Thorough, profound, astonishing, and insufferable imbecility envelops the screen in Shining Through, a Hollywood-formula spy thriller-romance set in a woebegone World War II, finding a permanent home there for two hours and twelve minutes. It’s one of the worst movies to come my way in a long while, which is…
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…
Juice, a coming-of-age picture about a group of four young black men growing up in a New York City ghetto, is the kind of film you root for during the first hour, then pray for during the second. Ernest Dickerson’s movie looks great, of course, but the former cinematographer doesn’t…
Tom Berenger has never been as imposing and remote – or as doggone silly – as he is in At Play in the Fields of the Lord, Hector Babenco’s new film based on the Peter Matthiessen novel of white mischief in the rain forests of South America. Berenger plays Lewis…
When Hollywood producers scan their in-boxes for hot scripts, they look for a story with a “through line.” They’d like you to believe this term refers to a strong, lean narrative that pulls you through the movie and keeps you interested. But it really refers to a concept you can…
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…
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…
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…
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…
It’s hard to talk about what’s wrong with Claude Chabrol’s static retelling of Madame Bovary without mentioning the glossy 1949 version, directed by Hollywood musical master Vincente Minnelli. Few of the nine celluloid stabs at Bovary pleased Flaubert’s fans (Jean Renoir’s 1934 fantasy version probably came close, because it used…
The ads for The Prince of Tides, Barbra Streisand’s latest directorial effort, sell the film as a love story. But the romance feels secondary, because the story’s really about a rangy South Carolina football coach named Tom Wingo (Nick Nolte) struggling to understand how his dysfunctional childhood disfigured the rest…
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…
Bugsy, the biography of Forties gangster Ben “Bugsy” Siegel, the man who built Las Vegas, is directed by Barry Levinson, who knows a thing or two about the way men think; his previous films, including Diner and Tin Men, are about how men relate to one another while ignoring or…
West German writer and director Monika Treut has devoted her film career to a study of sexuality, especially those sexualities viewed as taboo or deviant. Since she selected de Sade’s Juliette and Sacher-Masoch’s Venus In Furs as the primary texts for her Ph.D. thesis, Treut has forged bravely ahead with…
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…
If you’ve started to swallow this generation’s subtle ethnic-assassination campaign – resolving Japan’s dominance of world business by denigrating the Japanese as button-down, honor-bewildered, investment-confounded numberheads – you should probably hop in your Toyota and go see Black Lizard. If you’ve ever hankered for a detective story in which the…
Given: Frank Pesce, Jr., (Anthony LaPaglia), the youngest son of a New York trucker, is the hero of George Gallo’s savvy and affecting new comedy 29th Street, based on a true story about a young man who must come to terms with his family and himself. Prove: Frank Pesce, Jr.,…
Goodfellas may have been his finest movie, but Raging Bull is still the seminal masterpiece that future film students will watch to understand Martin Scorsese. Scorsese directs as if he’s boxing, with a powerful mix of physicality and strategy, and he has an uncanny knack for knowing precisely how to…
Los Angeles may be the City of Angels, but Sharon (Mimi Rogers) – the protagonist of Michael Tolkin’s The Rapture – isn’t one of them. At least not for the first movement of this complex, disturbing film, which slips phantasmagorically from religious parable to suburban adventure to supernatural gothic. Thirtyish…
The hope, I guess, was that phenom Patsy Kensit would light up every corner of Twenty-One, Don Boyd’s saga of how a spirited girl in modern-day London learns to juggle sex, love, and satisfaction. The reality is far different. Though Kensit’s wattage is high – she’s brilliantly blonde and beautiful…
Let’s face it – Danny DeVito is typecast. From Louie DePalma on Taxi to the wife-hating husband in Ruthless People, DeVito has specialized in one role, the greedy, unprincipled moneymaker. Sure, he’s escaped from this sleazebag strangle hold with the occasional sweet dolt (Throw Momma from the Train, One Flew…
In a year in which gangster-movie inflation is at its all-time high, director Robert Benton’s Billy Bathgate has turned a profit, and done it the old-fashioned way – with heartfelt storytelling, inspired camerawork, and impeccable timing. Based on the novel by E.L. Doctorow, Billy Bathgate explores the criminal education of…
