When the concept of food is brought up in film, the classic Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man” cannot be ignored. In it seemingly benign space aliens befriend humans and convince them to visit their planet. The scheme is busted when a decoding buff discovers that the book left behind…
To the woman who broke Adrian Lyne’s heart all those years ago: Stop what you’re doing right this minute. Drop everything, pick up the phone, and call him. Apologize profusely for cheating on him. Tell him it’s all your fault and you’re a worse person for leaving him. Offer him…
It’s hard to go wrong with a story by Peruvian master Mario Vargas Llosa. The naughty premise of his novel Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, about an upright military man ordered to start a prostitution service for soldiers quartered in the Amazon, is enough to keep the film adaptation…
Last month GQ ran a disquietingly flattering profile of Joe Roth, who, in January 2000, quit his gig as Walt Disney Studios chairman to “revolutionize the industry” (GQ’s words) by forming his own studio. With a billion bucks on loan from men with money and bridges to burn — among…
“This is contrary to how we grew up,” Stacy Peralta is saying a few minutes after getting dropped off at a newspaper office by a limo driver. The 45-year-old Peralta, still SoCal handsome and boyish beneath a ball cap and behind a well-trimmed beard, grins long and hard–a real hell-yeah…
American entries to the Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in short supply this year? Fine. Let’s see how lesbians in Slovenia do it. That’s right, Slovenia. And judging from Maja Weiss’s excellent feature Guardian of the Frontier (Varuh Meje), they do it damn well. It being filmmaking, of course…
Peter Bogdanovich, maybe the last man alive who wears a neckerchief without irony, holds a copy of a newspaper article in which his old friend Larry McMurtry is saying nice, or not nice, things about him–Bogdanovich can’t tell which. “He’s kind of risen from the dead,” McMurtry was quoted as…
So the issue of identity as a theme in a gay and lesbian festival may seem redundant — aren’t all gay films by nature dealing with sexual identity? Well, here comes a surprise at this year’s fest: Identity in a much broader sense is indeed the theme, including what should…
An eighteenth-century battle of the sexes, Triumph of Love contains a radiant performance by Mira Sorvino as a princess whose complicated scheme to win the man she loves finds her juggling three suitors at once, all while disguised as a man. “I’m losing track of my own plot,” she giddily…
Ah, jealousy. Scourge of the spirit and seed of countless wicked plots, the green-eyed beast guarantees gripping drama. Celebrated British playwright Sir Peter Shaffer (Equus) seems to have grasped this concept in reorchestrating the intertwined lives of eighteenth-century composers Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Adapting his hit London and…
On a good day, Mark Cuban might respond to a journalist’s query with a terse, unpunctuated e-mail that reads like something dashed off by a hostage while his captors are in the can. It’s understandable: The man’s running the Dallas Mavericks, investing in movie distribution and exhibition companies, sticking it…
It is possible to admire Frailty, directed by Texas-born actor Bill Paxton, without actually liking it. It’s not, strictly speaking, a gratifying movie: Too dependent upon twists, both excruciatingly obvious and irritatingly ludicrous, it never fully satisfies; what you can’t guess you won’t see coming, because it’s too outrageous to…
Wending through the summaries of this year’s forthcoming blockbusters — dudes fight evil; chicks keep yanking up their trendy hip-huggers while fighting evil — it’s immediately refreshing to note a movie about furry freaks and saucy geeks whose primary goal is just to, you know, do it. In Human Nature,…
The work of Henry Jaglom is an acquired taste that for many of us remains unacquired. While his new film, Festival in Cannes, is not a huge departure from the usual, it may be his most accessible work for nonfans since 1991’s Eating. Not surprisingly the movie is set at…
The two slacker antiheroes of Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También (And Your Mother, Too) come furnished with all the usual glitches of late adolescence — raging hormones, impatient wanderlust, contempt for their elders, and a jones for dope and beer. In fact Julio (Gael García Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego…
Before he died of congestive heart failure in March 1992, Richard Brooks, director of The Blackboard Jungle and In Cold Blood, used to tell this story. It takes place sometime in the late 1940s, when Brooks was ascending royalty in Hollywood; after all, he’d written John Huston’s Key Largo, starring…
Cell phones and silk saris, dot-coms and arranged marriages — Monsoon Wedding, the latest film from Indian-born director Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala), captures the heady mix of old and new, rich and poor, traditional and modern that defines contemporary India. A sort of Father of the Bride set…
A young, handsome, newly married doctor finds he’s becoming attracted to other men; after an affair with a young, handsome, feckless novelist, he regretfully leaves his young, attractive, sadder-but-wiser wife. That was the plot of Making Love, and it was considered fairly groundbreaking material in Hollywood back in 1982. Now…
This very expansive Miami Latin Film Festival was once two: the French Hispanic and the Miami Hispanic film festivals, which this year morphed into one, headed by Jaime Angulo. Running from March 22 to 31 at the Regal South Beach cinema, the festival’s 38 films seem to cover the spectrum…
One day, years ago, Gregory Mcdonald was playing tennis with a man he’d known since they were both 12 years old. It was hot, the middle of summer, and Mcdonald was playing a good game–doing that tricky shit, making with the kind of moves that get under an opponent’s skin…
Kissing Jessica Stein ends several times — which likely explains how a film with so short a running time, 96 minutes, feels as though it lasts much longer — and each conclusion satisfies; each feels real, natural, and best of all, inevitable. That is, except for the actual finale, which…
Precious and cloying, Harrison’s Flowers sets out to prove itself a story of hope and human endurance, but swiftly deteriorates into a terribly obvious melodrama and rough-hewn vanity project for lead actress Andie MacDowell. (One can almost hear her shouting to her agent: “Hey, Meg Ryan landed a search-and-rescue picture,…
