Fans of Zhang Yimou’s haunting and visually striking epic Raise the Red Lantern may want to check out Li Shaohong’s new film Blush, a lush adaption of a novel by Su Tong, who also wrote the book upon which Raise the Red Lantern was based. Like Yimou’s film, Shaohong’s provides…

If Jean-Michel Basquiat had chosen rock music rather than painting as his metier, his life story would seem so familiar as to border on cliche: gifted young artist rockets from obscurity to fame, makes buckets of money, begins to believe his own press clippings, and ultimately succumbs to the too-much-too-soon…

You won’t see a more damning testimony to the mindlessness of war than the final scene of Vukovar. It’s a sweeping panorama of burned-out rubble where once stood the town of Vukovar, a breathtakingly picturesque jewel of a city in the former Yugoslavia. It took three months for director Boro…

The last time Robert Altman named one of his movies after the city in which it took place, he gave us 1975’s sweeping satire Nashville, one of the defining films of its time. The country music capital and the crazy quilt of characters who gravitate to it provided Altman with…

Emma viewers may need reassurance that they haven’t just wandered into a screening of last year’s acclaimed Jane Austen adaption, Sense and Sensibility. The two films share a wealth of connections with a real-life Emma — Thompson, that is. Although she isn’t starring in this current film, the distinguished English…

A lot of people, myself included, enjoyed director Andrew Davis’s wildly improbable but winning chase flick The Fugitive, which bore little resemblance to the Sixties’ TV series upon which it was based. Prior to that Harrison Ford vehicle, Davis had made a name for himself in Hollywood circles as a…

It comes as no surprise that the recent release Kingpin has been rolling gutter balls at the box office. The promotional campaign for the film stresses the fact that Kingpin was directed by Bobby and Peter Farrelly, better known as the duo that brought you Dumb and Dumber. One might…

Nicole Holofcener sits at an elegantly set table in the nearly deserted Mayfair Grill and studies the cover of the press kit for her engaging new movie Walking and Talking. It’s the first time that the fledgling writer-director, in the midst of a whirlwind multi-city publicity tour, has seen the…

A few bombshells from the movie adaption of John Grisham’s A Time to Kill: The U.S. criminal justice system has flaws. Matthew McConaughey walks funny and has crooked teeth. Some lawyers are dishonest. Mississippi has not yet discovered air conditioning. Some cops are racists. Good guys look sexy in khaki…

Well, now we know: Liv Tyler can act. That probably doesn’t qualify as an earth-shattering revelation of the magnitude of, say, discovering life on Mars or unraveling the mystery of Stonehenge. But music-video-maiden-turned-aspiring-movie-actress Tyler is this year’s “It” girl, and writer-director James Mangold’s self-consciously small but well-acted debut feature film…

Trainspotting is the most powerful, disturbing, and darkly funny movie I’ve seen since Crumb. The second film from the team that made 1994’s Shallow Grave (screenwriter John Hodge, director Danny Boyle, producer Andrew Macdonald, and star Ewan McGregor) delivers the kind of drugged-out nihilistic rush that cinematic adaptations of Naked…

Every time Denzel Washington dons a military uniform you know you’re in for a damn good movie. The actor has done some of his best work playing soldiers: He earned his motion-picture acting stripes with an outstanding supporting performance in 1984’s A Soldier’s Story, distinguished himself in combat alongside Morgan…

If other intelligent life forms do exist in outer space, let’s hope they never catch wind of Independence Day. Director Roland Emmerich’s triumphant merger of cutting-edge computer-generated special effects with the narrative conventions of Irwin Allen-style Seventies disaster movies — a big ensemble cast of archetypical characters playing out cliched…

Stealing Beauty has two things going for it: the lush, inviting beauty of the Italian countryside of Tuscany where the movie was filmed, and the lush, inviting beauty of Liv Tyler, the film’s doe-eyed, succulent-lipped, barely postadolescent star. The rest is all numbing pseudointellectual trash that would have to undergo…

Striptease may not be as precious as pure platinum or solid gold, but for most of its nearly two-hour running time the film is tauter than its $12.5 million star Demi Moore’s washboard abs, and almost as funny as last year’s crime-fiction-best-seller-turned-hit-movie Get Shorty. Viewers who would rather club Madonna…

Jon Turteltaub’s Phenomenon wants so desperately for you to like it that you feel guilty if you don’t. In an attempt to create a Capraesque fable, screenwriter Gerald DiPego and director Turteltaub stack the deck to make the film’s main character, George Malley (John Travolta playing warm and fuzzy) the…

If his new turkey Eraser has any effect on Conan the box-office Barbarian’s future per-picture asking price, perhaps Maria Shriver’s square-jawed, stogie-toking hubby should consider trading in his Hummer for a Hyundai. Rarely does one get a better chance to witness how the “too many chefs spoil the broth” axiom…

Demi Moore continues her one-woman assault on classic literature with her appearance in Disney’s latest animated feature, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Less than a year after making critics see red by adding gratuitous nudity and a happy ending to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Moore — or at least…

A little girl gets picked on. It’s amazing how Todd Solondz’s stark, painful suburban comedy Welcome to the Dollhouse takes that simple premise and twists it into a wrenching exploration of the dark side of the Wonder Years. Solondz’s eleven-year-old protagonist, an archetypically awkward, bespectacled middle school misfit named Dawn…

Mark Rappaport makes funny movies. Not funny in the ha-ha, laugh-out-loud sense; rather, funny in the oddball, hard-to-categorize sense. Rappaport calls his features “fictional autobiographies.” Others have labeled 1992’s Rock Hudson’s Home Movies and 1995’s From the Journals of Jean Seberg “imaginary monologues,” “mock autobiographical documentaries,” “blends of fiction, biography,…

It took a sick mind to find humor — even of the darkest shade — in the murderous real-life exploits of Graham Young, a brilliant but twisted young Londoner who, in the early Sixties, conducted lethal toxicological experiments on his family and schoolmates. Fortunately, writer-director Benjamin Ross and his screenwriting…

Excess shaped producer Don Simpson’s movies, just as it shaped his life. With his partner Jerry Bruckheimer, Simpson latched on to a hit-making formula that dovetailed perfectly with the entertainment expectations of a generation reared on MTV: Inundate audiences with mesmerizing visuals, throw in a hot actor or a topical…