Another indigestible mix of martial arts and hip-hop, the special niche that cinematographer-turned-director Andrzej Bartkowiak has carved out 4 himself. (In exactly what way, except of course 4 money and power, is it better 2 be the director of Romeo Must Die and Exit Wounds than 2 be the photographer …
Excursion into pinkish nostalgia, a swirl of forces, currents, ideas, and ideologies at play in New York in the 1930s, a two-ring circus (at the least) revolving around side-by-side cases of artistic censorship: the opening-night shutdown of a federally funded Left-wing Broadway musical and the effacement of Diego Rivera's Lenin-lionizing …
The new girl in school, revealing an ability to stand a pencil on its point, completes the circle of an extracurricular coven. An "empowerment" fantasy, for feminist teens in particular. But power corrupts, doesn't it? The inevitable falling-out (with the tranquilized Robin Tunney representing Good, the flamboyant Fairuza Balk representing …
Jason Statham, his stolen heart, his beat-the-clock recovery effort, chronicled with a spastic camera, warping lenses, sophomoric smut, stupefying action. With Amy Smart, Bai Ling, Clifton Collins, Jr., and Dwight Yoakam; directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor.
Multicharacter tapestry of the seething melting pot of L.A., an object lesson on racial and ethnic stereotypes, attitudes, biases, tensions. The didactic impulse overrules good sense: a bigoted cop, for just one example, gives a hard time to a respectable black couple at the side of the road, and then …
Cultish, or would-be cultish, adaptation of a novel by the erstwhile science-fiction writer J.G. Ballard -- albeit a novel infinitely less science-fictional, though no less inert, than The Drowned World or The Drought. It plays out on screen as little more than a slice of soft-core (or semisoft-core) porn, right …
Breck Eisner’s remake of a lesser-known George Romero horror show from 1973, a therefore more defensible remake than those of the Dead series, for which we can hope that Romero (credited as executive producer) received decent compensation. The no-nonsense line of action to do with a contagion of homicidal lunacy …
Teen romance between an underprivileged, highly motivated Chicano (a football star but also a studious student who can explain the difference between "assert" and "exert" in a class discussion) and a spoiled white rich bitch who shows a lot of midriff and no consideration. Potentially, that's more of a subject …
Jeff Bridges is pretty much the whole show, and a generous show it is. His Bad Blake, given name to be held back for the gravestone, is an over-the-hill and down-on-his-luck C&W singer still living the life of a C&W song, four marriages behind him, long lonely drives and cheap …
Truth in advertising (Jaguar: "For men who'd like hand jobs from beautiful women they hardly know"). What a concept! And who better to carry it out than a copywriting team of incarcerated lunatics? What a -- to be more exact -- stale concept! What a rancid one! With Dudley Moore, …
A Nobel Laureate biologist at a well-endowed West Coast university has, in his backyard laboratory, cultivated the cells of his dead wife for thirty years, with the ultimate intention to clone her. Plainly, this situation cinches up the traditional connection between Mad Scientist and God, and indeed it is hard …
Jack Arnold's 3-D horror film (the horror is lost in the fog) features an indifferent actor, possessed of a nonchalant swimming stroke and dressed in a lizard suit, who terrorizes some bird-brained explorers on a jungle set that's supposed to pass for the untravelled reaches of the Amazon. With Richard …
Jeepers! A sweet young somnambulist who communicates with insects is a pleasantly ridiculous idea. But other ideas to come along are just ridiculous, or quite unpleasantly ridiculous (e.g., the razor-wielding monkey), and despite some flickering signs of imagination (a girls' school situated in Richard Wagner's Swiss estate), one has the …
Five tales of terror (or humor, or humorous terror, or terrible humor) written by Stephen King and directed by George A. Romero, and grouped together in a comic-book framework to bring back memories of pre-Seduction of the Innocents classics like Tales from the Crypt. There is a frequent elbow in …