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By Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman is a film critic for EW

THE ADDAMS FAMILY (PG-13) They're creepy and they're predictable? Mysterious and rather tame? The big-screen version of ''The Addams Family'' turns out to be the sitcom with better set design. True, the casting is nifty: Anjelica Huston as Morticia (a honey-voiced torture freak), Raul Julia as Gomez, Christopher Lloyd -- done up in makeup that makes Zippy the Pinhead look like Prince Charming -- as Fester. Best of all is the scene-stealing Christina Ricci, who plays Wednesday with the adorable, saucer-eyed disengagement of a demon child from Neptune. So why isn't the movie more fun? For one thing, there's almost no story. More than that, it's the same joke over and over: Those Addamses, they sure are wacky and cold-blooded and macabre! Before long, the kookiness grows fatally quaint. C+

ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS (G) Chintzy hokum about a brother and sister who hatch a yuletide plan to bring their estranged folks together. D

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (G) A well-crafted Disney animation that never quite finds its heart. Belle, a beautiful young bookworm, is taken prisoner by the Beast, an enchanted prince who falls in love with her. What's missing? Mostly, the Beast. He should be a figure of haunting, monstrous poignance. But as realized by the Disney animators and voiced by Robby Benson, he just comes across as a rather grouchy bison. For all its charm, humor, and dazzling visual artistry, the movie lacks the core of enraptured yearning that marked Snow White, Bambi, and 1989's The Little Mermaid. B

BLACK ROBE (R) There are moments of cool, heightened clarity in this missionary movie directed by Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy). Set in the early 17th century, it centers on a dour, ascetic Jesuit priest, Father Laforgue (Lothaire Bluteau) -- a man who has never really lived inside his own body -- who journeys to a missionary outpost deep in the icy Canadian wilderness. Accompanying him are several Algonquin Indians, notably the savvy, cynical chief Chomina (August Schellenberg). For a while, the film is fascinatingly unsentimental in its depiction of the spiritual and perceptual gulf that separates Laforgue from his Native North American guides. But when the characters are captured and tortured by a tribe of Iroquois, an exploitative edge creeps in: Since we haven't gotten to know any of the Iroquois as individuals, they just seem like generic savages. Beresford, too, adopts such a detached, ''objective'' tone that the movie actually grows more remote as it goes on. B-

CAPE FEAR (R) Martin Scorsese has made a hypnotically engrossing thriller that spins along on the dreams and anxieties of its characters. Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte), a slick, prosperous attorney, lives with his wife (Jessica Lange) and teenage daughter (Juliette Lewis) in the picturesque Southern town of New Essex. Enter Max Cady (Robert De Niro), a vicious redneck who has just served 14 years in prison. He has come to wreak vengeance on Sam, the lawyer who defended him but buried a crucial piece of evidence. Scorsese fuses his obsessions with sin, brutality, and salvation into a throat-grabbing moral melodrama. A

CURLY SUE (PG) John Hughes gives in to his gushy, ''sincere'' side. A homeless waif (Alisan Porter) and her guardian (James Belushi) are taken in by a yuppie divorce lawyer (Kelly Lynch) who doesn't understand the importance of Feelings. The movie is mechanical and almost unbearably treacly. D-

FOR THE BOYS (R) Do audiences really want to watch a 148-minute historical musical about two people who don't like each other? Eddie Sparks (James Caan) and Dixie Leonard (Bette Midler) first meet on a USO tour in England in 1942. Onstage, they're in perfect synch. Offstage, the spunky, combative edge that fuels their act congeals into sour backbiting. The movie, which takes them from World War II to Korea to Vietnam and finally to their big, gala reunion in the present day, is a scattershot pastiche: ''A Star Is Born'' meets ''Beaches'' meets ''The Sunshine Boys'' meets ''Platoon.'' Midler and Caan go at their roles with energy and snap. The script, though, is just a skittery series of episodes, and there's so little actually going on between the two characters that the movie never hits the requisite pitch of emotional extravagance. C+

LIFE IS SWEET (Unrated) Mike Leigh's lovely, small comedy about a lower-middle-class family living amid the dreary comfort of Middlesex, England. The central character is Nicola (Jane Horrocks), the family's outrageously unhappy misfit daughter. Raising her upper lip in a disgusted sneer, telling people off in her vicious, croaky rasp, she seems, at first, a joke. As the movie goes on, though, her barbed edges begin to soften and blur into those of a human being, and Horrocks gives what may be the most moving performance of the year. Leigh scrambles up drama, satire, and slapstick into lyrical kitchen-sink farce. He creates such a strong sense of his characters as fluky individuals that even his most lackadaisical scenes are alive with possibility. A-

LITTLE MAN TATE (PG) Jodie Foster's sweet, middling fable about a child genius (Adam Hann-Byrd) whose precocious intellect can't win him the thing he longs for most: a friend. C+

MY GIRL (PG) Yes, this is the movie in which Macaulay Culkin kicks the bucket -- and no, the big event won't be nearly as devastating to little ones (at least, not to those over the age of 8) as, say, Bambi's mother getting gunned down by hunters. Culkin isn't actually the star. He plays the best friend of Vada Sultenfuss (Anna Chlumsky), an exuberantly smart and creative 11-year-old who happens to have death on the brain: Her father, the kindly, distracted Harry (Dan Aykroyd), is a mortician who does his embalming right in the basement. The cast is uniformly appealing, and there are some sweet, funny moments. ''My Girl,'' though, unfolds in TV Land, that clean, well-lighted place where there isn't a tragedy that can't be resolved in 17 minutes. The movie takes the experience of an audacious, conflicted child and reduces it to: She needs to Confront Her Feelings. C+

THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS (R) If there were any truth in advertising, this would have been called The Not Very Scary Movie Set Inside a Grungy, Badly Lit House. D


Posted Dec 13, 1991 | Published in issue #96 Dec 13, 1991 | Order Article Reprints