Baby Geniuses

A better title for this atrocitywhich reportedly languished on the shelf for ages before being released like a noxious odorwould be Look Who’s Stalking. Kathleen Turner and Christopher Lloyd, both uncomfortable, play leaders of a baby products company who are trying to crack the baby talk code by studying genius infants locked away in the lab and babbling to one another. We get to hear what the toddlers are actually saying through the miracle of bad dubbing, and apparently it’s proof of their genius that they all speak in ad-copy cliches and do bad imitations of Billy Crystal delivering one-liners. One baby breaks free and contrives to liberate the others; the hokey dialogue and witless physical gags keep everything painful and hectoring. Director Bob Clark wrote the script with Greg Michael, Steven Paul (responsible for the similarly awful Slapstick), and others; with Dom DeLuise, Peter MacNicol, Kim Cattrall, and Ruby Dee. (JR) Read more

Cruel Intentions

Reconfiguring the great 18th-century French novel Les liaisons dangereuses as a contemporary teen sex comedy might sound like a bad joke, but writer-director Roger Kumble and his compliant castincluding Ryan Phillippe, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Reese Witherspoon, and Selma Blairmake it a fairly sexy and amusing one. It’s less pretentious than the artier adaptations of the same novel directed by Roger Vadim, Stephen Frears, and Milos Forman, and in some ways comes at least as close as they did to the overall spirit of the original. With Louise Fletcher and Swoosie Kurtz. (JR) Read more