Probably every film director itches to make a Western, so let’s be thankful that, with The Newton Boys, Richard Linklater has scratched his itch. Now he can go back to making movies about subjects he has some genuine feeling for. Linklater should not be begrudged his chance to “stretch.” But…

If ever there was a movie destined to be written about in an “elevated” realm beyond the movie pages, it’s Primary Colors. Thanks to Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones, the Hollywood-Washington nexus has lifted director Mike Nichols’s picture, based on the 1996 bestseller by Joe Klein, into a higher stratosphere…

Palmetto is a film noir set in a torpid seaside Florida town. It’s based on the 1961 James Hadley Chase novel Just Another Sucker, and when we first see Harry Barber (Woody Harrelson), he fits that description exactly. He looks dazed and confused — a sucker incarnate. Suckers are, of…

Martin Scorsese’s Kundun is a deeply ceremonial experience; it’s like watching a serene pageant of colors, rituals, and costumes. It tracks the life of the Dalai Lama — recognized as the fourteenth reincarnation of the Buddha of Compassion and the spiritual and political leader of Tibet — from his childhood…

Swedish director Jan Troell’s Hamsun, starring Max von Sydow, is easily the greatest film I’ve seen in years. It takes you as far out as you can go — to the limits of feeling. As a movie about a great and grievous artist made by an artist of equal rank,…

Where would Irish filmmakers these days be without the Troubles? In just the past couple of years we’ve seen The Crying Game, In the Name of the Father, Michael Collins, Some Mother’s Son, and now The Boxer, the latest collaboration between director Jim Sheridan, screenwriter Terry George, and Daniel Day-Lewis…

If Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown hadn’t arrived weighted with post-Pulp Fiction (1994) expectations, it might be easier to see it for what it is: an overlong, occasionally funky caper movie directed with some feeling. It’s derived from Elmore Leonard’s 1992 best seller Rum Punch, with the location shifted from Palm…

The new Gus Van Sant film Good Will Hunting is like an adolescent’s fantasy of being tougher and smarter and more misunderstood than anybody else. It’s also touchy-feely with a vengeance. Is this the same director who made Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy? Those films had a fresh way of…

If one is in a biblical frame of mind, the sinking of the White Star Line’s Titanic about 400 miles off the southern coast of Newfoundland in 1912 could well be characterized as a divine act of one-upsmanship. The 46,328-ton “ship of dreams” was struck down on its maiden voyage…

Steven Spielberg’s Amistad is being given the Big Picture treatment — Schindler’s List big, not Jurassic Park big. Last week’s Newsweek featured the film on its cover, calling it “Spielberg’s controversial new movie,” even though it had not yet been released and the only “controversy” was a legal one about…

You can’t exactly call Alien Resurrection a pleasurable experience, but then again, you wouldn’t say that about its predecessors either. Directed by the Frenchman Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who previously co-directed (with Marc Caro) Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, this fourth installment in the Alien onslaught is once again designed…

Stylishness without substance can become wearying real fast. Twenty minutes into A Life Less Ordinary, the new movie from the producing-directing-writing team of Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, I was already into overload. It’s not that director Danny Boyle doesn’t have imagination. It’s just that occasionally imagination is all he has…

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights opens with a sinuous, breathlessly extended tracking shot that swoops us into a San Fernando Valley disco and then does a curlicue around a succession of faces. In the discotheque’s low-lighted luminescence, these people pop out like jack-o’-lanterns. They have the look of trashy…

Seven Years in Tibet feels more like Seven Days in the Movie Theater. It refuses to come to life — even when Brad Pitt, hirsute as a yak, wanders the frozen Himalayas with an Austrian accent that probably gave his dialogue coach the hives. The film’s an epic about how…

Oliver Stone’s low-budget, hopped-up film noir U-Turn is being billed as a change of pace for the Conspiracy Dude, but actually it looks quite at home in the maestro’s hothouse. After all, aren’t conspiracies and the workings of fate what noirs are all about? Stone’s JFK pulped history with the…

This summer Air Force One kicked off the post-Cold War thriller derby. The Peacemaker, the first feature from DreamWorks, the studio headed by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen, picks up the hot potato and carries it another nine yards. Once again we’re watching thickly accented Russians bemoaning the…

Critics and audiences outside France have been going on for so long about the decline in French cinema that it’s fun to see a French film — Irma Vep — that says much the same thing. The rap is, of course, somewhat unfair (most raps are), but there’s no question…

The Fifties-era Los Angeles of L.A. Confidential is Noir Central. Its denizens are tattooed in shadow; the play of light and dark in the streets, the police stations, the morgues is fetishistic. The postwar L.A. touted in the travelogues and billboards is a boomtown, but what we actually see is…

The Game is a puzzle picture; beyond its premise there isn’t much you can divulge without giving the show away. I’m not one of those critics who like to write “Stop reading now if you plan to see this movie,” so I’m tempted to wrap things up right now and…

Excess Baggage, Alicia Silverstone’s first feature from her First Kiss Productions, turns out to be a rather shaggy and uninvolving jaunt. As Emily T. Hope, the moneyed teenager looking for love from her emotionally distant single dad (Jack Thompson), Silverstone pouts a lot while trying to wring our sympathy. Even…

If you’re nostalgic for the cockeyed let-it-all-out gabfests of the late John Cassavetes, She’s So Lovely will seem like dejà vu all over again. Cassavetes wrote the script more than a decade ago, and now his son Nick, whose first feature, Unhook the Stars, starred his mother, Gena Rowlands, has…

In G.I. Jane, Demi Moore plays a naval intelligence officer, Lt. Jordan O’Neil, who is recruited to be the first female SEAL. She gets a buzzcut. She endures the indignities of the male volunteers snickering at her in the food line. She rolls huge barrels through the surf and clambers…