Full Metal Jacket (1987)

Very Bad Things, written and directed by Peter Berg, aspires to be a black comedy but it forgets to be comic. The title is a true enough description of what is to be found inside, but as none of the bad things are also funny, the movie itself is merely. . .a bad thing. Jon…

Absolute Power is a typical product of the Clint Eastwood line of knock-off existentialist heroes: a vehicle, that is, for yet another mythologization of the high-plains-drifter/man-with-no-name anti-hero whom neither old Clint nor his devoted audience ever seems to get tired of. I got tired of it myself a long time ago, so I should probably…

A film that tries to sell its anti-war message by making American soldiers in Iraq into victim-heroes. Haven’t we seen this somewhere before?

How Stella Got Her Groove Back, directed by Kevin Rodney Sullivan from a screenplay by Terry McMillan and Ron Bass from Miss McMillan’s novel, is a middle-aged woman’s wish-fulfilment fantasy and, unfortunately, little else. I thought at least it might be amusingly bad, but it doesn’t even reach as high as that. Angela Bassett stars…

Suicide Kings directed by Peter O’Fallon attempts without very much success to present a kidnap caper in the manner of the brothers Coen, featuring a lot of crazy plot twists, wise-cracking and otherwise fantastical dialogue and lots of comic criminal incompetence. Christopher Walken plays what has long since become his typecast part, a sinister criminal…

Body Shots, directed by Michael Cristofer and written by David McKenna, is really two movies in one, pulling in opposite directions—a fact which, whether it is intended as a kind of post-modern experiment or simply the result of incompetence, is fatal to its success. The first movie is a sort of latter-day comedy of manners,…