Any moviemaker who ventures into the sewers of New York City corruption will find Sidney Lumet’s wet footprints. In classics like The Pawnbroker, Serpico, and Q&A, this streetwise film master has explored, among other things, individual morality in the face of big-city vice and individual transcendence in ethnic conflict. Other…
It has often been written of Chris Guest–or, if you prefer, Fifth Baron Christopher Haden-Guest, son of diplomat Peter Haden-Guest, who could once vote in Parliament–that he has the demeanor of cold stone and the temperament of the dead. He possesses, one often hears, an impenetrable façade, that of the…
The past month or so hasn’t been good for the local film scene. The death of the venerable Alliance Cinema in South Beach was a decided blow to independent film programming in South Florida. Combined with a few months without much film festival activity or many special screenings, the area’s…
Let’s be honest: As much as people may complain about Spike Lee’s public pontifications on race, or his controversial stances, or his being a rabble-rouser, that’s the way we like him. What first comes to mind when you hear his name mentioned? Certainly not Girl 6 or The Original Kings…
A cold breeze blows through an open window, and a football game silently unfolds on the television screen. The old man sitting on the couch regards the game with mild interest, though not long ago, football was his passion, a way of pocketing a little scratch during those long stretches…
Richard Gere, as Dallas gynecologist Sullivan Travis, has never been more likable onscreen, perhaps because he’s never been more human, more vulnerable, more there. After so many years of so many duds, after so many years of playing ladies’ man to little girls (and the recent Autumn in New York…
Somewhere near the halfway mark of The Broken-Hearts Club, the latest gay romantic comedy (they really seem to be piling up these days) comes a not-unexpected scene where a rock-solidly avuncular older man (John Mahoney) tells a tremulously insecure younger one (Ben Weber) the “message” that’s at this film’s core:…
The setting of Stephen Daldry’s uplifting comedy Billy Elliot, which is about a working-class boy who wants to be a ballet dancer, is a beleaguered coal-mining town in the north of England, circa 1984. A coat of grime covers the squat brick row houses, drying laundry flaps sadly in the…
John Wesley Hall believes justice is a myth taught in classrooms, a fable found in law books, as imaginary as the unicorn and the mermaid. The Arkansas attorney mentions case after case in which he represented an innocent who wound up imprisoned or, worse, executed; in the course of a…
Meet the Parents has just enough class to make for Prestige Pop: Robert De Niro as star, Randy Newman as composer, Blythe Danner as wallpaper, Ben Stiller as schmuck. It has just enough “comedy” to qualify as a crowd pleaser: sight gags (Stiller chasing a cat across a roof before…
The video camera and the chaos of the modern world have given Lars von Trier the opportunity to make us all seasick while self-indulgently flogging our emotions with a great big ham bone. Nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the celebrated Danish director’s new abomination, the insanely sloppy…
Joel Schumacher goes to Vietnam: What else does one really have to know about Tigerland? Schumacher, for those readers fortunate enough not to have their brains cluttered with the sort of Hollywood detritus that afflicts some of us as an occupational hazard, is the auteur behind commercial confections such as…
According to Patrice Leconte, women live to be vulnerable, men thrive when they are in command, and the two genders can only find happy fusion once they’ve tasted one another’s fates … unless they capriciously kill each other. At least, this seems to be the director’s thesis in Girl on…
It takes a special kind of mindset to celebrate castration, and audiences confusing feminine empowerment with the crude hacking off of seemingly oppressive huevos are certain to get a bang out of Girlfight, the gritty debut feature from writer-director Karyn Kusama. Metaphoric or otherwise, there’s already a movie about deballing…
At first, you don’t want to admit it, because it seems somehow wrong–just too easy. After all, the woman on the other end of the phone line is not that woman seen every Sunday night on HBO, lamenting the sad, sorry state of her love affairs. She’s not an actress…
This song explains why I’m leaving home and becoming a stewardess,” says Anita Miller (Zooey Deschanel) to her well-meaning, overbearing mother, as the soundtrack begins to swell with the low hums of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. Just a few seconds earlier, Elaine Miller (Frances McDormand) had insisted she wouldn’t…
Some may find reason to embrace the romantic comedy Woman on Top as the nonsensical but sweet-tempered fantasy of two South American filmmakers who don’t understand life in this country very well but grasp all the magical powers of Brazil. After all, Brazil ranks second only to fashionable Tibet on…
Almost Famous is the movie Cameron Crowe always wanted to make–and the movie he tried to keep from making as long as he could. The writer-director insists he didn’t want to make a film about his wonder years as a Rolling Stone writer in the 1970s, because he didn’t want…
Aimée & Jaguar would be an unusual film under any circumstances, but that it was made in Germany proves somehow especially unexpected. Set in Berlin in 1943 and based on a true story, the movie concerns the love affair between two women: one a Jew passing as a Gentile while…
By day they drive their rippling torsos beneath the blinding desert sun, pausing intermittently to gaze sexily into the distance. By night they head for the open-air discos of Djibouti to get squiffy with the locals. When time allows they wash their socks, shave, and wander around in cylindrical white…
So a Jew and a Christian walk into the economically challenged valleys of Wales … No, it’s not a joke — not until the absurd, maudlin third act, anyway — but rather the essence of Solomon and Gaenor, the feature debut of British television director, documentarian, and psychotherapist Paul Morrison…
A month ago, R.J. Cutler thought he found a home for his child, one that would coddle and nurture his baby until it was ready to stand on its own two legs without wobbling or falling. A month ago, it all seemed so simple to the Oscar-nominated producer-director, who was…
