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 ADDICTED TO LOVE. There's so much wrong with this movie
you'd need a chart to explain it all: Among other things, it glorifies
stalking, promotes violence against innocent French people, and
stars Meg Ryan. Matthew Broderick plays a sweet-natured but deeply
deranged astronomer who destroys the life of his ex-fiancée's
new boyfriend (Tchéky Karyo). He's helped in this endeavor
by some illegal listening equipment, his collection of cockroaches,
and a violently unstable woman (Ryan) who was Karyo's last girlfriend.
Of course, while making their ex-beloved's lives miserable, Broderick
and Ryan fall in love. Nonetheless, I couldn't help thinking this
whole plot could have been avoided with a simple restraining order.
--DiGiovanna
BREAKDOWN. This is one of those small, seemingly inconsequential
movies that sneaks in and proves to be worlds more entertaining
than its "blockbuster" competition. The premise is simple
enough: While driving across the desert, yuppie Kurt Russell's
wife Kathleen Quinlan is cleverly kidnapped by yahoos, and Russell
has to save her with few resources and even less information.
Writer/director Jonathan Mostow neatly builds a queasy, stranded-feeling
tension that rarely ebbs, and smartly never lets Russell seem
like anything other than an ordinary guy. The resulting payoffs
are huge, and at its best Breakdown recalls Steven Spielberg's
Duel, or that great cropduster sequence in Hitchcock's
North by Northwest. The lubberly J.T. Walsh adds a healthy
dose of creepiness as a two-faced truck driver. --Woodruff
CITIZEN RUTH. Citizen Ruth puts the fun back in
abortion! Employing hysterical stereotypes of pro-lifers and pro-choicers,
Ruth makes political points without the humorless didacticism
of most message movies. Especially memorable is the pederast leader
of the "Baby-Savers," played by the eternally slimy
Burt Reynolds, who tells the creepy tale of saving his young catamite
from the "abortuary." Not to be missed, unless you're
so easily offended that a bidding war over the life of an unborn
fetus strikes you as "tasteless." --DiGiovanna
CON AIR. Nicholas Cage's muscles star in this testosterone-tinged
tribute to the potency of America's prison populace. Sweating,
glistening, shirtless scalawags and scofflaws commandeer a prison
transport plane for their manly amusement. They cruise the masculine
skies, flexing their rippling torsos in defiance of heterosexual
authority (played by Colm Meaney). However, their Fire Island
of Flight is brought down by Cage's love for his cellmate Baby-0
(Mykelti Williamson). In the final scene, the turgid plane plows
its way into the dirty cleft of the Las Vegas Strip, creating
one of the most powerful and explosive climaxes in cinematic history.
It's mantastic! --DiGiovanna
THE FIFTH ELEMENT. Writer and director Luc Besson sacrifices
sensibility for style in this excessively fashion-designed science
fiction movie. Besson, known for Subway, La Femme Nikita
and The Professional, tries here for a sort of Blade
Runner/Star Wars hybrid but ends up with something closer
to Stargate meets Prêt à Porter. But
it's not just another sci-fi flop--the film has a distinct French
flavor (even hero Bruce Willis' cat looks French)--and you can't
take your eyes off the screen even when it's mind-numbing to watch.
As with The Professional, the story places intense emphasis
on the preternatural beauty of a young woman (Milla Jovovich)
who, this time, is turned into a half-naked, super-powerful-yet-sweetly-vulnerable
Raggedy Ann doll. Gary Oldman once again plays the villain; now
a new-wave Hitler cowboy with buck teeth. If Besson took any of
this seriously, the movie would reek; he didn't, so it's just
an eye-poppingly bizarre experience. --Woodruff
PRISONER OF THE MOUNTAIN. A really good Russian film about
a pair of soldiers captured by mountain people (who are sort of
a warlike, Eastern European version of the Amish), Prisoner
of the Mountain deserves its Academy Award nomination for
best foreign film. Hokey, out-of-date production values combined
with a story that's moving without being manipulative, Prisoner
of the Mountain bears a rough relation to American films from
the 1970s. Not only does one of the leads have a center part and
blow-dried hair, but the general understatement and attention
to detail recalls the days before bad soundtracks dictated the
entire emotional tenor of movies. -- Richter
ROUGH MAGIC. Close your eyes, wish real hard, and maybe
this movie will go away. Bridgette Fonda stars as a peppy, talented
magician being chased by an evil, well-groomed politician because
she's photographed a murder that didn't really happen, or something.
She goes to Mexico, seeks out a Shaman, falls in love--it's the
1940s! This movie is so strange and inconsistent that it is
mesmerizing...mesmerizingly awful. It seems the filmmakers are
aiming for a dose of magical realism, dried-out, reconstituted
and completely misunderstood. Conjure, if you will, Gabriel Garcia
Márquez with his brain partially removed writing a quip-filled
mystery set in the '40s, and you might come close to the recipe
for Rough Magic. --Richter
SPEED 2: CRUISE CONTROL. Almost unwatchable due to the
excessive use of close-ups, shaky hand-held shots and meaningless
strobe lights, this is perhaps the worst film so far this year.
Its only competition is Lost World, and both films follow
the same formula: 20 minutes of setting up nothing followed by
an hour and a half of running, screaming and explosions. Speed
2 does feature the first villain to be driven to criminal
insanity by the lack of insurance regulation, and perhaps the
first to express his villainy by sticking leeches to his chest.
After the bad guy (Willem Dafoe, naturally) gives his requisite
"this is why I'm doing this speech," there isn't much
else in the way of plot, so he repeats the speech every 25 minutes,
just in case we've forgotten. Then again, there's no time for
plot or character development when you've only got two hours of
movie and a virtually unlimited special effects budget. Basically,
this is The Poseidon Adventure, if that film were incredibly
boring and stupid. On the whole, Speed 2 is probably the
best case I've ever seen for strict, Islamic-style censorship
of cinema (i.e., no plots derived from sex or violence allowed).
--DiGiovanna
TRIAL AND ERROR. A predictable, flatline Hollywood legal
comedy (a perfunctory cross between My Cousin Vinny and
Something Wild) without an ounce of bite or innovation.
The leads make the most of a formulaic script dealing with an
actor (Michael Richards) pretending to be a lawyer to fill in
for his high-strung, Type A attorney buddy (Jeff Daniels) who
gets lost in the Nevada desert, falls in love with a beautiful
blonde and discovers all the important things in life. The film
strives for a surface kind of cynicism, only to invoke the Love
Conquers All escape clause in the end. One of the perennial and
most irritating of Hollywood messages: We all need to let our
hair down and stop trying to overachieve in order to find ourselves.
If it's so damn easy to drop all your over-reaching, money grubbing
material ways and fulfill your inner self, then why is Spago double-booked
through the end of the millennium? --Marchant
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