Proof that the intellectually challenged are fun to watch even with subtitles. Commence with a dead cat, an overly-latexed actor buried beneath more wrinkles than a kennel filled with shar-peis, and a neck-breaking 20x1 zoom. It only gets clumsier. At his current age, our titular centenarian (Robert Gustafsson) flees a …
Plus assorted other breeds, plus one loquacious parrot, plus a rehabilitated (not for long) Cruella De Vil ("Please, call me Ella"). A higgledy-piggledy incoherent mess, busy enough and loud enough to distract the little ones, and dismay the bigger. Glenn Close, Ioan Gruffudd, Alice Evans, Gerard Depardieu; directed by Kevin …
Russian revision of Twelve Angry Men, slightly “opened up” to no benefit (the makeshift jury room is a gymnasium), still stagy, wordy, overacted, mired in lengthy monologues, spun out in excess of two and a half hours. With Sergey Makovetsky, Sergey Garmash, Sergey Gazarov, Valentin Gaft, Alexey Petrenko, Yuri Stoyanov, …
With a sprinkle of Wishing Dust, the disaffected young heroine, on her first day of teenhood, is spirited into her future life as a "thirty and flirty and thriving" editor of her favorite fashion magazine, Poise. Yet she's still thirteen in her head, with none of the knowledge, the experience, …
An Arabian Nights tale detoured into a Norse saga. (A little off the beaten path, too, for the author of the original novel, Michael Crichton.) Lots of gore, but lots more hair. John McTiernan's careening Steadicam slips and slides over every possible point of interest. The release was delayed so …
Not just was Christopher Columbus: The Discovery faster into the marketplace (for the quincentenary of the voyage of the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria); it was also clearer in story, in character, in actors' diction, in photography. Bad as it was, sometimes amusingly so, this is worse -- …
Socially conscious monstrosity on the stitched-together topics of violence in America, tabloid television, and the cult of celebrity. A couple of new-generation American Dreamers ("You think I came to America to work?"), a Russian and a Czech whose feverish sweat and shifting glances unaccountably fail to set off any alarms …
Second-chance fantasy that, through the agency of a bewhiskered supernatural school janitor, sends the middle-age-crazy hero not back in time, but back in age, back to the high school of his youth, so that he must fend off the incestuous flirtations of his teenage daughter and make age-inappropriate advances to …
Exciting year, excruciating movie. Ernest (On Golden Scum) Thompson, directing for the first time in addition to writing, makes a characteristically shallow belly-flop onto deep thematic waters: Vietnam, the generation gap, long hair, LSD — that whole package. The finale — a funeral party turned protest march — is guaranteed …
Upwards of a dozen New Yorkers in destiny's dance on New Year's Eve, 1981. Flatly written comedy, and broadly acted in compensation. Wall-to-wall oldies. (It's an MTV Films co-production.) With Ben Affleck, Dave Chappelle, Janeane Garofalo, Kate Hudson, Courtney Love, Jay Mohr, Martha Plimpton, Christina Ricci, Paul Rudd; written by …
Low-budget "mockumentary" wherein an abrasive, facetious, blabbering would-be filmmaker by the name of Myles Berkowitz hits upon the idea of finally getting a film made by simply filming himself (or rather, videotaping himself) on a series of dates with women. And maybe as a bonus, falling in love. (Either that, …
Takeoff from a true story, presumably far, far off, about a team of MIT math whizzes who, drilled by a Mephistophelean mentor on the faculty, visit Vegas on weekends to beat the house at blackjack. The film is not able to make the frowned-upon practice of “card counting” comprehensible, much …
An “update” to the ’80s television series, this time involving two high school polarities (the dumb jock and the smart geek) who are recruited for an undercover assignment to pose as high school students and infiltrate the supplier of a new “super drug.” The film is a pinball machine: loud, …
Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill advance from high school to college, while the overall level of humor plunges from ninth grade to third. I laughed once: the action momentarily trips over itself to deliver a sternly graphic anti-drug message before quickly returning to the business of trying to milk laughs …