Bill Forsyth, having built up expectations with Gregory's Girl and Local Hero, was hereupon charged with "slightness." Why? A character who gets dumped by his girlfriend at middle age, seizes upon the opportunity to take stock of his life, finds it to be without serious purpose, and begins to cast …
Boringly cryptic and oblique Death-in-Venice tale about an unmarried English couple preyed upon by an ambiguous white-suited native (actually Christopher Walken with a bad accent, explained or excused by biographical brushwork to do with an upbringing in England and a Canadian wife). Harold Pinter, working at about half-alert on an …
Fittingly tacky documentary, by Ron Mann, on the history of comic books -- a static subject by nature, "cinematized" with crude animation techniques and montages. The decision to devote better than half the running time to the advent of the Underground (and after) may have been dictated solely by the …
A radical case of Art for Art's Sake, a limp spaghetti Western in which the 3-D process becomes the sole raison d'être. All the action is funneled into the camera lens: bats fly at it, rats scamper at it, spears and flaming arrows are flung at it (these are the …
The Marine Captain's wife, thinking to make herself useful while her man is away in Vietnam, takes a nonpaying job in the veterans' hospital. There, she undergoes a radical character change (symbolized by her going from straight hair to frizzy) and falls in love with a bitter wheelchair case who, …
Prince Akeem of Zamunda -- a kind of African Shangri-La -- selects Queens, N.Y., to seek out a bride who will love him for himself, and "who will arouse my intellect as well as my loins." He finds one of those, right enough, but a dearth of laughs. Eddie Murphy, …
A modern-day Job -- he has lost his wife and unborn child, his house, his job, and although not his dog, at least his dog's left front leg -- and unless and until God gives him some answers to tough questions ("What kind of a God takes a dog's leg?"), …
Arnold Schwarzenegger, expanding himself as an actor, portrays a devoted father of a frizzy-permed moppet, tickles her ribs, treats her to ice cream, teaches her karate, allows her to hand-feed a wild fawn, takes her fishing and swimming. But not to worry. This oogum-snoogum stuff doesn't go much past the …
The first and only film of Alexander Askoldov, and reportedly the last film under glasnost to be brought out from the Soviet closet, where it had been shut away for twenty years. Reasons for this disciplinary action — never mind any "official" ones — might conceivably have something to do …
That's the name of the band (their subhead: "The Saviours of Soul"), a retro rhythm-and-blues group in present-day Dublin, founded on the logical enough assumption that "the Irish are the blacks of Europe." A number of the members of the group (a cast of unknowns) are colorful and photogenic: the …
Taken from Whitley Strieber's alleged nonfiction best-seller (no dispute about the goodness of sales), this tale of abduction by aliens will convince no one as yet unconvinced. But its desire to be taken for possible protects it from SFX extravagance. It doesn't protect it from tedium. With Christopher Walken, Lindsay …
Backstage dance musical centered around a Chicago ballet troupe, not necessarily the Joffrey Ballet that does the actual dancing. A labor of love for Neve Campbell, who trained in her native Canada as a ballerina and who co-wrote and co-produced in addition to starring, and just a labor for Robert …
Glibly cynical and expediently plotted spy-jinks about the growing bond between an over-the-hill CIA man and a captive KGB man who both are left out in the cold when a prisoner swap goes bad. Mikhail Baryshnikov virtually disappears alongside that amiable scene-hog, Gene Hackman. Some European tourist spots hold their …
The fever dream of a contemporary British teenager turns into a fantasia on the werewolf theme, set in a sunless fairytale kingdom, vaguely 19th-century, with a bespectacled and bonneted Granny as guide to the dark mysteries. The whole show has something of the charged erotic atmosphere of Christina Rossetti's Goblin …
Can love bloom and grow between two rivals in what is ballyhooed as the Super Bowl of piano contests? and will his Beethoven beat out her Mozart (or will she opt at the last minute for Prokofiev?)? and will the outcome hurt their chances for happiness? and, most suspensefully of …