Stopping briefly at a theatre near you before finding its rightful place on home video.
Introducing Batgirl, the worst yet of the Caped Crusaders, a mush-mouthed motorcycle daredevil (Alicia Silverstone) over from Oxbridge University to visit her ailing Uncle Alfred, manservant to the heretofore Dynamic Duo. As if to make her feel at home, the movie overall has more and worse of just about everything. …
With a new director (Christopher Nolan) and a new star (Christian Bale), the fifth entry in the Batman series, true to its title, returns to square one: how and why Bruce Wayne came to be Batman; the psychological root of his fixation on flying mammals; the part this played in …
Batman for a third time, to be more precise. Val Kilmer, even taking into account the overprocessed reproduction of his speaking voice, is an improvement over Michael Keaton in the title role. Or at least an improvement in the alter-ego role of Bruce Wayne, billionaire philanthropist. Once he's inside the …
Batman for a third time, to be more precise. Val Kilmer, even taking into account the overprocessed reproduction of his speaking voice, is an improvement over Michael Keaton in the title role. Or at least an improvement in the alter-ego role of Bruce Wayne, billionaire philanthropist. Once he's inside the …
Seventy-some-minute cartoon. The square-jawed, trapezoid-torsoed hero is more credible, certainly, than Michael Keaton, and the graphic style throughout is convincingly comic-bookish. But the animation is not really all that animated, and the story is slowed by flashbacks and romance. Voices by Kevin Conroy, Dana Delany, Mark Hamill.
The Batman thesis-antithesis continues. Just as the campy-wonderful '60s TV series gave rise to a revival of Bob Kane's original Dark Knight with '89s Tim Burton outing, so Zack Snyder's grimdark 'n gritty Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice beckons the return of Adam West and Burt Ward. Directed by …
Unfortunately he is still Michael Keaton. Or Michael Keaton is still him. And as long as he's in the lead role, any Batman movie will have to hobble along in leg irons. On the other hand, both The Penguin (Danny DeVito, unrecognizable) and Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer) have imposing physical presences, …
Alan Moore's landmark graphic novel gets an R-rated cartoon treatment. Good times.
In a word, exhausting. In a few more, overblown, overstuffed, repetitive, bombastic, and sometimes just dumb. (Never mind dreary to look at and punishing to hear.) Zack Snyder follows his Superman reboot Man of Steel with a muddled meditation on man's anxiety about God walking the earth. Except of course, …
And not just any ordinary old bats, but great big Texas-sized omnivorous bats. (Actually, laboratory-enhanced Indonesian imported bats.) Perfectly harmless s-f mutation stuff, apart from the stupefying conformance to convention. (And guess what's playing these days at the main-street bijou in Gallup, Texas? -- Nosferatu.) With Lou Diamond Phillips, Dina …
Pretty effective piece of sentimental fantasy (in science-fiction clothing), with an interesting inversion of the usual sense of scale. A couple of self-reproducing flying saucers (a mama and a papa, with babies on the way) come to the aid of tenement dwellers threatened with eviction. The odd twist is that …
Murky vision of the future, from a novel by the founding father of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard. John Travolta, a Hubbard disciple, co-produced, and also portrays the iron-fisted alien colonist on planet Earth in the year 3000, though his ham Shakespearean diction hardly indicates he's taking it seriously. Roger Christian …
Disenfranchised earthlings invade a distant planet in clayey 3-D animation. Stirring music and excellent space-travel effects at the start, and a well-imagined other world, and an anti-war, anti-imperialist (i.e., anti-Earth) campaign that offers no easy solution, only a naive one. With the voices of Evan Rachel Wood, Luke Wilson, Justin …
This shameless action machine is a video game wrapped in a Marine Corps recruitment poster. Space aliens invade L.A., mostly trashing Santa Monica. Only our jarheads can rise to the occasion, mostly with a platoon led by veteran sergeant Aaron Eckhart. They make their escape from hell in a bright …