Sixty years after Walt Disney’s original plans to expand on 1940’s Fantasia, Walt Disney Pictures has finally gotten around to making new musical segments for a reprise of the film’s classical-music-cum-animation concept. Fantasia/2000 has seven new sequences, with that old favorite, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” thrown in for old times’ sake…
When Werner Herzog was still a teenager, he found himself living in an apartment with several other boarders — one of them a maniacal, uncontrollable actor named Klaus Kinski. Fifteen years later, he cast Kinski as the lead in Aguirre, Wrath of God, the German director’s first (relatively) big-budget film…
Digital video is poised to become a major factor in commercial filmmaking, and Time Code, the new feature from Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas) could be used as a commercial for the process, which is its greatest point of interest. The movie is not so much an intriguing story as…
East-West begins in 1946, as a French woman (Sandrine Bonnaire) accompanies her physician husband (Oleg Menchikov) back to his Russian homeland, in response to Stalin’s campaign for repatriating those who fled the revolution. They immediately discover Stalin’s overtures are simply a sadistic come-on. Nearly all the returnees are executed or…
Paola di Florio’s documentary Speaking in Strings takes a midcareer look at Italian-born violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, who leapt to prominence in 1981 when she became the youngest-ever winner of the international Naumburg Competition. Salerno-Sonnenberg, who moved to the United States at the age of eight, became a child prodigy of…
Three decades after Rosemary’s Baby, two decades after The Tenant, and following a series of five non-horror films, Roman Polanski returns to the supernatural thriller with The Ninth Gate. What could be more promising? Regardless of what one thinks about Polanski’s personal life or legal status, the man is clearly…
It’s not a startling breach of conventional wisdom to apply the term masterpiece to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, which is being reissued in a nice restored print that, if memory serves, is better (though not by much) than we’ve seen before. But critical reputations can be as volatile as the…
The Cup takes place in a Tibetan monastery-in-exile in Bhutan, where the head abbot (Lama Chonjor) is curious, though not the least bit ruffled, to discover that some of his monks are secretly sneaking off to a nearby town to watch World Cup matches on television. Not surprisingly the abbot…
The first thought you have while watching The Next Best Thing is, Was Madonna always this bad an actress? It’s a question that soon fades from consciousness to be replaced by, Was Rupert Everett always this bad an actor? and, Was John Schlesinger always this bad a director? Since the…
Director Chen Kaige is best known in the United States for Farewell, My Concubine, the most successful Chinese production ever released here. As many pointed out at the time, this Oscar-nominated 1993 epic of modern Chinese history may have been wholly Chinese in both content and viewpoint, but it was…
In the past 30 years, Woody Allen has written and directed something like 28 movies (“something like” reflects the confusion of how to count his contribution to New York Stories), a remarkable productivity record for a major filmmaker, and one that’s even more impressive when you consider how high his…
Writer-director Anthony Minghella has chosen to follow up his Oscar-laden The English Patient with another literary adaptation — this time, of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. Highsmith is known to film buffs as the author of Strangers on a Train, the basis for one of Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers; but…
Much like the religion that has swirled around the Star Wars trilogy for twentysome years, the fanaticism of American fans of Japanese anime remains a mystery to some of us. Writer-director Hayao Miyazaki’s megahit Princess Mononoke does very little to cast light on this obsession. More’s the pity, because Lupin…
How do you make a sequel to a nearly perfect film? Toy Story, the 1995 hit from Disney and Pixar, was not only the first fully computer-animated feature; it was also as brilliantly written and directed a film as any of the classic Disney releases. Pixar did nearly everything right:…
The engaging and delightful low-budget feature Where’s Marlowe? began life as an unaired one-hour TV pilot. Somehow director Daniel Pyne and John Mankiewicz, his co-writer, have managed to expand their footage to roughly an hour and 40 minutes without any of the seams showing. That would be an accomplishment in…
Luc Besson, director of La Femme Nikita, The Professional, and The Fifth Element, is not the first name that would leap to mind to helm a biopic of Joan of Arc. Sure, he’s French, and sure, most of his films have women/girls as protagonist or savior, but this is a…
Scotsman Irvine Welsh became a literary sensation in Britain with the publication of his first novel, Trainspotting; and Danny Boyle’s film version of this depressing look at the underbelly of Edinburgh brought Welsh fame in America as well. Now director Paul McGuigan makes his feature debut with an adaption of…
Wes Craven — purveyor of fine horror movies, including A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, and the Scream trilogy — has apparently decided to go “legit.” And with Music of the Heart, he has done so with a vengeance. The film’s only death is the result of…
Ever since the mid-’80s release of Emir Kusturica’s first two features — Do You Remember Dolly Bell? and When Father Was Away on Business (which was nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar) — Kusturica has been the most internationally visible figure in Yugoslavian cinema (that includes all the former…
The Limey.
Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Screenplay by Lem Dobbs. Starring Terence Stamp, Peter Fonda, Luis Guzman, Melissa George, and Barry Newman.
Take pity on poor Sebastian (Adrian Grenier). As your typical teenager in a small town in upstate New York, circa 1983, he’s already got enough problems: His divorced parents have both remarried, his sister is leaving for college, and life seems meaningless. To top it all off, his stepfather, Hank…
Late August, Early September takes an intensely up-close look at its characters. French director Olivier Assayas broke through to American audiences two years ago with Irma Vep, his clever homage to and vehicle for the great Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung, whom he subsequently married. His new drama is much…
