Lethal Weapon 4 was, according to the credits, directed by Richard Donner, but it might as well have been directed by a computer. Here is the perfect summer blockbuster movie in which the formulae perfected in the first three installments in the series are employed once again, the explosions and the hair-breadth escapes are even…
Mark Twain’s America written and directed by Stephen Low is the latest in IMAX 3-D and illustrates that basic critical principle, the law of the inverse relationship between the sophistication of a film’s technique and the quality of its content. The feeble idea on which this movie is based is that you can relate various…
Dr Doolittle, directed by Betty Thomas, stars Eddie Murphy as the eponymous doctor who can talk to the animals. For the nineties, all the whimsy of Hugh Lofting’s literary creation and the earlier film version starring Rex Harrison has given way to post-modern joking as celebrity voices are put into animal mouths and made to…
Don Diego (Anthony Hopkins), the aristocratic settler in Spanish California who dons The Mask of Zorro to fight against his aristocratic brethren and for the people as “Zorro,” the fox, is a man of apparently no politics, though he repeatedly risks his life, no internal conflicts, in spite of being “a traitor to your country…
Amazon, the IMAX film now being shown at the Museum of Natural History in New York, begins with scenes from an old black and white movie of pith-helmeted explorers fighting everything from vicious natives with poison-dart blowguns, to crocodiles to piranha. The picture is a tiny keyhole in the middle of the screen. Then up…
You knew that Mulan, the latest extrusion from the Satanic Mills of the Disney animation shop, had reached its intended audience when you saw the headline of Janet Maslin’s review in the New York Times: “A Warrior, She Takes on Huns and Stereotypes.” Someone ought to do a study on what it is that makes…
So let me get this straight. The sleazy boyfriend (Viggo Mortensen) of the stunning sex- goddess Gwyneth Paltrow, an unhappy wife with a hundred million dollars in her butter-and- egg jar, is going to use this desperate woman — as he has used many desperate and lonely women before — to make half a million…
Dirty Work, directed by Bob Saget, is utterly without redeeming features: boring, stupid and unfunny. Even my two sub-teen boys thought it was bad, and worse than that movies like this do not get.
All Hollywood agrees that anytime someone makes a movie about TV or the media culture it is ipso facto a serious picture. And a picture — like, for instance, Natural Born Killers — which hasn’t a serious bone in its body can be instantly transformed into a serious picture by the addition of a “satirical”…
Beyond Silence, directed by Caroline Link, is one of those tremendously worthy films that deal with handicap and that one had better not say anything bad about because of their great sensitivity and caring. But they illustrate a saying of George Lucas, the director of Star Wars etc, that “emotionally involving the audience is easy….
Un Air de Famille, directed by Cédric Klapisch (While the Cat’s Away) from an original play by Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri, is enormous fun, and I highly recommend it if you are lucky enough to find it opening in your neighborhood. Denis (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) is having affair with Betty (Miss Jaoui) while working for…
Mr Jealousy directed by Noah Baumbach (Kicking and Screaming) is the kind of film that young filmmakers ought to be making, and that I approve of in theory. But I’m afraid it is just not very good. The jokes in this would-be romantic comedy for the ’90s fall mostly short of being funny, the characters…
