What is it they say? That even a flea can reach Mount Olympus riding in Pegasus's mane? Well, in the case of the new Albert Brooks comedy The Muse, Brooks is the flea and Pegasus is his delectable co-star, Sharon Stone. But I get ahead of myself. In The Muse,...

Filmmaker Bobby Bowfinger, the lead character in the intermittently funny Hollywood satire Bowfinger, starring Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy, has a dream. Nothing so grand as an Academy Award or even a table down front at the Golden Globes. No, when Bowfinger (Steve Martin) allows his fantasies to run wild,...

One of our leading men's fashion magazines runs a column every month titled "What Were We Thinking?" in which it presents a ludicrous photograph of a famous person dressed in what the magazine had earlier decreed a style that every hip cat would soon be wearing. It's my guess that...

Runaway Bride, the long-anticipated reunion of Pretty Woman, starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, isn't a sequel, but it feels like one. In everything, there is a distinct sense of predestination, of events occurring according to some irresistible force of the inevitable. This makes life especially easy for Garry Marshall,...

Eyes Wide Shut, the final motion picture from the late, great Stanley Kubrick, is easily the most anticipated adult film of the year. It's The Phantom Menace for grown-ups. Kubrick made only thirteen features in his 46-year career, but his death in March (just after the movie's completion) and the...

Do you feel snug and secure in your cozy suburban life? Are you happy in your picture-perfect home, with your carefully manicured lawn, your kids and your soccer games and barbecues? Do you feel safe? Well, the creators of Arlington Road, the ponderous new thriller starring Jeff Bridges and Tim...

It won't take long for anyone familiar with the television original to notice that something is not right with the listless Barry Sonnenfeld-directed film version of Wild Wild West. Yes, the film features Will Smith in the role of James West, with Kevin Kline as his cerebral sidekick, Artemus Gordon...

Simon West, the director of The General's Daughter, the new thriller starring John Travolta and Madeleine Stowe, likes the kind of close-ups that bore into an actor's face, exposing every clogged pore and mascara smudge. In the film, his camera also tracks in to capture the thick layer of sweat...

Bernardo Bertolucci's Besieged is a movie of enthralling visual poetry. Set almost entirely within a ravishing Roman villa, the film is a love story played out in furtive glances and stolen looks by characters on opposite sides of the ethnic divide. Culturally, Mr. Kinsky (David Thewlis) and Shandurai (Thandie Newton)...

In an early scene in Instinct, released by Touchstone, a division of Disney's Buena Vista Pictures, we're told that a brilliant primatologist named Ethan Powell (played by Anthony Hopkins) is being brought back to the United States from Rwanda, where for several years he has been engaged in a close...

In Pushing Tin, the edgy new comedy from British director Mike Newell, the dominant image is a black screen pulsing with obscure fluorescent markings, like the characters on some early prototype of Pac-Man. In this case, though, nobody's playing any games. The markings represent very real jet airliners filled with...

Imagine, if you will, one of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby's classic road movies that never leaves the terminal and you have pretty much described Life, the strikingly uneventful new comedy starring Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence. It's their own Road to Nowhere. Life, which was directed by Ted Demme...

Courage comes in an infinite variety of forms and faces, but who among us would be brave enough to go back and relive our high school years, face the horrors of homeroom and confront hallways so fraught with danger that the most treacherous battlefield would look as placid as a...

There's an old adage that says by the age of forty, a man gets the face he deserves. If that's true, then Clint Eastwood, the producer, director and star of the death-row thriller True Crime, must have committed a capital offense or two of his own. To call it "lived...