Giuseppe Tornatore is not the first young filmmaker to wilt in the heat of devotion to a past master (see: DePalma, Brian vis a vis Hitchcock, Alfred), but he may be the most gifted. When the young Sicilian scored an international hit last year with the boyhood reverie Cinema Paradiso,…
The latest in a series of pathetic American movies that baldly rip off foreign films, Pure Luck – based on the misadventure comedy Le Chevre (The Goat) – proves that international trade regulators should set aside important issues and get right down to the trivia. These French missed connections, which…
In the peculiar garden party that opens John Greyson’s Urinal, it’s June 1937, and some of the leading cultural figures of the decade have been assembled in a modest Toronto house. Harlem renaissance poet Langston Hughes is there, as are Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, Japanese author Yukio Mishima, and Mexican…
The age-old question “Is there a doctor in the house?” is answered in duplicate this week with The Doctor and Doc Hollywood. In the wake of a bombs-away July in which Hollywood hardly showed a pulse, these early-August offerings, both about physicians, both based on books written by physicians, have…
The real Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, and Frank Costello were four ugly-mug Lower East Side rough boys who learned to live with each other, amassed an empire based on bootlegging, narcotics, gambling, and protection money, and became kings of the New York streets. In Mobsters, a laughably vacant…
Chuck Workman’s Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol goes heavy on the times and light on the life. Warhol, the celebrated pop artist who died unexpectedly in 1987 after minor gallbladder surgery, was a bizarre character. Sickly despite the vigor of his art, seemingly anesthetized despite the sensual…
Natalie (Jo Beth Williams) has a problem. It’s her son, Doyle (Ethan Randall), a sullen, abusive kid who blames his parents’ divorce on his virtuous mother and apotheosizes his rich scumbag father Reed (Christopher McDonald, who played Geena Davis’s poor scumbag husband Daryl in Thelma and Louise). When Dad skips…
All hail the San Dimas, California, duo of William S. Preston, Esq., and Ted “Theodore” Logan, benignly disaffected teens with lazy minds, heavy-metal dreams, and their own special language. Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) first wandered into theaters in 1988, when Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, a sleeper…
Whatever the new generation of black moviemakers lacks in dramatic sophistication and deep-pockets funding, it makes up for in freshness and passionate certainty of purpose. Witness the admirable first efforts of newcomers Matty Rich, age 19, and John Singleton, a geezer at 23. Rich’s Straight Out of Brooklyn, a roughhewn…
If you want to see Ronald Reagan rob a bank, hop in the car and drive to the nearest showing of Kathryn Bigelow’s crime-and-surfing drama Point Break. As the leader of a holdup gang called the Ex-Presidents, Reagan terrorizes savings and loans along the Southern California coast. It’s bipartisan felony,…
Martin Scorsese’s films have always included documentary elements, the grit and ring of truth. But with the exception of The Last Waltz, the lavish kiss-off to The Band, he’s kept away from documentaries. Well, almost. Three by Scorsese, a package of shorter, non-feature works, finds America’s most powerful director hard…
