Badlands (1973)

In Anaconda, Danny (Ice Cube), while he is being pursued up the Amazon by a gigantic, man-eating snake and a homocidal river man, dreams of being back in “civilization” — by which he means “on the L.A. freeways with my cell phone.” Ha! If you’ve got to choose between the giant snake and the river…

Anywhere But Here, Wayne Wang’s adaptation to the screen of a novel by Mona Simpson, is a total chick-flick but still worth seeing for the terrific performances of Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman as the mother and daughter whose troubled relationship it is all about. In fact, the greatness of these two performances rather exaggerates…

Follow your bliss, middle-aged America! Quit your job, speak your mind, buy that muscle car you’ve always wanted. Start smoking pot again. Buff up and start an affair with a teenage girl. You may die for it, but you will die happy. Where have we heard this before? Periodically, the popular culture becomes receptive to…

Firestorm is the kind of picture which it would be nice to be able to encourage with a sympathetic review. It is the story of heroic men—in this case the legendary “smoke jumpers” who parachute into forest fires to help put them out—fighting against both nature and bad guys and prevailing against both. Nor is…

An inspirational tribute to European unity from a director who is clearly capable of better things