Michael Caruana Movies

Television sitcom star Tim Allen made his big screen debut with this light, family-friendly holiday comedy. Allen stars as Scott Calvin, the divorced dad of Charlie (Eric Lloyd). Scott is distressed to learn that his ex-wife Laura (Wendy Crewson) and Charlie's psychiatrist stepfather Neal (Judge Reinhold) have informed his son that there is no Santa Claus. While a sullen Charlie visits his dad on Christmas Eve, a noise on the roof brings them outside, where Scott startles the intruder, who tumbles from the roof. It turns out that there is a Santa after all, and Scott has just accidentally killed him. Because of a legal technicality known as "the Santa clause," Scott inherits the jolly old elf's job. As the next year passes, Scott rapidly gains weight, grows a white beard and meets the elf Bernard (David Krumholtz) -- who is the one who really runs the North Pole -- while Charlie regains his Christmas spirit. However, Neal becomes concerned about Scott's sudden change in appearance and insistence that he's Santa, and he forces him to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. Director John Pasquin previously directed Allen in the TV series Home Improvement and would team with him again for Jungle 2 Jungle (1997). ~ Karl Williams, Rovi

This cinematic/literary hybrid fuses motifs from Beat writer William S. Burroughs's novel of the same name with elements of the author's biography and plenty of the cerebral alienation and biomorphic special effects fans of creepy cult director David Cronenberg have come to expect. Bill Lee (Peter Weller) wants to write, but he exterminates bugs to pay the bills. His wife, Joan (Judy Davis), becomes addicted to Bill's bug powder dust, and soon he joins her in a world of unorthodox hallucinogens; he visits the kindly yet sinister Dr. Benway (Roy Scheider) and walks away with his first dose of the black meat -- a narcotic made from the flesh of the giant aquatic Brazilian centipede. Soon, monstrous beetles are whispering conspiracy theories in Bill's ears and his nebbish writer friends Hank (Nicholas Campbell) and Martin (Michael Zelniker) are sleeping with Joan under his nose. When a party trick involving a liquor glass and a gun goes awry, killing Joan, Bill flees to Interzone, a Mediterranean city full of talking insectoid typewriters, double agents, offbeat aesthetes, and plots within plots. As he navigates this paranoid landscape, Bill begins ingesting another drug called mugwump jism and writes fragments that Hank and Martin soon assemble into a novel under the title Naked Lunch. As beat literature aficionados know, Interzone is based on Tangiers -- the city where Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch. The incident in the film in which Hank and Martin appropriate Bill's writing and have it published closely approximates the real-life circumstances of the novel's publication, although it was Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac who helped out the real-life Burroughs. The William Tell incident that kills Bill's wife is also drawn from the author's real life. "William Lee" is both Burroughs' literary stand-in and the name under which he published his first autobiographical novel Junky. Ian Holm, who plays Joan Frost's husband, Tom, would appear in Cronenberg's similarly experimental eXistenZ several years later. ~ Brian J. Dillard, Rovi

This slow-moving occult thriller has Pamela Sue Martin and hubbie Tim Matheson menaced by a coven of witches when they move to an island off the coast of Massachusetts. Director Carl Schenkel -- who went on to make the interesting Knight Moves -- does the best he can with a tedious script and a lot of miscasting, but it doesn't make the movie any more interesting. It looks like a who's who of '80s sitcoms, with Woody Harrelson, Jeff Conaway, and Inga Swenson along for the evil doings, but some viewers will be rolling on the floor when they see Leave It to Beaver's Barbara Billingsley as a 300-year-old witch. The highlight of the film is an exploding church, which may just be loud enough to wake you up so you can rewind the tape. ~ Robert Firsching, Rovi

The Big Town is Chicago, circa 1957. Matt Dillon stars as a small-town crapshooter who heads to the Windy City to seek his fortune. There he becomes the pawn of two high-rolling professional gamblers, played by Lee Grant and Bruce Dern. He later gets mixed up in a revenge scheme cooked up by Diane Lane, the embittered wife of strip-joint owner Tommy Lee Jones. Before he knows what's happened, Dillon is embroiled in two torrid romances, one with Lane and the other with "nice" girl Suzy Amis; he also nearly loses his life by ending up in the middle of a deadly feud between Dern and Jones. Based on The Arm, a novel by Clark Howard, Big Town tends towards uneveness, a result perhaps of the defection of its first director, Harold Becker. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Set in the years before World War I, this film is about Robert, a young man growing up in a wealthy family in Toronto who is burdened by a distant, cool mother and a father dedicated to duty, both highly conservative people. When Robert loses his beloved invalid sister in a car accident he is further tormented by the family's decision to kill her pet rabbits - and quarrels with them so intensely that he enlists in the army and goes off to war. Once "over there," he discovers brothels and romance, and in a climactic scene, decides to free a barn full of horses from certain death - in spite of contrary orders from his superiors. The juxtaposition of Robert's internal conflict and the external horrors of combat may have been intended to illustrate the nature of "war," although that is difficult to surmise since the evidence in the film is not that strong. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi