The new Gus Van Sant film Good Will Hunting is like an adolescent’s fantasy of being tougher and smarter and more misunderstood than anybody else. It’s also touchy-feely with a vengeance. Is this the same director who made Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy? Those films had a fresh way of…

You can’t exactly call Alien Resurrection a pleasurable experience, but, then again, you wouldn’t say that about its predecessors, either. Directed by the Frenchman Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who previously co-directed Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children with Marc Caro, this fourth installment in the Alien onslaught is once again designed…

A glance at the cast list for the new Sidney Lumet hospital drama Critical Care might lead you to expect an embarrassment of riches. Instead, the results are often just plain embarrassing. How could a film starring James Spader, Helen Mirren, Albert Brooks, Kyra Sedgwick, Anne Bancroft, Jeffrey Wright, Wallace…

In Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, based on the late Robert Heinlein’s 1959 sci-fi opus, the killer arachnids upstage the humans. Not that it’s much of a contest, since the humans are all raging dullards. We’ve seen these young men and women with their square jaws and pert noses emoting their…

Stylishness without substance can become wearying real fast. Twenty minutes into A Life Less Ordinary, the new movie from the producing-directing-writing team of Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, I was already into overload. It’s not that director Danny Boyle doesn’t have imagination. It’s just that sometimes imagination is all he has…

Seven Years in Tibet feels more like Seven Days in the Movie Theater. It refuses to come to life–not even when Brad Pitt, as hirsute as a yak, wanders the frozen Himalayas with an Austrian accent that probably gave his dialogue coach the hives. It’s an epic about how an…

The Peacemaker is the first feature from DreamWorks, the studio headed by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. It stars George Clooney and Nicole Kidman, and it’s about terrorists who steal Russian nukes. As an intelligence officer with the U.S. Army’s Special Forces, Clooney gets to model his jutting…

The 1950s-era Los Angeles of L.A. Confidential is Noir Central. Its denizens are tattooed in shadow; the play of light and dark in the streets, the police stations and the morgues, is fetishistic. The post-war L.A. touted in the travelogues and billboards is a boomtown, but what we actually see…

The Game is a puzzle picture, and beyond its premise, there isn’t much you can divulge without giving the show away. I’m not one of those critics who like to write Stop reading now if you plan to see this movie, so I’m tempted to wrap things up right now…

If you’re nostalgic for the cockeyed let-it-all-out gabfests of the late John Cassavetes, She’s So Lovely will seem like dejà vu all over again. Cassavetes wrote the script more than a decade ago, and now his son Nick–whose first feature, Unhook the Stars, starred his mother, Gena Rowlands–has directed it…

The cops in Cop Land carry on like a bunch of goombahs. On the take from the Mob, they mimic the Mob. The fuzzy line dividing cops and crooks is the subject of many a strong police movie, but Cop Land goes a step further–it says there is no line…

Not satisfied with the president you have? Here’s Harrison Ford’s James Marshall in Air Force One–Vietnam War hero, straight as a ramrod, devoted husband and father. We first see him delivering a speech before a roomful of Russian dignitaries. Departing from the prepared, wishy-washy text, Mr. President fire-breathes his new…

The special effects in the sci-fi comedy Men in Black are an orgy of animatronics, mechanical effects, practical effects, miniatures, computer enhancements, makeup–the whole shebang. The film’s mishmash of tones, from goofball to horrific, is equally all over the map. The trailer for the movie promised a great big Ghostbusters-style…

Bring earplugs to Batman & Robin. A pair of noseplugs wouldn’t hurt, either. The fourth installment in the Batman franchise is one long head-splitting exercise in clueless cacophony that makes you feel as though you’re being held hostage in some haywire Planet Hollywood while sonic booms pummel your auditory canal…

Here are the Joys of Summer…and the Oys of Summer, the nearly 100 movies scheduled to open between now and the end of August. Many of them may even make it to Denver. They’re listed in the order of their L.A. release: May 30 Drunks. Peter Cohn’s look at the…

The appearance of The Lost World: Jurassic Park carries a double burden. Not only is it the sequel to the most popular movie ever made but it is also the first film Steven Spielberg has directed since 1993’s Schindler’s List. Now that he has finally won his Oscar and achieved…

Gummy with heartfelt folderol and overbearingly chummy, Fathers’ Day comes across like a feature-length expansion of its sniffle-and-giggle trailer. Prior to this teaming, Robin Williams and Billy Crystal had never been in a movie together–though, along with Whoopi Goldberg, they appear together annually on the televised Comic Relief fundraiser–so there…

In The Fifth Element, the all-knowing, all-powerful Supreme Being of the Universe turns out to be Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), an orange-haired babe in a skimpy, Band-Aid-thin mod outfit who speaks in a kind of Slavic scat and cries a lot. It’s as if the filmmakers started out to make a…

If you’re hankering to see a movie that sends up swinging ’60s London and Carnaby Street and vintage James Bond movies, don’t bother to check out Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. What the movie mostly sends up is its star and screenwriter, Michael Myers. That’s not all bad: Myers…

Volcano is set in Los Angeles, and audiences get high watching the city crash and burn. For L.A. haters, Volcano could prove a peak experience. You don’t even have to hate L.A. to enjoy it–love/hate will do. That’s why the film closes with Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.,” a facetious…

There are way too many movies about hit men, but that shouldn’t dissuade you from seeing Grosse Pointe Blank. It’s not quite like any other movie–let alone one about a hit man. That may be because it’s a hit-man movie crossed with a high-school-reunion comedy, and the two genres mesh…

When Val Kilmer walked away from the Batman franchise, it was only a matter of time before he offered up his own competing brand. The Saint isn’t just his answer to Batman–it’s a full-length commercial for all the Saint movies to come. There’s a breezy effrontery in the ploy; Kilmer…