Good Morning Vietnam is a more than usually human take on America's most controversial war, an often poignant and always entertaining fictionalisation of the Vietnam years of DJ Adrian Cronauer (Robin Williams). Cronauer is employed as the voice of the US Armed Forces radio in South East Asia, but it soon emerges that his idea of entertaining the troops and the Army's are poles apart. This ...
An effective exercise in "confined cinema", Panic Room is a finely crafted thriller that ultimately transcends the thinness of its premise. David Koepp's screenplay is basically Wait Until Dark on steroids, so director David Fincher (Seven, The Game) compensates with elaborate CGI-assisted camera moves, jazzing up his visuals. A relocated New York divorcée (Jodie ...
A comedy thriller with a silken thread of romance, 1987's Stakeout stars Richard Dreyfuss and Emilio Estevez as a pair of undercover cops assigned to watch the apartment of the former girlfriend (Madeleine Stowe) of a violent escaped convict. Complications ensue when Dreyfuss' cop poses as a telephone inspector to get in and bug the girlfriend's phone and they strike up a relationship. ...
A well-oiled Jean-Claude Van Damme makes his starring debut in what may be one of the few kickboxing films to be based on a true story. The Muscles from Brussels plays Frank Dux, the first Westerner ever to win the extreme "whupfest" known as the Kumatai (a long-running, no-holds-barred fighting tournament in Hong Kong). While a bit deficient in the script department (to say the least), this ...
There's a kind of perverse marketing genius at work in this cheesy sci-fi hit from 1995 in which scientists create a half-human, half-alien woman named Sil (Natasha Henstridge) who's capable of morphing from a slimy, tentacled creature into a blonde babe with the body of a Playboy centrefold. This makes it easy for Sil to lure gullible guys who are only too willing to indulge her voracious mating ...
For a film confined almost entirely to one tiny location, Phone Booth has been the centre of a lot of off-screen action: changing lead man from Will Smith to Jim Carrey to Colin Farrell, with various directors attached, and finally postponed as a result of the Washington Sniper attacks--and all this before its release. Still, Larry Cohen's taut 80-minute script finally hits the screens and, ...
There's a kind of perverse marketing genius at work in this cheesy sci-fi hit from 1995 in which scientists create a half-human, half-alien woman named Sil (Natasha Henstridge) who's capable of morphing from a slimy, tentacled creature into a blonde babe with the body of a Playboy centrefold. This makes it easy for Sil to lure gullible guys who are only too willing to indulge her voracious mating ...