Art imitates art imitates art. How can you not like a film that begins and ends with a roaring gunfight, particularly when the film owes its allegiance to Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” and afterwards encouraged Quinten Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs”?…
Spencer Tracy was a tremendous actor, but he was as badly miscast as Hemingway’s Cuban fisherman in the 1958 version of “The Old Man and the Sea” as John Wayne was as Genghis Khan (“The Conquerer,” 1956). Anthony Quinn is…
No, “Ice Princess” is not about that girl you dated in high school. It’s a lightweight Disney teen drama. The “Ice” part comes in because the main character in the story is a teenage girl who goes from being merely…
The first time I saw the 1991 remake of “Father of the Bride” with Steve Martin, I had my doubts going in. Memories of the original, 1950, Vincente Minnelli movie with Spencer Tracy as the flustered parent of bride-to-be Elizabeth…
One of the few times I’ve known a Director’s Cut to turn a bad film into a good one was “Daredevil.” That hasn’t changed. The new, unrated Director’s Cut of “Gone in Sixty Seconds” contains nine more minutes than the…
It’s hard to believe that screen icon James Dean, whose name is known to probably every filmgoer in the world, starred in only three films before his tragic death in a car accident. When Warner Bros. call their boxed set…
There was a time when Steven Seagal was B-A-A-D in a campy sort of way. Now he’s just bad, and whoever convinced him to make “Submerged” should be severely chastised and held up to public ridicule. Like the film. “Submerged” is…
When you’ve got a good thing, go with it. Which is exactly what Fox studios are doing with some of their more popular recent hit movies by reissuing them in two-disc Collector’s Editions. Basically, this set follows the same pattern…
Nowadays, it’s hard to think of a mystery or suspense thriller that doesn’t include people chasing each other as a lot of stuff around them blows up. But occasionally we’ve gotten a rarity from Hollywood, the intelligent thriller. One such…
Disney’s “Pocahontas” came out the same year, 1995, as Disney/Pixar’s “Toy Story,” and I wonder if the coincidence didn’t signal the beginning of the end for traditional full-length animated features. Although “Pocahontas” did very well at the box office, there…