A guilty pleasure but nothing more, Sliver is a tame thriller, made at the height of Sharon Stone's fame as she rode high off the back of Basic Instinct. Where Sliver goes wrong though is in effectively trying to transpose the elements that made Stone's name into the film (right down to getting Basic Instinct scribe Joe Ezterhas to pen the script) It doesn't work, but ...
Anybody seen Keanu? The action star of Speed opted out of this overbearing sequel, which finds co-star Sandra Bullock in love with another guy (Jason Patric) and in trouble aboard a cruise ship under the control of a mad extortionist (Willem Dafoe). Speed director Jan de Bont is back at the helm for part 2, but even he seems to have forgotten that what made the first film work was the ...
Matthew Broderick makes up for years of wet-noodle performances with his low-key but unsparing characterisation of Jim McAllister, a high-school teacher at George Washington Carver High School in Omaha, Nebraska. Driven by a strange mixture of loathing and lust for pathologically overachieving student Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon), McAllister encourages a dim but popular athlete, Paul (Chris ...
Annette Bening is the stand-out highlight in this dysfunctional "family" comedy based on the bestselling memoir by Augusten Burroughs. Although fans of the book may be slightly disappointed with the film's uneven and somewhat campy rendition of Burroughs' twisted adolescence in the 1970s, there's plenty of pleasure to be found in the work of an excellent cast led by Bening, who gives a subtle ...
Writer-director of Loser, Amy Heckerling, has a way with teen comedies, from Fast Times at Ridgemont High to Clueless. She manages to take the clichés of life in school and spin them into cinematic gold. Part of her secret is that she genuinely seems to respect all of her characters, even the unsavoury ones. In Loser, Paul Tannek (Jason Biggs from American Pie) ...