Francois Truffaut's film noir exercise, like such earlier exercises of his as The Bride Wore Black and Mississippi Mermaid, stresses more the content than the style. Yes, this one is in black-and-white, but, in spite of the amount of rain that comes down, is not especially atmospheric. Meanwhile, the plot …
The enormous suspense potential of the Alberto Moravia novel, about an Italian Fascist whose yearning for normality and acceptance has brought him the assignment of murdering his former professor, remains buried beneath the hot-shot gimmickries and smart-aleckries indulged in by Bertolucci — the shuffled time sequence, the overly choreographed snow-white …
Old-fashioned (as old at least as Rider Haggard) African safari adventure, from a Michael Crichton novel: restless natives, defecting porters, a hippopotamus attack, a Lost City, an angry volcano. A few newer-fashioned touches, too: a talking gorilla (her sign language computer-translated into an audible voice), a leech attached to a …
If you wrote and starred in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, what do you do for an encore? (Well, after a spin-off TV series, anyway.) How about this? A sex-change operation on Some Like It Hot: two airport lounge singers (sisters of the one in Anything but Love) witness a …
A cautionary tale concerning wife-swapping: your fellow swapper could turn out to be a sociopath who wants to frame you for murder and to steal your wife for keeps. The dilemma for the filmmakers -- scriptwriter Matthew Chapman and director Alan J. Pakula -- is how to make the premise …
As sopping-wet a love story of the why-can't-society-leave-us-alone variety as anything to come along since "Patches" and "Town Without Pity" disappeared from the Top Forty hit list. The lovers in this case are a couple of Blueboy-ish homosexuals, having to take separate turns in prison for their sexual predilections, and …
A very bad Bad Day at Black Rock, with a Desert Storm hero missing a leg instead of an arm, and a super-patriotic, super-stereotyped bad guy at the head of a war-profiteering corporation modelled on Halliburton, thinly disguised under the name of Hallicorp. With Val Kilmer, Jennifer Esposito, and Gary …
Paranoia thriller without a milliwatt of power to compel belief. Mel Gibson, reunited with his Lethal Weapon director, Richard Donner, is an addlepated Manhattan cabbie, loonier than Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle, who puts out a newsletter of exposés on the order of "The Oliver Stone-George Bush Connection." (Number of subscribers: …
An adaptation of a John le Carré suspense novel, and a long stride for filmmaker Fernando Meirelles (City of God) from the slums of Rio de Janeiro. Le Carré, to be sure, has always had an elevated social consciousness, and a missionary zeal to match, and so the stretch for …
Soporific supernaturalism, notwithstanding some startling special effects, with Keanu Reeves as a cool-dude demonologist in a long coat, doomed to Hell for a momentarily successful suicide attempt, and ticketed to an early grave, even now, for a pack-a-day smoking habit. Tilda Swinton, of all people, is cast as the angel …
Starry-eyed science fiction, seemingly designed or destined to be blurbified into a "2001 for the Nineties" — complete with otherworldly light show and a solarized encounter with a Higher Intelligence. The very opening of the movie lays out the fictional terrain — light-years and light-years of it — as we …
Godard described his movie as an Antonioni subject done in a Hitchcock style. That's a start. A French couple, out of an Alberto Moravia novel, drift apart, glumly, passively, uncommunicatively, after they travel to Italy in order for the husband to patch up the screenplay of a troubled Fritz Lang …
Topical, pot-stirring political melodrama in the vein of Advise and Consent. In fact it tells the same story (pruned of subplots and subordinate characters), with the slight difference that whereas that one was about the midterm nomination of a new Secretary of State, this one is about the nomination of …
Rocky romance: rocky as in shaky, bumpy, stormy; also Rocky as in Mountains. The sort of newspaperman whom Paul Sorvino brought back to life in Slow Dancing in the Big City -- the Jimmy Breslinesque Voice of the People whose column is avidly devoured by every mugger, hooker, and cab …
Ian Curtis has aspirations beyond the trappings of small town life in 1970s England. Wanting to emulate his musical heroes, such as David Bowie and Iggy Pop, he joins a band, and his musical ambition begins to thrive. Soon though, the everyday fears and emotions, that fuel his music, slowly …