The Great Buck Howard

The world of semicelebrity provides the backdrop for this comedy about a law-school dropout (Hanks) who works as the personal assistant of an aging, arrogant magician (Malkovich)—the kind of two-bit entertainer whose fame peaked when you could still casually refer to The Tonight Show as “Carson.” The younger Hanks is a blander version of his father, without any sense of the elder’s hidden zaniness; Malkovich, unsurprisingly, is quite convincing as a man whose ego surrounds him like an enveloping fog.