Two top actresses in low-to-medium-level material, a slavering serial-killer thing, with an overdrawn finale and a checklist of unanswered questions. Sigourney Weaver, as the traumatized agoraphobic brandy-swilling psychological expert, comes too close to repeating herself too soon after her victim role in Death and the Maiden. But Holly Hunter forges …
A piece of 3-D stop-motion animation about a little girl with blue hair and ski-jump nose (everyone hears her name as Caroline, and her last name of Jones will only encourage confusion in anyone who remembers the Morticia of TV’s Addams Family, Carolyn Jones), who, unhappy with her preoccupied parents, …
A piece of 3-D stop-motion animation about a little girl with blue hair and ski-jump nose (everyone hears her name as Caroline, and her last name of Jones will only encourage confusion in anyone who remembers the Morticia of TV’s Addams Family, Carolyn Jones), who, unhappy with her preoccupied parents, …
A piece of 3-D stop-motion animation about a little girl with blue hair and ski-jump nose (everyone hears her name as Caroline, and her last name of Jones will only encourage confusion in anyone who remembers the Morticia of TV’s Addams Family, Carolyn Jones), who, unhappy with her preoccupied parents, …
A piece of 3-D stop-motion animation about a little girl with blue hair and ski-jump nose (everyone hears her name as Caroline, and her last name of Jones will only encourage confusion in anyone who remembers the Morticia of TV’s Addams Family, Carolyn Jones), who, unhappy with her preoccupied parents, …
Jon Amiel's doomsday thriller in the tradition of The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1962) and Crack in the World (1965) stays serious long enough for a couple of catchy introductory scenes: thirty-two civilians simultaneously dropping dead within a few-block radius in Boston (the common thread appears to be their …
Consciousness-raising, conscience-pricking documentary by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, reciting a laundry list, two and a half hours long, of the vices of big business past and present. A rotation of experts (CEOs, Harvard profs, Milton Friedman, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, many more) lectures directly to the camera and over …
A little girl, traumatized by her mother's death, comes out of her shell to nudge her father and their black housekeeper (jazz lovers both) into romance. The writer-director, Jessie Nelson, does a lot of nudging also, making double sure we know precisely how we're supposed to feel about everything and …
Hong Kong-style action dropped like a bomb into a Sidney Lumet-style probe of NYPD politics. The result is widespread devastation. Mark Wahlberg, reunited with the director of Fear, James Foley, who has sometimes been somewhat serious, is the soft-spoken second-generation Irish cop assigned to the Chinatown beat for incendiary reasons …
Glitterbug movie which demands that the audience go ga-ga over customized sports cars and vans, garish paint jobs, hydraulic lifts, waterbeds, wigs, the night lights of Las Vegas, and others of life's little extras. It uses two unassuming actors — Mark Hamill as a gullible grease monkey and Annie Potts …
Low-rise soufflé concocted of a family holiday on the Riviera. The action takes the form of a change-partners sexual cotillion in which the committed heterosexuals slightly outnumber the overt or borderline homosexuals, yet command much less attention from co-writers and co-directors Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, the team responsible for …
You might well have expected that a movie called The Cotton Club would actually be about the Cotton Club. But no. The movie is not so much about it as around and about it. One of the main characters owns the place. A couple of others work there. Others of …
Ismail Merchant, the producing half of the Merchant-Ivory team, takes a turn at directing: a mid-Fifties period piece about a dark-skinned, self-deluded Anglo-Indian nurse ("My father was an officer in the British regiment"), who takes over the care of an undernourished Anglo baby, insinuates herself into the household, undermines the …
An escapee from the loony bin, passing himself off as resident psychiatrist thereof, gets to sit in for a radio psychologist on leave of absence: an "idea" comedy with nothing much to back the idea up -- nothing beyond putting Dan Aykroyd in the starring role (where Chevy Chase or …
Far-ranging reassessment of the nuclear threat in the age of terrorism, an effective means of sleep prevention. The concluding call to arms, or rather call to no arms, produces much agreement yet little reassurance. Directed by Lucy Walker.