooks, a slim one. The main characters and situation are credible -- an estranged sister and brother obliged in middle age to …
Joe Dante's mockery of, hommage to, and commentary on, the gimmicky grade-Z fright films of his youth. Typically, he doesn't know where to stop, or even slow down. Atypically, he at least knows where to start. A William Castle-ish huckster from Hollywood (or off-Hollywood) arrives in Key West to test-screen …
Based on the David Henry Hwang play, based on a true story: a young French diplomat in Communist China enters into long-term intimate relations with a Peking Opera star, never realizing "she" is a "he." A story hard to believe -- and John Lone looking jowly and beardy (and sounding …
The vicious-cycle view of life in the urban ghetto, in this case Watts. (Aren't there any other views of life in the urban ghetto?) No new wrinkles, but slick photography, and scary violence, and even more scary nihilism behind it. Too much narration, not too much preaching. Directed by The …
Benign alternative to ghetto-violence movies. A pacifistic grade-school teacher in Washington, D.C., is struck by a meteor and invested with supernatural powers: the usual ones, plus the ability to converse with dogs and to absorb the contents of books at a touch. There are some pleasant notions (acrophobic, the caped …