Fontaine's Film Wipe

The thing that made the original 1987 "Robocop" special was its unpredictability. MGM's 2014 reboot lacks that trait, and reveals that its makers didn't understand the original as well as they should have. But the remake manages to finesse some special moments of its own into its otherwise lackluster narrative, which saves it from being the bomb it was precariously close to becoming.  Part of the genius of Paul Verhoeven's film was its casting; Peter Weller is an offbeat personality with strange features and a deep, leaden delivery, and he was born to play programmable fuzz. Verhoeven wisely allowed elements of dark comedy and schlock horror into his script, and included gory and ironic scenes of a radically disfigured criminal being bashed apart by a moving vehicle and a malevolent robot murdering an unsuspecting suit in a boardroom demonstration gone awry. Weller's character is himself murdered by scuzzy crooks, but what remains of him is revived in a new fo...

Ever wonder what kind of people find pleasure in rest-stop sexual hijinks? I would be wondering too, if I weren't so busy wondering why it took three people to write Rebekah McKendry's "Glorious."  This is a low-budget movie, yet the screenplay money was divvied three ways. Bad economics, and even worse when you consider the outcome. The film stars five people, only four of which appear on screen, and what it lacks in casting it fails to make up for in story. I was five minutes into "Glorious" when I figured out who Wes, the main character, really is. Spoiler, he isn't just another innocent guy who gets lost trying to reconnect with his ex-girlfriend.  I had him pegged down to the last detail before he even set foot in his little roadside hell, and figuring the character out that early, and that thoroughly, made the rest of the movie a total slog. If you graduated from middle school and know how many dimes are in a dollar, you'll figure it out too. T...

If Steven Spielberg couldn't direct a good sequel to the original "Jurassic Park" (1993), what makes us think anyone else can? "Jurassic World Dominion" isn't a terrible movie, but it isn't very good. It inhabits a weird middle ground of a thin story and pointless special effects that are nonetheless conjoined into something entertaining enough to distract the viewer from the real world for two-plus hours. With a summer blockbuster, that's all you can ask for. (Thirty years ago you could expect a bit more.)  It struck me while watching this movie that every sequel in this franchise makes the same critical mistake: the dinosaurs get far too much screen time. Spielberg knew in 1993 that the only way to generate suspense was to hook audiences with brief glimpses of extinct reptiles, and intersperse them with languorous scenes of humans engaged in eco-management discussions. There was tension buildup in having Dr. Ian Malcolm explain chaos theory to Dr. ...

It's safe to say that every movie lover should view "Orlando." The reason is simple: movies immortalize the people that are in them, and no movie deals with the subject of immortality better than this one.  There isn't really a serious story here. There is no logic animating the things we are shown. Instead, Sally Potter ("The Man Who Cried") directed a film about a young man who decides to live forever, and makes good on his decision. It's an interesting idea that raises the question, what if we could choose to not die? What if the inevitability of death were an illusion, and a conscious sidestep meant one could enjoy a biblical lifespan of many centuries, and without showing any wrinkles? The question is culled from Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel,  Orlando: A Biography , but there are no bookish pretensions here. "Orlando" stars a naturally ageless Tilda Swinton as a young nobleman in seventeenth century England who is given the ultimate pep...

"Have you ever noticed how transparent people are when you really look at them?" So asks Sam Dodsworth, the retired president of Dodsworth Motors. He's speaking to the man who has been seeing Fran, his wife, behind his back. The affair blossomed after she'd asked her husband if she could spend some alone time in Europe. She'd arrived in Paris with Sam, and he'd gone home without her, but then suspected things were amiss and had a colleague spy on her to confirm her infidelity. Having returned from America to confront them, one thing is now crystal clear: Dodsworth doesn't suffer fools.  I enjoy this movie's story, but also love it as a character study of Walter Huston's Sam and Ruth Chatterton's Fran. From the very first shot, which is stylistically a precursor to the cinematography of the soon-to-follow Citizen Kane, Sam is portrayed as a living emblem of the American Dream. He and his car manufacturing company, which he ruefully leaves at the...

The last thing I expected from a "Predator" movie was a period piece, but with "Prey," that's exactly what I got. The story takes place in 1719, about three-hundred years before the events of the first film, and instead of muscled Vietnam veterans hoisting hand cannons in a tropical rainforest, our heroes are axe-wielding Native Americans of the Comanche Tribe in the region that became Nebraska or Wyoming. I don't think I've ever seen a more original backdrop for an entry in a schlocky sci-fi horror franchise, and director Dan Trachtenberg and writer Patrick Aison wisely made the time and place main characters in their film. But the true star is Naru, the young Comanche healer who dreams of being a hunter, played by 25 year-old Amber Midthunder in what ought to be her breakthrough role.  I've seen Midthunder in only one other film, 2021's "The Marksman," in which she has a tiny part as a clerk in a gas station. Her list of movie credits...

There's a disdain for the past that burned through my experience of seeing "Licorice Pizza," and it was an unpleasant enough aspect of the film that it ruined it for me. One might mistakenly think that writer and director Paul Thomas Anderson's cinematic rendition of 1973 in the San Fernando Valley is based on the 52 year-old's personal impressions, but he's too young to have remembered any details of the time period that he depicts. What he offers instead is a bizarre reimagining of the landscape. This isn't a 1973 of women married by 25 and teens with weed and rock music on the brain. This is bizarro 1973, where a 25 year-old single Jewish woman is hectored with obscenities by her Jewish dad for coming home late (and where apparently only Jews are circumcised), where the 1978 Chris Norman and Suzi Quatro song "Stumblin' In" is on the airwaves, where California police send their collars cross-country to Attica, and where teenagers are so wel...