Miramax held on to the Spanish comedy Mouth to Mouth (a.k.a. Boca a Boca) for better than a year before releasing it early this fall — usually a bad omen. (The film did screen locally as part of this year’s Miami Film Festival.) But although this romp from director-cowriter Manuel…

First, The Heiress was unofficially remade as Washington Square, then Ace in the Hole as Mad City, and The Day of the Jackal as The Jackal. But now we get The Absent-Minded Professor all dressed up in new threads as Flubber. In this frenzy of plundering the past, is nothing…

Documentarian Errol Morris is by far best-known for his 1988 feature The Thin Blue Line, which is often described as the only film that ever got an innocent man off death row. But he got his start with very different sorts of material: His first two films, Gates of Heaven…

Over the past three years, 20th Century Fox has built an ambitious new animation studio in Phoenix, putting the promising Don Bluth and Gary Goldman in charge. The two were obvious choices. Since the animators defected from Disney Studios in 1979 to form Don Bluth Productions, they’ve turned out the…

The true-life story of the Cottingley fairies is so full of possibilities, so thought-provoking and hilarious at once, that it’s amazing it has never been filmed before. Making up for lost time, two films have suddenly appeared, on the 80th anniversary of the purported sighting of these ethereal creatures. Photographing…

Jennifer Jason Leigh follows up one of her smallest, and weakest, roles (in A Thousand Acres) with a far more challenging, and formidable, performance in Washington Square, the new film version of Henry James’s 1880 novel chronicling the courtship of a wealthy girl with no obvious attractive qualities. But the…

The Seventies were so awash in Fifties nostalgia that it’s surprising Going All the Way, the 1970 best seller by South Beach resident and FIU writing professor Dan Wakefield, is only now turning up in big-screen form. Of course, not all Fifties coming-of-age stories are the same: Unlike The Last…

Every film adaption of an existing work has its own unique set of problems. In the case of Jocelyn Moorhouse’s A Thousand Acres, the problem is compounded. Not only was Jane Smiley’s 1991 novel a Pulitzer Prize-winning best seller with a large number of (presumably) devoted fans, but the book…

At first glance, the new Japanese comedy Shall We Dance? appears to be an Asian remake of the Australian hit Strictly Ballroom. But in fact the similarities are only surface-deep, and just barely that. Part of the difference is rooted in the cultural gap between the two nations, but wider…

First the good news: Unlike most action film sequels, Speed 2: Cruise Control is not a mere retread of the original. Now the bad news: Better it had been. Director Jan De Bont made a dazzling debut with the 1994 Speed. His riveting direction of action triumphed over a hackneyed,…

It wouldn’t be completely fair to say that the hits produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer from 1983 through 1996 are stylistically interchangeable. But it wouldn’t be so awfully unfair, either: A homogeneous, auteurial touch runs from Flashdance (1983) through Top Gun (1986), Beverly Hills Cop II (1987), and…

Sidney Lumet has had enough ups and downs in his long, prolific career that it’s never safe to count him out … even after two disappointing films in a row, A Stranger Among Us (1992) and Guilty as Sin (1993). Even the greatest directors frequently falter in their seventies, so…

John Woo has often cited the films of Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973) as among his greatest influences — particularly 1967’s Le Samourai — and it’s easy to see the connection. Even in France, Melville spent most of his career as a cult director: His series of gangster films, starting in 1956…

Nobody is seriously going to accuse writer-director Alexander Payne of being chickenshit. For his first feature, the hilarious Citizen Ruth, he has not only chosen the number-one issue a filmmaker is likely to get killed over — abortion and a woman’s right to make a personal decision on the subject…

In the two decades since Eraserhead, David Lynch has established himself as American cinema’s premier surrealist, our own Wizard of Weird. Although his first two Hollywood projects — The Elephant Man (1980) and Dune (1984) — had room only around the edges for the sort of spooky shit at which…

Lars von Trier is, perhaps consciously and defiantly, one of the least-commercial brilliant directors in the world. His best-known movie, the 1991 Zentropa, and his earlier The Element of Crime both open with hypnotic voice-overs, seemingly daring us to succumb to sleep before the credits are even over. Nonetheless, if…

You can bet that at one point or another some executive wanted the title of this long-awaited nonsequel to 1988’s A Fish Called Wanda to be A Lemur Called Rollo (the story does include such a character). While that wouldn’t have been the most commercial of titles, neither is Fierce…

Hamlet (Kenneth Branagh) is Prince of Denmark. After his father (Richard Briers) dies, his uncle Claudius (Derek Jacobi) takes the throne and marries Hamlet’s mother Gertrude (Julie Christie). When the late king’s ghost reveals he was murdered by Claudius, Hamlet must decide what action to take. Meanwhile, he has been…

Now and again as I sit here on my power perch, having just praised some pleasing cinematic trifle with a mot so bon it could singlehandedly vault the producers into new tax brackets, or having characterized some hack with invective withering enough to permanently brand his pathetic career like some…

The stodgy works of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, makers of Howards End and Jefferson in Paris, have encouraged the sad notion that costume dramas must be leaden and respectable. Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility helped rehabilitate the stifled form, and now Patrice Leconte’s Ridicule ventilates it with yet more…

Wes Craven, creator of the Nightmare on Elm Street series and writer-director of its two best entries (the first and the last), works within whispering distance of the commercial Hollywood mainstream, just far enough away to allow for more rude wit and less comfortable resolution than most studio product. His…

Thomas Hardy wrote Jude the Obscure in the mid-1890s, and to those of us professional critics who sometimes question the efficacy of our calling, it is considerably reassuring to note that the savage reception of the book actually discouraged Hardy from producing any more novels. Later on, English majors the…