Mike Nichols’s The Birdcage has a lot in common with Two Much. Both contemporary comedies make extensive use of bustling Miami Beach as a location. Both stories center on characters who pretend to be somebody they aren’t. And neither Birdcage director Nichols nor Two Much star Melanie Griffith has enjoyed…

Ever notice how you can never wager on really interesting propositions? For example, you could have made a fortune betting that Fernando Trueba’s Two Much would be a mess. If only some bookmaker had offered odds against the made-in-Miami movie’s success. All the ingredients for a flop were in place…

A bottle rocket is little more than a glorified firecracker on a stick. You point one upward and light it, but you can never be sure that it’ll fly in the direction you want it to go. Sometimes bottle rockets just fizzle out. At best they sparkle, streak skyward, and…

Fans of black comedy and fiendishly frisky film noir rejoice: The Coen brothers are back! The savagely funny Fargo is a vicious sidesplitter, easily the drollest, hippest, sweetest satire Joel and Ethan Coen have dreamed up since 1987’s Raising Arizona. The film marks a return to form for the sick…

At the risk of coming off like some stodgy codger bemoaning the passing of the good old days of American cinema, it really does seem to me that these days they don’t make quality American movies like they did in the Seventies. The Godfather (I and II), Five Easy Pieces,…

Surely by now the cinematic love triangle has become one of France’s most enduring exports. Nobody plays more variations on the old three-part harmony than the French. Heck, most English-speaking countries don’t even have an equivalent for the phrase “menage a trois.” It’s kind of ironic then that while we…

Belinda and Philip Haas’s (she produced; he directed; they both wrote the screenplay) slow but absorbing production of Angels & Insects reminded me of Peter Greenaway’s 1982 The Draughtsman’s Contract. Both films are English period pieces, although Greenaway’s film is set in the Seventeenth Century, while the Haases’ takes place…

I have a confession to make: I haven’t watched the annual orgy of stupidity, vanity, and self-congratulation popularly known as the Academy Awards in years. The Oscars are a farce, an abomination, a laughingstock, a repugnant folly, an insult to the intelligence of any moviegoer with even a modicum of…

Just as too many chefs spoil the broth, too many screenwriters spoil the script. In the case of the disappointing City Hall, a roster of four heavyweights — three from the world of movie writing and one from the world of high finance — contributes to a muddled screenplay that…

That Shakespeare fellow is all the rage at the cineplex these days. But as more filmmakers translate the Bard’s plays to the screen, the adaptions stray further and further from their source. Kenneth Branagh broke into the movie biz with his faithful version of Henry V in 1989, but his…

The dreaded date movie. Snotty critics such as myself hate the genre because real-life moviegoers tend to hold date movies to a different standard: “Did you like it?” “Well, there was no story, the jokes weren’t funny, and the characters talked like somebody lifted their dialogue straight out of Cosmo…

Justino opens with the unsentimental butchering of a bull that has just met its end in the ring. As hammers, axes, and long knives do their dirty work in portentous grainy black-and-white footage, co-writers/co-directors Luis Guridi and Santiago Aguilar (they call themselves “La Cuadrilla” — “The Team”) let viewers know…

Last year’s Miami Film Festival introduced Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami to Miami audiences, and what an introduction it was. Kiarostami’s three films — Where Is My Friend’s Home?, And Life Goes On . . . , and Through the Olive Trees — were like nothing seen around these parts before…

Profiles of Kenneth Anger often express surprise that the legendary avant-garde filmmaker and author of the Hollywood tell-all books Hollywood Babylon and Hollywood Babylon II is, to quote Betsy Sherman of the Boston Globe, “cordial and soft-spoken in conversation, with no fangs in evidence.” After all, Fireworks, Anger’s first film…

While each year the general public awaits the unveiling of a colorful poster heralding the arrival of the Miami Film Festival (February 2-11), I await the annual unveiling of an equally colorful excuse for not being able to preview festival films in time to meet my deadline. This year I…

You say you always wanted to go to film school but you couldn’t afford the tuition? You panic when some pompous cineaste such as me expounds upon the parallels between Pauly Shore’s work in Bio-Dome and Charlie Chaplin’s in Modern Times? You wouldn’t know Meliäs from Mayles, or Battleship Potemkin…

Dead Man Walking offers many surprises, but none more astonishing than the mere fact that writer-director Tim Robbins — a man who has not been shy about stating his liberal political ideas in interviews — could avoid preaching, and present such a balanced take on a subject as emotionally charged…

What a deliriously twisted opening to a wondrous flight of fancy called The City of Lost Children: Like millions of other children around the world, young Denree stays awake late on Christmas Eve awaiting Santa’s arrival. Suddenly the tail end of a rope appears at the bottom of the fireplace…

Finally, director Terry Gilliam (Brazil, The Fisher King) and screenwriters David Peoples (Blade Runner, Unforgiven) and Janet Peoples (The Day After Trinity) have managed to address the complaints of moviegoers upset by the quantity of gratuitous female nudity and the corresponding dearth of male nekkidness on display in modern U.S…

Last year one husband-wife/director-star team — Renny Harlin and Geena Davis — ran off to Malta to make a movie with some 70 million dollars of studio funds, then returned with nothing to show for it but an insipid little bit of derivative drivel entitled Cutthroat Island. Meanwhile, another husband-wife/director-star…

Frankie Starlight strives mightily (and succeeds intermittently) to couch itself in the warm, magical glow of a fairy tale. The story doesn’t start out much like a fantasy, though: Beautiful young Bernadette (Anne Parillaud) watches four of her friends get blown to bits by a mine that washes ashore on…