Justice may be blind, but vengeance, it turns out, has a very short memory. So it goes in Memento, the much anticipated “puzzle” movie from Christopher Nolan (Following), which — as is already fairly well-known — plays out its plot more or less in reverse. Pitting the protagonist (and us)…
Easily the creepiest (and by far the most interesting) thing about Along Came a Spider, yet another adaptation of one of James Patterson’s alleged mystery novels featuring beleaguered Det. Alex Cross, is how much costar Monica Potter looks, sounds, and acts like Julia Roberts. Granted it’s hardly a revelation to…
Hello, what’s this? Could it be another cautionary tale from Hollywood about recreational drugs being — alert the media! — not particularly good for people? Indeed with Blow, director Ted Demme (Beautiful Girls, Monument Ave.) has set us up with a morality tale in which the moral is obvious from…
Ennio Morricone can tell you stories about each of his 400 children–where they were conceived, what they mean to him, why each one remains so singular and special he cannot and will not choose a favorite. He’s proud even of the orphans, the runts, the bastards, the children long ago…
As its title suggests, Spy Kids is an action fantasy aimed primarily at the preteen/early-teen audience. For all its thrills — and it has plenty — it’s strictly a PG film, which is all the more surprising when you consider its source: Robert Rodriguez, master of bloody gunplay and monster…
Amid the plethora of films with Freddie Prinze, Jr., Mena Suvari, Chris Klein, and Jason Biggs, it’s nice — in theory at least — to see a contemporary romantic comedy, like Someone Like You, where the characters, while hardly over the hill, are all over 30. In practice, however, “nice”…
Want to make a movie? Get a big house, preferably in a beautiful rural setting, gather a group of good-looking actors, and photograph them wandering around, discussing life and death. No, we’re not talking about The Big Chill or Enchanted April or Howard’s End or a dozen other successful films…
Im Kwon Taek has long been the best-known Korean director in the United States; in fact it would be fair to say he’s pretty much the only even vaguely known Korean director, and even then his renown is strictly among festivalgoers. The general distribution of his latest film, Chunhyang, should…
Gil Cates takes a long, deep breath before answering the question: Is producing the Academy Awards show the ultimate no-win situation? Cates has produced nine of the past 11 Oscar telecasts, and he returns March 25 after a year’s layoff; for those scoring at home, Cates is not to blame…
With luck Yi Yi (A One and a Two), the seventh release from writer-director Edward Yang, one of Taiwan’s most respected filmmakers, will open a vein of interest in Taiwan’s cinema, but it will be an uphill struggle. While it’s a rich and rewarding film, its pace is more leisurely…
The somber figure of Ingmar Bergman no longer looms over the film world like a guilty conscience, but the great Swedish director has spawned enough artistic descendents to keep us supplied with thorny philosophical and ethical questions for decades to come. Faithless, the second film that actress Liv Ullmann has…
To keep it simple, Enemy at the Gates plays like a cross between the PlayStation game Medal of Honor, a World War II Nazi-shoot-’em-up viewed through a sniper’s scope, and a Harlequin Romance novel. It’s history lesson as video game, video game as soap opera, soap opera as highbrow drama,…
In his latest film, Spectres of the Spectrum, filmmaker/archivist/pack rat Craig Baldwin creates common ground for his postmodern bricolage somewhere between the hazy vision of a corrupted techno future and the rose-colored modernism of the postwar American media. It’s not nearly as much of a stretch as you might think…
Van Gogh was a lunatic who cut off his ear. Picasso was a self-absorbed cur who abused women. Warhol turned out to be a weird, desperate loner, Basquiat a doomed junkie. Try as he might, shriveled little Toulouse-Lautrec failed miserably at romance. As for El Greco’s explosive affair with that…
Director John Herzfeld’s 1996 feature, the droll and underrated 2 Days in the Valley, was a more than adequate counterbalance to the catastrophe of his first feature, Two of a Kind, a 1983 John Travolta vehicle (which, together with Moment by Moment, put its star on the fast track from…
One can only imagine the pitch meeting at which comedian-turned-film actor Denis Leary told ABC programming execs he wanted to write and star in a show about a pill-popping, Scotch-swilling, chain-smoking, adulterous New York City cop who utters obscenities as casually as he exhales. It’ll be a 30-minute show, Leary…
Sam Hamm is, relatively speaking, a successful Hollywood screenwriter, meaning he earns his keep penning screenplays without having to subsidize his income by tending bar or waiting tables. He has to his credit a handful of films, some little known (1983’s Never Cry Wolf, his debut), some enormously profitable (1989’s…
Read Part 1, Festival of Might Featuring a cast of outstanding young actors and a pack of symbol-laden dogs, first-time director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu’s urban portrait captures the daily desperation and persistent hopes of an ensemble of characters in millennial Mexico City. Economic class and personal histories clash when parallel…
There are many striking aspects to Patrice Leconte’s vivid, powerful film The Widow of St. Pierre, which screens this week at the Miami Film Festival, but the most unusual is the central relationship between a French army officer and his wife — a marriage based on passion, admiration, intimacy, and…
The festival closes as it began with an adaptation of an early twentieth-century novel by Vladimir Nabokov, The Luzhin Defence, a disappointing finale to what has been a very strong program overall. The film follows an obsessed Russian chess master, Alexander Luzhin (John Turturro), who in the late 1920s arrives…
It was to have been a routine stop on a routine press tour, yet another town in which the actress was to show up, chit and chat with the local media about her movie, then move on–the traveling salesman getting the word out, moving The Product. Denver, Dallas, San Francisco,…
On Golden PonderingLet us now praise famous filmmakers, specifically the lauded team of director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant, whose latest film, The Golden Bowl, headlines the Miami Film Festival. In forty years and seventeen theatrical productions, this team has compiled a superlative record of finely wrought films, almost…
