Juvenilization (not for the first time) of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in.... The Connecticut Yankee has now become a Reseda Pee-Wee Baseball Player, who falls through a time crack in the dugout and lands back in Camelot, where he introduces such anachronistic concepts as the Round Table (Arthur hadn't …
Spend a day, if you choose, in the company of screwing, swearing, spitting, stealing, smoking, skateboarding, stomping Manhattan teens. Still photographer Larry Clark, shooting in a haphazard cinéma-verité mode, aims to shock. But the effect is muffled, in part by unintelligibility (poor recording, poor enunciating), and in part by sheer …
Barbet Schroeder's remake and update of Henry Hathaway's same-named film of 1947 is a serviceable crime melodrama. It should come as no surprise, but perhaps as some continuing source of pain, that a mature European of culture and taste can be trusted to show more respect for the genre than …
Czech heart-tugger about a lecherous old cellist who agrees, for a fee, to a mock marriage with a Russian, and then gets stuck with her five-year-old son when she joins her true love in West Germany. (This is 1988.) Schmaltzy, but full of lifelike detail and sensitive observation: e.g., the …
Director Bob Balaban's third feature film signals no sort of "growth" in his career, but instead a switch to a totally different branch, a less twisted one, a more widely reachable one, an altogether lower one. Perhaps counting himself lucky to be still working at all, the man who made …
Tall corn about the discovery of a hidden valley of changeless Cheyenne Indians in the mountains of northwest Montana. The interplay between an atavistic frontiersman (Tom Berenger, amusingly chewing up the gorgeous scenery) and a comely anthropologist (Barbara Hershey) is corn, too, but canned. With Kurtwood Smith and Steve Reevis; …
Typical Henry Jaglom gabfest, fragmentary, improvisatory, self-conscious, mostly vacuous. The setting this time is the country retreat of a three-generational theatrical family, where the whole clan and acolytes (including a Hollywood luminary played without much illumination by Jaglom's wife, Victoria Foyt) have gathered for a final bash before the estate …
Losers' love story about an all-day drinker and a lady of the night. (What passes for sweet talk: "You're like some kind of antidote that mixes with the liquor and keeps me in balance.") There is nothing convincing about the essential storyline, not the level of convenient coincidence (the pair, …
Low-budget "vanity" film written and directed by, and starring, Wally White, about a gay Manhattanite (looking like a cross between Tom Hulce and Tom "Billy Jack" Laughlin) who joins the summer pilgrimage to Provincetown. The technique is self-depreciatively informal and playful (lots of chatting to the camera, lots of mimicry …
The debut feature of twenty-five-year-old James Gray is a creditable attempt to resuscitate the American film noir, perked up a bit (if "perked up" can apply to something so somber) by the untrafficked milieu: the Russian Jewish community in Brighton Beach. Fine feel for gloom and doom on the faces …
Alfonso Cuarón seemingly follows carefully the attractive pattern of Agnieszka Holland's Secret Garden, starting from a lesser known work of the same novelist, Frances Hodgson Burnett. It opens similarly in India in 1914, where the prepubescent heroine has earnestly learned from her father, the oxymoronic Captain Crew(e), the lesson that …
The follies of low-budget independent filmmaking, broken down into three separate chapters. The first two turn out to be dreams, of the director and the leading lady respectively, and the third depicts the actual shooting of a dream. Paradoxically, the first two have a firmer grip on hard realities -- …
Harry D'Amour, Occult P.I., on the trail of a master black magician, leading ultimately to the mouth and very long esophagus of Hell. Some intelligent chewing-over of the distinction between mere illusionism and real magic: "Illusionists get Las Vegas contracts; magicians get burned." Some dense, oppressive, persuasive atmosphere. Some signature …
TV-movie-of-the-week material: a black crack baby rescued from beside the dumpster where his mother mislaid him, adopted by a white social worker, and then at age two subjected to a custody fight when his rehabilitated birth mother finds out he is not in the landfill after all. ("We take cases …
Well, "clinically depressed" love, at any rate. Not to overstate the case. He (Chris O'Donnell) dresses by the code of Seattle grunge, but after all he lives in Seattle, and is otherwise a responsible big brother in a single-parent home. She (Drew Barrymore, tattoos concealed) is a moonlight-jet-skiing, library-book-stealing, school-skipping, …