In Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988, PG), sloppy, brash American con man Steve Martin tramples through the carefully guarded French Riviera territory of elegant charlatan Michael Caine. This, of course, means war. The prize is the easy pickings of the rich widows who pass through the wealthy resort town. The battle? The first to separate an […]
A year after Oliver Stone elevated the phrase “Greed is good” to a satirical double-edged mantra in Wall Street, John Carpenter put it more bluntly in They Live (1988), a scruffy little genre movie with a subversive subtext. “Why do we worship greed?” asks an pirate broadcaster in the opening scenes, as images of homeless […]
Hayao Miyazaki is one of Japan’s living treasures, a beloved filmmaker whose animated films number among the most beautiful and most enchanting productions ever drawn by hand. In this day of CGI productions, the aging artist still personally draws his key frames and defining characters, with a love and craft that comes through every frame. […]
Big (1988) arrived in theaters amidst a spate of films about adults and children swapping bodies. There’s no swap involved in this story—an adolescent boy named Josh makes a wish that he was big on a midway fortune-telling machine and wakes up in the body of Tom Hanks—but this warm-hearted comedy was by far the […]
The midnight run of Martin Brest’s action comedy Midnight Run (1988) refers to what is supposed to be an easy job for skip tracer and bounty hunter Jack Walsh (Robert De Niro). He’s hired to capture Jack “Duke” Mardukas (Charles Grodin), a mild-mannered accountant who stole $15 million from the mob and then skipped out […]
In the Hong Kong action movie explosion of the eighties, when the craziest, most kinetically energetic and narratively surreal action movies were pouring out of the Hong Kong film studios at a breakneck pace, Jackie Chan’s Police Story (Hong Kong, 1985) was one of the films that both defined and redefined the industry while firmly […]
Married to the Mob (1988) – Two years after his breakthrough film Something Wild, Jonathan Demme returned to the genre with another mix of offbeat humor and dangerous criminals. This colorful gangster comedy stars Michelle Pfeiffer as the frustrated wife of mid-level mobster (a very young Alec Baldwin) and Matthew Modine as a dedicated and […]
Another chapter in the cult canon of movies that are so bad that they become inadvertent comedies, Miami Connection (1988) is a gonzo B-movie from the eighties created by Y.K. Kim, a martial arts instructor and inspirational speaker who took his talents to the big screen despite a complete lack of screen charisma or acting […]
