Bovie Movie

The Temple of Doom saw the Indiana Jones series lurch off the rails a little, but all was restored with this third movie. The masterstroke here was the introduction of Sean Connery as Indy’s crotchety dad, and the snappy by-play between him and Harrison Ford adds a wonderful new twist to the adventure. The quest this time is for the Holy Grail, no less, and finds Jones reunited with old chums, such as Marcus Brody (played by Denholm Elliott), and old enemies, namely the Nazis (allied with Julian Glover’s American collector). As usual, the action is on an epic scale and delivered with breathless enthusiasm and much panache by director Steven Spielberg. There’s also a neat sequence at the beginning with River Phoenix as the young Indy that explains such things as our hero’s fear of snakes and that scar on his chin. 

Director Oliver Stone continued his Vietnam trilogy with this biographical drama, a masterpiece of film-making that occupies a much broader canvas than its predecessor, Platoon. It stars Tom Cruise as Ron Kovic, the all-American boy who enlists in the marines because he loves his country. The Stars and Stripes flies proudly in his home town. Then he is hideously wounded, endures the rat-infested hell of a veterans’ hospital and comes home to find the Stars and Stripes being burned in the streets. He drops out and goes to Mexico, then returns to America to conduct an antiwar campaign from his wheelchair. The story is based on the autobiography of Kovic and Stone himself did two tours of duty in Vietnam, and the movie fairly reeks of their experience and regret. Stone had won the director’s Oscar for Platoon and he won it again for his powerful work here. Sadly, Cruise had to settle for a nomination, but his transformation from golden boy to ravaged and embittered paraplegic is utterly convincing. 

This small, unassuming movie went up against the big guns of Hollywood and emerged with a best picture Oscar and a hefty profit. Based on the 1987 one-act play by Alfred Uhry, it charts the deepening relationship between an elderly widow and her black chauffeur in Atlanta. Miss Daisy, played by the Oscar-winning Jessica Tandy, is a strong-willed former schoolteacher whose independence is curtailed when she crashes her new car and cannot get insurance on another. So her son (Dan Aykroyd) arranges a permanent chauffeur, the widower Hoke, played by Morgan Freeman. Although Miss Daisy is Jewish and regards herself as without racial prejudice, Hoke must gradually win acceptance and put up with her tirades from the back of the gleaming Hudson. The story covers the years from 1948 to 1973 — a period of racial strife and the civil rights movement — attaining the status of allegory in the process. But Australian director Bruce Beresford, who was unaccountably left out of the Oscar nominations, does not push things over the edge; although we see and hear events about Martin Luther King and the violence of the period, this remains a character study, and a superb one. Tandy ages from 72 to 97 and comes across as a stubborn, tetchy but extremely likeable woman. And Freeman, who was in the Broadway stage version, adds layers of irony and wit to what could so easily have been a role of suffering saintliness. 

Timothy Dalton is better in Licence to Kill than in his first James Bond endeavor (The Living Daylights), but he still seems uncomfortable on the right side of the law. This time around, Bond is working on his own rather than on behalf of the British Secret Service. His American friend Felix Leiter (David Hedison), an agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration, has been seriously injured by drug dealer Robert Davi, and 007 is out for blood. There is precious little time for the usual Bondian quippery and directorial campiness, resulting in a marked increase in bloodletting (including the “implosion” of secondary villain Anthony Zerbe). A climactic highway chase involving an oil tanker and a helicopter is stretched slightly beyond its value, but is still one of the best action setpieces in any Bond film. Licence to Kill was a refreshingly serious change of pace for the series, albeit one that tended to lessen Bond’s box-office value.

This charming and disarming family film offers wish fulfilment to all but the most cynical of youngsters. Rebecca Harrell plays a nine-year-old girl, recovering from the death of her mother, who finds an injured reindeer and thinks it belongs to Santa Claus. Unfortunately, her grief-stricken father (Sam Elliott) is struggling to save their farm from the bailiffs and has little patience with his daughter’s attempt to nurse the beast. Sentimental without being mawkish, with the grown-ups given as much character as the children, this is lump-in-the-throat stuff from start to finish. 

Avant-garde director Peter Greenaway’s most accessible film to date is a truly elegant, shocking and transfixing experience. A Jacobean drama in contemporary clothing, this savage indictment of greed, power and control in today’s wannabe society finds Helen Mirren memorably strutting her stuff in another risky, and risqué, performance, while manic Michael Gambon portrays evil personified. Memorably scored by Michael Nyman, Greenaway’s stunning “designer dream” is sick, sexy and rude in about equal provocative proportions and totally unforgettable. 

A career criminal who has been deformed since birth is given a new face by a kindly doctor and paroled from prison. It appears that he has gone straight, but he is really planning his revenge on the man who killed his father-figure and sent him to prison.

This dreadful comedy stars Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor in their third movie together, and it manages to waste both men’s ability and bore and deeply offend most viewers at the same time. Quite a feat. Their characters are deaf and blind respectively, and the movie hinges on a series of appalling jokes and unoriginal situations, wrapped around a makeshift murder plot. As well as being an original comic talent, Richard Pryor has also had the dubious distinction of appearing in a plethora of truly execrable movies, and this is certainly one of them. 

Having run out of inventive gags and originality by the final scene of the very first Police Academy, the series had overstayed its welcome long before this fifth sequel by stretching a thin premise to breaking point. Aside from the vocal gymnastics of Michael Winslow, this laughter-free zone couldn’t even get itself arrested for indecency, unlike our own far superior Carry Ons. 

This tense, glossy and violent thriller stars Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia as New York cops on assignment in Japan where yakuza gangsters wield razor-sharp swords and where Kate Capshaw hangs out in a nightclub à la Marlene Dietrich. This being a Ridley Scott film, the atmosphere is so hyped up that the picture threatens to burst an artery every second, and Jan De Bont’s photography (he went on to direct Speed and Twister ) delights in the neon-lit locations and makes the city of Osaka look like a vision of hell. Beneath all this is a very conventional cop thriller that makes an occasional comment about Japan’s economic miracle following Hiroshima.