Before Harrison Ford assumed the mantle of playing Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan hero in Patriot Games, Alec Baldwin took a swing at the character in this John McTiernan film and hit one to the fence. If less instantly sympathetic than Ford, Baldwin is in some respects more interesting and nuanced as Ryan, and drawing comparisons between both actors' performances can make for some interesting ...
Because Hamburger Hill was released less than a year after Oliver Stone's Platoon and within months of Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, this exceptionally well-made film about one of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War was largely overshadowed and overlooked. It's a pity, because in some respects this is the best of the Vietnam films of the late 1980s, at least in ...
This "To Ma'am with Love" is much more an escapist popcorn movie than the inner-city document its marketing suggested. Michelle Pfeiffer plays real-life former Marine Louanne Johnson, a high school English teacher who meets resistance from kids and administration alike at a tough urban school in Northern California. Pfeiffer is good and her character's overall development even survives various ...
Before Harrison Ford assumed the mantle of playing Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan hero in Patriot Games, Alec Baldwin took a swing at the character in this John McTiernan film and hit one to the fence. If less instantly sympathetic than Ford, Baldwin is in some respects more interesting and nuanced as Ryan, and drawing comparisons between both actors' performances can make for some interesting ...
Let's see--he has been Han Solo in three films and Indiana Jones in three more. So why shouldn't Harrison Ford take on a new continuing character in Tom Clancy's CIA analyst Jack Ryan? In this film, directed by Phillip Noyce, Ford picked up the baton when Alec Baldwin, who played Ryan in The Hunt for Red October, opted for a Broadway role instead. In this film, Ryan and his family are on ...
Painted in mile-wide strokes of black satirical comedy, The Last Supper turns intolerance into a parlour trick, then repeats it ad nauseam in case we missed the joke. Still, redundancy can be fun when applied to the pre-meditated murder of right-wing extremists by self-righteous left-wing zealots. Director Stacy Title is an equal-opportunity offender, never taking sides. The grisly high ...
Space Cowboys is a slice of cornball Americana that's so much fun you'll be tempted to stand up and salute. Director and co-star Clint Eastwood manages to turn what might have been ludicrous into a jubilant tribute to age and experience, and Space Cowboys succeeds as two movies in one--a comedy about retired pilots given one last shot at glory and an Apollo 13-like thriller ...
A Sylvester Stallone vehicle, D-Tox thinks it is inventive, earnest and serious, but it is actually just extremely dull and formulaic. Following the death of his girlfriend at the hands of a twisted serial killer, hard-nosed cop Frank Malloy (the in-need-of-a-hit Stallone) turns to drink. He then checks in to a remote, futuristic rehab clinic for cops to confront both his demons and the ...
Huckleberry Finn's age has been scaled down in this 1993 Disney film in order to accommodate star Elijah Wood's young years at the time. But that is not the only concession Mark Twain's great American novel must make to Disney revisionism. Wood's Huck, as adapted for the screen by writer-director Stephen Sommers, is all rascal and only nominally a philosopher, which takes a lot of the soul out of ...