Monotony in nothing flat. The Addamses have a new addition (a mustachioed bundle of gloom named Pubert), and the two jealous older kids are packed off to summer camp, and the hired nanny is actually a black-widow serial killer who has set her cap for Uncle Fester. In the nanny …
The reputation of the Mark Twain novel is not so unimpugnable that it can afford an ally such as the Disney studio: stress on the affected folksiness and sentimentality (underscored by the Aaron Coplandisms of composer Bill Conti). With Elijah Wood, Courtney B. Vance, and Jason Robards; written and directed …
Right on screen at the outset, the viewer, or reviewer, is enjoined not to reveal the identity of "the client." (The Miramax company, hoping to recapture past fortune, even makes specific reference to its The Crying Game.) But this willfully misrepresents, or misunderstands, the nature of the narrative. The client's …
Directorial miscasting: Martin Scorsese moves from the agitated, violent, profane turf of Mean Streets and Raging Bull into the genteel neighborhood of Edith Wharton, of "fine literature," and of the Manhattan haut monde of the 1870s. He answers the opening bell in his customary Smoking Joe fashion: rushing in, reeling …
Grisly details of the 1972 plane crash in the Andes, the survivors of which resorted to eating the casualties in order to stay alive. The crash itself is hair-raising, and the rest is certainly a more tasteful (not to say tasty) treatment than the 1976 Mexican quickie, Survive. Possibly it's …
Upper-middle-class Jewish kids on Long Island descend into an unelucidated underworld, in pursuit of lives of crime. Low-low-budget sub-sub-Scorsese: "Hey, fuck fuckin' Hollywood, awright?" Written and directed by Rob Weiss, with a cast of unknowns.
Drearily prolonged situation involving a distinguished black scholar (and "thorn in the side of the white man") who is mistaken for a thief in his posh new summer home. Drearily photographed, too. Nicolas Cage's goofy self-amusement and Samuel Jackson's smoldering intensity are wasted. With Michael Lerner, Margaret Colin, Dabney Coleman, …
The sequel to Stakeout goes the way of the Lethal Weapon series: into escalating silliness. (Even the title, copied from Another 48 Hrs., is not a novel way for a sequel to go.) Enlisting stand-up comedian Rosie O'Donnell and her audible gasp makes the intentions perfectly clear. The most actual …
Sam Raimi's slap-happy sequel to his Evil Dead II: the one-handed hero (how he got that way is explained in a cumbersome recap at the outset) is sucked through a time tunnel to the Middle Ages (and a different continent), armed with a custom-fitted chainsaw and a shotgun that more …
Two buds on the peaks, the slopes, the dangerous curves. The cute one wants to be a writer someday, but he's "got to live first," meet people, read books, be the hero in a featherbrained movie. Paul Gross, Peter Berg, Finola Hughes; written and directed by Patrick Hasburgh.
Maggie Greenwald's non-Western: not an anti-Western, just not quite a Western. The action may be located in a mining town not too distant from those of The Hanging Tree and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and by and by the historic conflict between cattlemen and sheepherders may loom on the horizon, …
Kooky-kinky crime comedy about a modern-day Billy the Kid who holes up with his loot in Room 222 at the Heartbreak Hotel and entertains a monotonous parade of weirdos. Lisa Bonet takes first prize, if not the cake, as a scrupulously honest, sotto voce, tattooed call girl. With Patrick Dempsey, …
A sort of street-corner doomsday tirade, though strictly nonverbal, and very much in the mode of Koyaanisqatsi. (The title, according to the press notes, is a Sufi word meaning "blessing" or "breath" or "essence of life.") Half an hour or so of big-wide-wonderful-world footage is followed by over half an …
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.
Insipid but surprisingly well-worked-out comedy on the birds and the bees. The titular Saint Bernard gains some firsthand knowledge of the subject, with the result of four puppies. The two older children of the family (Nicholle Tom, Christopher Castile, very sweet) are starting to take an interest, too. The villain …