Mario Van Peebles

Friday April 24, 1998      The phrase appended to the title, "Los Locos: Posse Rides Again," is a bit of a cheat: "Los Locos" isn't actually a sequel to the 1993 "Posse," in which director-star Mario Van Peebles rode tall as the leader of a mostly...

"Ali" opens with a shot of Will Smith as a bundled-up 22-year-old Cassius Clay doing late-night roadwork in preparation for his 1964 heavyweight title fight with Sonny Liston. It's an arresting visual, of a lonely sphinx in sweats, and it tells you a...

Friday September 26, 1997      Two young men, business partners, enter a tasteless, out-sized suburban home. One of them is about to be married, the other has surprised the groom-to-be with a stag party, a gesture he and everyone else involved will...

Michael Mann opens ``Ali" with an invigorating burst of music and images, bouncing through the early years of Cassius Clay, as a surrogate Sam Cooke rocks out ``(Don't Fight It) Feel It" and Will Smith rockets through a fusillade on a speed bag. With...

With kindly and wicked monsters already on hand, and wizards young and old in the wings, fantasy rules in a holiday season shadowed by persistent mourning and pervasive fears. What better time for flying brooms and an all-powerful ring? The end-of-year...

Back in 1971 Melvin Van Peebles, already one of the first black directors to have had a film in general release with "Watermelon Man" the year before, scorched screens across America with "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song," a surreal odyssey in which Van...

Unfunny rather than outrageous as intended, Jonathan Kesselman's "The Hebrew Hammer's" laborious self-described "Jewxploitation" comedy imagines a Brooklyn private eye, Mordechai Jefferson Carver (Adam Goldberg), whose role model is Shaft. Known as the...

Tomorrow - The Agronomist: Jonathan Demme, keeping his hand in documentaries and pursuing his fascination with Haiti (previously reflected in a CD compilation of Haitian music), tells the story of the volatile Caribbean nation through the dissident...

Monday January 30, 1995      Like its two predecessors, "Highlander: The Final Dimension" is elementary and vague, but this purportedly last installment works well enough on a comic book level. Music video veteran Andy Morahan, in his feature directorial...

Saturday August 24, 1996      In the title role of "Solo," a lackluster action-adventure, Mario Van Peebles--his head shaved and his body buffed to the max--certainly makes a statuesque android. Judging from the evidence, Van Peebles worked lots harder...

Wednesday May 3, 1995      Jean-Luc Godard called the well-brought-up radicals of the 1960s "the children of Marx and Coca-Cola" and a twist on that celebrated phrase is applicable to "Panther," an examination of the Black Panther Party, and its director...