Six Ways to Sunday is only director Adam Bernstein’s second theatrical film, so it’s a little early to attempt a coherent analysis of his career. On the surface this young-mobster story couldn’t be more different from his earlier effort, the egregiously unfunny It’s Pat, which foolishly bloated Julia Sweeney’s one-gag…
Has any major American director had quite as many career swings as Robert Altman has? Maybe not, but if there’s one thing the past 30 years have made clear, it is that it’s never safe to count Altman out. The mid- and late Nineties have been particularly unfriendly to him…
William Mastrosimone’s Tamer of Horses takes place in a universe in which a kid named Hector wanders into the lives of two frustrated classics professors. You might surmise a coincidence like this is at hand from the title, a reference to Hector, the warrior hero of the Iliad. But would…
thursday april 1 TV’s Kung Fu protagonist Kwai Chang Caine battled an array of villains in the Old West, but lucky for him he never came up against a turntable. Yes, a turntable. Faced with juggling beats, scratching, and working a mixer, poor Caine might have resigned in defeat. Think…
Classy clothing this is not. Daring, dangerous, downright trashy — vulgar even. Revealing slinky gowns made of gold and silver mesh. Skintight, multicolored sequined hip-huggers covered with Marilyn Monroe faces. A form-fitting black dress precariously held together by a series of silver- and gold-tone Medusa-headed clothespins. Too many studs, beads,…
In a cozy corner theater in the heart of Little Havana’s Calle Ocho (Eighth Street), light shines on the small elevated stage, where the Afro-Cuban experimental band Io performs a percussive interpretation of the theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Behind them a video screen beams footage of…
Ginger and Fred. Shirley Temple and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds. To the list of unforgettable movie dance partnerships, we may now add Omar Epps, the trim, handsome young man who stars as one-third of The Mod Squad, and Michael Lerner, the heavyset middle-age actor who played…
Stuffed full of fantasy comics, addicted to action, and steeped in digital technology, the frenetic moviemakers Andy and Larry Wachowski have done what they must: create an eye-popping, morph-mad, quasi-mythical sci-fi flick that will thrill computer nerds as it kicks serious ass. The Matrix also presumes to (ahem) think deeply,…
There’s an old adage that says that by the age of 40, a man gets the face he deserves. If that’s true then Clint Eastwood, the producer, director, and star of the death-row thriller True Crime, must have committed a capital offense or two of his own. To call it…
David Mamet’s war-between-the-sexes conundrum is nothing if not a tense night out at the theater. That’s true if you’re male, female, a college student, a professor, or merely an innocent bystander trying to figure out whether there actually is a watertight argument inside this situation tragedy. Oleanna is about a…
The Y2K bug and its implications loom large in 1999, making people warier than ever that the technological advances of today and tomorrow are going to save us. Cynical and fearful of the future, we think the end of the millennium may mean the end of the world. Almost seems…
thursday march 25 Ambling around in your shorts on an average day in South Beach already makes you feel like a cellulite-ridden whale. Well, thunder-thighs, get ready to feel even worse about your slothful self when the Miami Beach Sports and Fitness Festival comes to town for the next four…
The director of the Deering Estate at Cutler, Miami-Dade Parks’ Ivan A. Rodriguez, chokes on construction dust, wipes his eyes beneath his shades, and says, “You are seeing the drama unfold.” He means the latest in a series of dramas. There were times when this verdant area along Biscayne Bay…
Self-serving confessions are a mainstay of best-seller lists; now we’re doomed to see their ilk onscreen. 20 Dates is the not-so-verite story of Myles Berkowitz, a tyro filmmaker in his mid-thirties who tries to advance his career and up his happiness quotient by filming himself on a score of dates…
“I hope it’s better than The Truman Show,” said the woman in line behind me at the publicized sneak preview of EDtv. Afterward a man in my row declared, “That was a lot better than The Truman Show.” Pretentious high-concept films such as The Truman Show often garner accolades and…
Among the best ways to search for oil is the seismic shoot. To make one you drill a hole about 25-feet deep, insert 2.2 pounds of dynamite, and detonate. The explosion causes vibrations in the earth that are recorded by sensitive listening equipment deployed over a large area. The data…
Back in 1993 Disney released Swing Kids, a dead-earnest portrait of rebellious German jazz fans during the Third Reich. This bizarre hybrid (a blend of Footloose and Schindler’s List, of Dead Poets Society and The Diary of Anne Frank) pitted big bands against armbands; it was a classic case of…
The “dinner party for dead people” play, in which an author gathers people who may or may not have met in real life and plops them into the same room for supper, isn’t officially recognized as a dramatic genre. But it’s so popular that maybe it ought to be. Few…
thursday march 18 Before men started marching into delivery rooms videotaping the births of their babies, before TV commercials and music videos appropriated the shaky-camera technique and quick-cut style of editing, there was the work of acclaimed avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage. He did it first. In the mid-Fifties Brakhage began…
In the late Seventies, John Epperson, a native of Hazelhurst, Mississippi, and a fan of the ballet flick The Turning Point, headed to New York City to fulfill his dream of entering showbiz. By day he worked as a rehearsal pianist for the American Ballet Theater. By night he was…
The Deep End of the Ocean starts out as a maternal horror movie and ends up as a family therapy session. Michelle Pfeiffer plays the photographer wife of a restaurateur (Treat Williams) and mother of two sons and an infant daughter. While checking into a jammed hotel for her fifteenth…
The Corruptor should come as something of a relief to fans of Hong Kong superstar Chow Yun-Fat who were mostly disappointed with last year’s The Replacement Killers, Chow’s American screen debut. Among the producers of that action thriller was John Woo, who in the Eighties and early Nineties directed five…
