The heroine of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s bold and bracing new comedy, Amelie, is Amélie Poulain, a doe-eyed crusader with the face of a porcelain doll and a sleek helmet of jet-black hair. From her high perch in Montmartre, where she works as a café waitress, Amélie secretly resolves to emancipate all…
The air of danger that surrounds Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl (À Ma Soeur) never lets up, which is unusual for a film that doesn’t mean to be a thriller. Rather it’s a merciless look at adolescent insecurity, the mixed signals of emerging desire, and the ruthlessness of carnal gamesmanship that,…
The beautiful little conceit at the heart of Brad Anderson’s Happy Accidents is that audiences will sit still once more for the crackpot notion of time travel — and in a movie that’s not science fiction. To his credit, and with an implied bow to Back to the Future and…
In the movies dead husbands and dearly departed boyfriends have an irksome habit of revisiting the women who once loved them — usually at inconvenient moments. Consider Demi Moore in Ghost. Poor thing had to put up with the dramatically challenged shade of Patrick Swayze, who droned on and on…
In the annals of social change, Alma Schindler is strictly small potatoes, and Bruce Beresford’s new biopic, Bride of the Wind, unwittingly threatens to erase her altogether. For those who don’t have the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at their fingertips, Alma (Sarah Wynter) was an outspoken party girl from…
Just when we culturally deprived, mystery-starved Americans were convinced that that most delicious of movie genres, the French thriller, was dead and buried, a literate and exciting new filmmaker named Dominik Moll has emerged to revive it — and set our nerves exquisitely on edge. It’s a minor miracle that…
With his hangdog face, rumpled overcoat and black beret, Tobias Schneebaum looks like one of those wild-eyed old men you find in, say, Prospect Park, absentmindedly feeding the pigeons and ranting on to exactly no one about Leon Trotsky, nuclear physics or the ’52 World Series. Time has taken its…
Irish. Sex. Farce. These are not three words you see snuggled up together very often. Given the ironclad no-no’s of the Catholic Church, the preoccupations imposed by political troubles for the past eight centuries or so, and frequent commutes to the local pub, the Irish probably haven’t had much time…
The somber figure of Ingmar Bergman no longer looms over the film world like a guilty conscience, but the great Swedish director has spawned enough artistic descendents to keep us supplied with thorny philosophical and ethical questions for decades to come. Faithless, the second film that actress Liv Ullmann has…
Van Gogh was a lunatic who cut off his ear. Picasso was a self-absorbed cur who abused women. Warhol turned out to be a weird, desperate loner, Basquiat a doomed junkie. Try as he might, shriveled little Toulouse-Lautrec failed miserably at romance. As for El Greco’s explosive affair with that…
The renowned South African playwright Athol Fugard has one commanding subject: his vivid social outcasts’ lifelong confrontation with the oppression of apartheid, and the nobility of their survival. In Boesman and Lena, written in 1969 as the third part of a dramatic trilogy that also included Blood Knot and Hello…
Have you heard? Beauty’s only skin deep. Pay attention now: When it comes to love, experience is the best teacher. And just in case you didn’t know: Youth is wasted on the young. Such are the banalities director Tonie Marshall dispenses, more or less, in Venus Beauty Institute, a French…
With the canon of Jane Austen all but exhausted, literary filmmakers continue their assault on Edith Wharton, another sharply observant writer of yore with something timeless to say about the plight of women. Terence Davies’ The House of Mirth, from Wharton’s beautifully detailed, ironically titled 1905 novel about a mannerly…
The moods of Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me are so artfully mingled that it’s difficult to get a fix on this highly personal independent feature. Set in a quiet little town in upstate New York’s lovely Catskill Mountains, it is at once a drama about the unresolved traumas…
About halfway through the megabudget mountain climbing adventure Vertical Limit, even the most rugged, thrill-hungry fans of disaster movies may find themselves going numb. Not from the howling weather on the icy face of K2, in the Himalayas, where the action supposedly takes place. Not from oxygen deprivation. Not even…
The soon-to-be-talked-about sensations in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream include three or four flashing near-subliminal montages that combine an eye’s iris and dilating pupil, an extreme closeup of heroin cooking in a teaspoon, and a sucking hypodermic needle; a surpassingly frightening sequence in which Ellen Burstyn, in the midst…
Canadian filmmaker Denys Arcand (Jesus of Montreal) isn’t the first guy to skewer what Tennessee Williams called “the bitch-goddess of success.” Or to lay bare the absurdity of Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame. Or to otherwise annihilate celebrity worship. But in his observant, swiftly paced Stardom Arcand does it…
Any moviemaker who ventures into the sewers of New York City corruption will find Sidney Lumet’s wet footprints. In classics like The Pawnbroker, Serpico, and Q&A, this streetwise film master has explored, among other things, individual morality in the face of big-city vice and individual transcendence in ethnic conflict. Other…
The setting of Stephen Daldry’s uplifting comedy Billy Elliot, which is about a working-class boy who wants to be a ballet dancer, is a beleaguered coal-mining town in the north of England, circa 1984. A coat of grime covers the squat brick row houses, drying laundry flaps sadly in the…
Some may find reason to embrace the romantic comedy Woman on Top as the nonsensical but sweet-tempered fantasy of two South American filmmakers who don’t understand life in this country very well but grasp all the magical powers of Brazil. After all, Brazil ranks second only to fashionable Tibet on…
Irish charm and British eccentricity are hot properties on this side of the pond, especially among U.S. moviegoers. Witness the phenomenal success here of The Secret of Roan Inish, in which a ten-year-old Irish girl finds her lost brother living among seals off her country’s rugged western coast, or of…
As any Klump family member can tell you, this has been a hot summer for black comedians. New movies starring Martin Lawrence, the Wayans brothers, and Eddie Murphy have already pulled down more than $300 million at the box office, and by the time Chris Rock’s remake of Heaven Can…
