That Old Feeling, directed by Carl Reiner, is a vehicle for Bette Midler to do her First Wives’ Club schtick all over again, but this time in the Goldie Hawn role as the over-the-hill starlet, Lilly. Dennis Farina plays her ex-husband, Dan, with whom she is said to have a hostile relationship with nuclear capability….
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…
Pink Flamingos by John Waters (1972), now re-released, is not a film which it is really possible to review. It contains sex scenes, both homo and heterosexual, weird perversions, bestiality, coprophagy, incest, madness, murder, torture, mutilation, rape, kidnapping, cannibalism, and the sale of human babies — and to all of this it invites and (in…
One ought, I think, to be suspicious of films about mental illness. They nearly always call on us to pity and thus to condescend to their characters. Such feelings are not those elicited by great art, which requires us to recognize in the characters an essential likeness to ourselves. But Angel Baby by Michael Rymer,…
Waiting for Guffman is the cheapest of cheap comedy. All it takes is our suspension of disbelief (easy in New York and L.A.) that the rubes in fly-over country could be as witless and unhip as they are presented as being here. Hip is our new class marker: snobbery on the basis of race or…
Grosse Pointe Blank by George Armitage is a high concept movie. A hit man called Martin Blank (John Cusack) goes to his 10 year high school reunion. He tells people matter of factly what he does and they reply by saying something like: “Do you get dental with that?” or “Do you have to do…
Kissed by the young Canadian, Lynne Stopkewich, is one of those made-on-a-shoestring, parents-helping-out, credit-cards-maxed-out sort of films which are so often touted in the press these days. Ms Stopkewich’s parents, at least, can be proud of their daughter’s commercial savvy, since they are certain to get their money back. Visa, too, can breathe a sigh…
The best comment on Howard Stern’s Private Parts came in the New Yorker cartoon that showed one rueful movie-goer saying to the other: “I think I hate liking Howard Stern even more than I liked hating him.” Here he presents himself, with the help of Betty (Brady Bunch) Thomas, as just a good old-fashioned, all-American…
In Donnie Brasco, based, as it is at pains to remind you, on a true story, Mike Newell and his screenwriter, Paul Attanasio, set up a highly interesting conflict with a great deal of skill and then simply slither out of it at the end, leaving the issues they raise unresolved. The excuse for this…
The version of Wolfgang Petersen’s classic Das Boot now arriving in your neighborhood multiplexes is a new director’s cut of the version of 1982 which adds over an hour of original footage to bring the film to an epic three and a half hours in length. The time flies. This is perhaps the best war…
Smilla’s Sense of Snow, based on the novel by Peter Hoeg and directed by Bille August from a screenplay by Ann Biderman, is another film in which far too much is going on. At its most basic, it is about the search by the beautiful young Smilla (Julia Ormond) for the murderer of a six…
Movie illnesses used to be the kind of thing that beautiful young women contracted. The silent killer was sure in its work, but it always left them looking in the pink when they finally breathed their last. They were still beautiful, but now also charged with pathos. Looking on them you might says, as Romeo…
