Since his TV show ended, Martin Lawrence has gotten more ink for his off-camera life than for his movie career. Nothing about Blue Streak is likely to change that. It’s a shame because the basic plot, which sounds like something from one of Donald E. Westlake’s Dortmunder novels, is promising…
As a filmmaker, actor John Turturro clearly believes in drawing from personal experience: His directorial debut, 1992’s Mac (which won the Camera D’Or at Cannes), was avowedly based on his father’s life. For his second feature, Illuminata, Turturro takes a look at the theater, showing us the ambitions, fears, and…
Spike and Mike’s 1999 Classic Festival of Animation, Spike and Mike’s latest edition of their annual festival (which is definitely not to be confused with their grosser, inferior Sick and Twisted fests) is their best compilation yet. There’s not a single stiff in the batch. The material is all new…
Joan Chen, director and co-writer of Xiu Xiu the Sent Down Girl, is best known as an actress: American audiences probably identify her most readily as the doomed wife in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor or as Josie Packard, the alternately evil and innocent character in David Lynch’s weird-o-rama Twin…
Robert Wise’s 1963 version of The Haunting (from Shirley Jackson’s novel) has long been considered one of the milestones of the horror film. After 36 years, DreamWorks has bankrolled a new version under the direction of Jan de Bont (Speed, Twister) — an idea that should sound unpromising, even to…
The animated TV show South Park was the big sensation of the 1997-98 season — or at least as big a hit as a cable channel like Comedy Central can manage. It was almost inevitable that creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone would take their batch of foul-mouthed eight-year-olds to…
Run Lola Run is proof that the influence of MTV on feature filmmaking hasn’t been all bad. The jagged stylistic excess that dominates short-form music videos can be exhausting and irritating when drawn out to feature length: Michael Bay (The Rock, Armageddon) may be the worst offender, though far from…
Anthology films are an odd-duck genre: While at one time books of short stories were published almost as frequently as novels were, their cinematic equivalent has never amounted to even one percent of the fictional films released. You could argue that Pulp Fiction counts as an anthology, but its stories…
While Hong Kong movies have been invading Hollywood through the success of Jackie Chan, John Woo, Jet Li, and others, mainland Chinese cinema has invaded the classier neighborhoods of the film industry during the past decade or so. The latest contender is The King of Masks, an affecting melodrama from…
In the desert outpost of Needles, California, two pathetic, near-bankrupt used-car salesmen (writer/editor/ director/producer Joe Carnahan and producer Dan Leis) are offered a quarter of a million bucks just to hide a 1963 Pontiac LeMans for two days … without looking in the trunk. They know the deal stinks, and…
The Castle is a modest little comedy from Australia that falls into the subgenre of Capraesque idealism, in the little-guy-triumphs-over-evil-powers-that-be division. The story revolves around the unpretentious Kerrigan clan. Darryl (Michael Caton), the father, has his own towing business. Sal (Anne Tenney), the mother, is the family cook and a…
We seem to be in the middle of one of those thematic blitzes that happen every now and then in the film world. This past year it was Dark City and The Truman Show; so far this year we’ve had EDtv, The Matrix, and eXistenZ. Coming up in the next…
Has any major American director had quite as many career swings as Robert Altman has? Maybe not, but if there’s one thing the past 30 years have made clear, it is that it’s never safe to count Altman out. The mid- and late Nineties have been particularly unfriendly to him…
Six Ways to Sunday is only director Adam Bernstein’s second theatrical film, so it’s a little early to attempt a coherent analysis of his career. On the surface this young-mobster story couldn’t be more different from his earlier effort, the egregiously unfunny It’s Pat, which foolishly bloated Julia Sweeney’s one-gag…
Back in 1993 Disney released Swing Kids, a dead-earnest portrait of rebellious German jazz fans during the Third Reich. This bizarre hybrid (a blend of Footloose and Schindler’s List, of Dead Poets Society and The Diary of Anne Frank) pitted big bands against armbands; it was a classic case of…
The Corruptor should come as something of a relief to fans of Hong Kong superstar Chow Yun-Fat who were mostly disappointed with last year’s The Replacement Killers, Chow’s American screen debut. Among the producers of that action thriller was John Woo, who in the Eighties and early Nineties directed five…
For Cruel Intentions, writer Roger Kumble’s directorial debut, he has come up with the clever idea of updating Choderlos De Laclos’s durable eighteenth-century novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses. With its focus on totally amoral protagonists who use sex as a tool to manipulate innocents, often just for the hell of it,…
The independent production/distribution company The Shooting Gallery probably got more attention when Monica Lewinsky showed up in Washington, D.C., wearing a cap bearing its logo than it is likely to receive from the release of this modest, deserving film from writer-director Nancy Savoca. Savoca has made three earlier features: True…
The worst thing about French director Manuel Poirier’s Western, which was nominated for multiple Cesar Awards (the French equivalent of the Oscars) and won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, is its title. Despite the strained attempts of the movie’s production notes to convince us of…
The new Mel Gibson vehicle Payback is arguably the first major-studio release this year to have even a modicum of aesthetic ambition. For his directorial debut, Brian Helgeland — who won an Oscar for his 1997 L.A. Confidential screenplay (cowritten with director Curtis Hanson) — has chosen to adapt The…
The worst thing about French director Manuel Poirier’s Western, which was nominated for multiple Cesar Awards (the French equivalent of the Oscars) and won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, is its title. Despite the strained attempts of the movie’s production notes to convince us of…
Writer-director Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, his adaptation of James Jones’s 1962 best seller about the World War II battle for Guadalcanal, arrives in theaters carrying an almost unbearable weight of expectation. After graduating in the first class at AFI’s Advanced Film Studies program and working briefly as a…
