Rarely have I felt the urge to punch out a movie character as strongly as I wanted to deck John, the sullen protagonist of George Hickenlooper’s cheerless The Low Life. That’s probably the reaction Hickenlooper was seeking at a certain point in his movie, but probably not the one he…

What do Anita Bryant and David Schwimmer have in common? In addition to whatever punch line you may have come up with, they also both grace this year’s Queer Flickering Light (QFL), South Florida’s lesbian, gay, and bisexual film/video festival. QFL offers local audiences an opportunity to view gay-theme works…

Why do we glamourize beautiful people who willfully crash and burn, especially when they choose heroin to fuel their self-immolation? It’s not as if they’re doing society a favor by testing the narcotic’s effects on the human body. It’s no secret that junkies as a rule do not enjoy long,…

The plot of the new movie Mission: Impossible probably makes sense, but I wouldn’t swear to it. I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt because it was cowritten by Chinatown author Robert Towne, a veteran screenwriter with impressive credits. But to tell you the truth, the damn thing shot…

French director Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s The Horseman on the Roof is the kind of grand, stirring epic that lightweight pretenders such as Hollywood’s Legends of the Fall aspire to be when they grow up. Rappeneau, the man responsible for 1990’s spectacular adaption of Cyrano de Bergerac, spits directly into the prevailing…

Alec Baldwin’s newest star vehicle, the muddled thriller Heaven’s Prisoners, wastes no time descending into cliched detective-movie hell. The film’s opening scene introduces us to ex-New Orleans homicide lieutenant Dave Robicheaux (Baldwin with a Cajun accent so light it verges on being imperceptible) and his personal demons. “I wanna drink…

In the summer of 1993, director Steven Spielberg and author Michael Crichton collaborated on the highest-grossing movie of all time (a distinction formerly held by Spielberg’s own E.T.), excavating dinosaur-size box-office returns with Jurassic Park. The movie suffered from a contrived plot and paper-thin characters, but all was forgiven once…

“The male is obsessed with screwing,” wrote Valerie Solanas in her funny-scary radical feminist primer The SCUM Manifesto. (That’s SCUM — Society for Cutting Up Men — of which Solanas was founder and sole member.) “He’ll swim a river of snot, wade nostril-deep through a mile of vomit, if he…

Hypnotism works only if you allow it to. Even then not everyone who wants to be hypnotized can be. Jim Jarmusch movies are like that. You have to want to fall under Jarmusch’s spell to enjoy his films, and even then you might never make it into the fully entranced…

A naive foreigner with a funny accent arrives in New York City and learns some tough lessons about survival before adapting and ultimately triumphing over adversity. Quick, that describes: (A) Coming to America (B) The Godfather, Part 2 (C) Crocodile Dundee (D) An American Tail (E) Tarzan’s New York Adventure…

The makers and distributors of the stale Argentine confection Killing Grandpa would love for me to compare their bland bonbon to the deliciously sexy Mexican mousse Like Water for Chocolate. There are a few similarities: Magic realism informs both tales, and both exalt the power of passion to the point…

Jeez, has it really come to this? Have cell phones, fax machines, and personal computers assumed such an integral role in our harried lives that we prefer securely chatting away in the comfort of our homes to the more exciting possibilities of face-to-face human contact? Hal Salwen, the first-time writer/director…

There’s no getting around comparing the lurid Hong Kong lesbian assassin flick Naked Killer with Russ Meyer’s Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Like Meyer’s cult classic, this over-the-top romp from the busy workshop of prolific filmmaker Wong Jing details the deadly shenanigans of a handful of lusty, bloodthirsty felines (two of…

A different, more “traditional” (in the sense that Naked Killer’s gleeful man-maimers are a tad atypical) kind of serial killer prowls the streets of Roberto Benigni’s drop-dead comedy The Monster. This film’s mass slayer preys on women; the movie opens with a shot of elevator doors slowly opening and closing…

How sorry can you feel for an attractive, intelligent young woman who earned upwards of six million dollars per year by willfully engaging in an ongoing criminal enterprise and arrogantly thumbing her nose at the law until undercover cops busted her? Not very, especially considering that the woman didn’t need…

Know anybody in L.A. who could use a 1988 Nissan Sentra? Filmmaker Matthew Harrison needs to unload his this week, when he returns to New York City after a year in Lotus Land. New York native Harrison moved to the West Coast shortly after his remarkably accomplished low-budget feature Rhythm…

Director Franco Zeffirelli reminds me of George Foreman. Like the larger-than-life boxer, Zeffirelli is a one-dimensional slugger. They both hit hard but telegraph their punches; put either man into the ring with powerful, straight-ahead material (Joe Frazier in Foreman’s case, operas such as Rigoletto or Don Giovanni in Zeffirelli’s) and…

Reviews of each new Pedro Almod centsvar film seem to fall into one of two categories: (1) He’s back! [NEW FILM NAME HERE] is his funniest movie since Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown! (2) He’s lost it! [NEW FILM NAME HERE] is nothing like Women on the…

In Flirting With Disaster, writer-director David O. Russell continues to tap into the fertile subject of family to create his edgy comedies. In his first film, 1994’s acid-washed Spanking the Monkey, Russell fashioned a sensitive, understated black comedy out of his nineteen-year-old male protagonist’s confusion over sexual politics, masturbation, and…

As anyone who reads this column with regularity knows, I make it a point to boycott that annual orgy of industry politics and self-congratulatory ass kissing known as the Academy Awards. On Monday night, March 25, it seemed as if everybody I know A not to mention most of the…

Maybe Spike Lee figured, “I made a great movie [last year’s Clockers] about a serious subject [crack and violence and their impact on ghetto life]. The film got excellent reviews, but nobody saw it. Maybe if I make a frivolous movie [Girl 6] about a titillating subject [phone sex] and…

If men such as Guy Baran didn’t exist, neither would books about smart women and foolish choices. Strong, handsome, intelligent, and confident, Guy attracts a lot of interest from members of the opposite sex who do not realize that his impeccable faaade masks a cruel, arrogant, manipulative liar. Mia and…