To any casual moviegoer, it comes as no surprise that a starlet now growing quite long in the tooth like Melanie Griffith should show up in an embarrassment such as A Stranger Among Us. From 1988’s passable Working Girl to this year’s abominable Shining Through, Tippi Hedren’s problem child has…
Eddie Murphy’s metamorphosis from foulmouthed ghetto comic into suave leading man is now almost complete, but so far it’s been about as successful as Woody Allen’s bumbling reincarnation as a lox-and-bagel Cary Grant. Because at least when Murphy was talking dirty and raising feminist hackles, he brought some hyperkinetic energy…
The Hollywood office of the CIA has pulled off its slickest trick in years. When last we saw him, singlehandedly combating the Evil Empire in The Hunt for Red October, the agency’s ace analyst, Jack Ryan, looked remarkably like the heartthrob actor Alec Baldwin. His new mission for the Langley-based…
Now that the fledgling Irish film industry has gained a toehold, it seems intent on waxing native to a fault. These days, Ireland’s most marketable cinematic exports bask in picturesque charm, scenic beauty, and boozy wit. It’s an amalgam of the Emerald Isle’s folk art, calculated to strike a sentimental…
When we first see Ray Levoi he’s cruising the Beltway donning opaque aviator Ray-Bans, a crisp white shirt, and regimental-stripe tie. As he impatiently twists the dial on the car radio, we can see he’s another ambitious young striver on his way to work in the nation’s capital. Another loyal…
Just when you begin to suspect that intelligence, wit and charm have vanished from the movies under the haunches of full-grown dogs like For the Boys and Shining Through, a sleeper pops up to restore your faith. Hear My Song, an Anglo-Irish comedy made on a shoestring, features elements of…
As the science fiction thriller Freejack would have it, the big Apple seventeen years hence is a grimy midnight junkyard blanketed by noxious gas, infested with drug-crazed snipers engaged in open warfare, and run, police-state style, by the hired goons of all-powerful corporations. Nuns armed with machine guns curse like…
In this era of slob humor and assault comedy, it’s a pleasure to stumble across a movie that comes at you as obliquely – slyly, even – as Mike Leigh’s offbeat Life Is Sweet. This wry slice of life, filmed in the north London suburb of Enfield, concerns the quiet…
Depending on which school of style you consult, William S. Burroughs comes up as a neglected literary genius or a dithering fraud still awash in the tame excesses of the Beat era. Cultists and detractors agree on one thing, though: For more than 30 years, Burroughs’s complex, scabrous fantasies have…
It’s amazing what passes for deep thinking in Southern California. Lawrence Kasdan’s godawful Grand Canyon combines a heavy dose of New Age psycho-babble, some lame platitudes about race relations, and a spoonful of pseudo-mystical pap on the possibilities of transcendence in evil, chaotic Los Angeles. Kasdan (The Accidental Tourist, Body…
The durable cottage industry created by the events of November 22, 1963 (six hundred books, just for a start) has never seen anything quite like the Coming of Oliver Stone – or the $40 million Warner Bros. poured into his three-hour epic, JFK. To hear the self-appointed guardian of the…
The prototypical Steve Martin character has evolved into a decent, beleaguered goof who can but roll his eyes, dip into that little trademark mambo step, and try to persevere in the face of domestic distress. He’s true-hearted but baffled — Buster Keaton with facial expressions. This is the striving Dad…
Any Trekkie worth his stars can probably fix the precise moment when Kirk, Spock, and Bones replaced the Three Stooges (or the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost) in the American popular imagination. The less enthralled among us simply grin and bear the gradual fact of it. In any case, here…
The New York character actor Joe Pesci (“I’m funny? How’ya mean, funny? You find me amusing?”) is at his best when sniping, kibbitzing and wise-cracking from the edges of street-tough movies like Raging Bull and Goodfellas. Whenever the spotlight hits him, he gives a film a lift, a shot of…
Galvanized by the raw vernacular of the Dublin streets, the language of The Commitments is dense and extremely local, kind of like a radically ethnic take on Bill and Ted’s most resplendent San Dimas-speak. Given the limits of the provincial tongue, director Alan Parker has found it in his culturally…
The British melodramatist and amateur muckraker Alan Parker has the blunt gift of a cartoonist, but he’s not much good at filling out his movie-essays. Give him a cause – any cause – and he’s likely to trivialize it. Set the cause to music, though, and you’ll want to start…
Dark Obsession is neither very dark nor very obsessive, but that does not disqualify it. On the contrary, all the fools and fops, snips and snobs you recall from British manor-house dramas past seem to have been coaxed out of retirement for one last go, and you’re bound to enjoy…
Giuseppe Tornatore is not the first young filmmaker to wilt in the heat of devotion to a past master (see: DePalma, Brian vis a vis Hitchcock, Alfred), but he may be the most gifted. When the young Sicilian scored an international hit last year with the boyhood reverie Cinema Paradiso,…
Whatever the new generation of black moviemakers lacks in dramatic sophistication and deep-pockets funding, it makes up for in freshness and passionate certainty of purpose. Witness the admirable first efforts of newcomers Matty Rich, age 19, and John Singleton, a geezer at 23. Rich’s Straight Out of Brooklyn, a roughhewn…
