In the past 30 years, Woody Allen has written and directed something like 28 movies (“something like” reflects the confusion of how to count his contribution to New York Stories), a remarkable productivity record for a major filmmaker, and one that’s even more impressive when you consider how high his…
Boo hoo! Frank McCourt had a miserable childhood! Honestly who can say their childhood wasn’t impoverished in some way … or in many ways? That Mr. McCourt survived and eventually published his inescapable memoir is nice, of course, and the book indeed is a poignant and crafty piece of work…
The world’s demand for minimally talented 30-year-old high school dropouts who believe they’re great poets or great musicians or great movie directors isn’t going to catch up with the supply anytime soon. That won’t keep the strivers from striving, of course, nor will it snuff out their dreams. Case in…
Some people really are crazy, but then crazy is a relative term. Does it apply to someone who thinks he might spin off into outer space and never be able to get back down to Earth? Or is it only crazy when you have to cling to the nearest table…
The War Zone opens with a black screen and the sound of waves gently crashing against the shore. The methodical ebb and flow of the water produces a soothing rhythm and a sense of tranquility. The film’s first visual image is equally evocative — a beautiful section of seashore, buttressed…
In The Allegory of Painting, seventeenth-century Dutch master Jan Vermeer paints a portrait of the artist painting a portrait. To the left of the canvas, a lavish curtain is drawn to reveal an empty chair, perhaps reserved for the viewer. Beyond the curtain a seated man has just begun the…
Andy’s Top 10Film critics are by nature a sour lot, so it is with truly great pleasure that I suggest that 1999 has been the best year for cinema — certainly for American cinema and even for the major studios — in my fifteen years on the beat. I’m at…
In the literary classic, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, photographer Walker Evans and journalist James Agee make heroes of three unknown families struggling to survive as tenant farmers in rural Alabama circa 1936. Evans and Agee’s praise for the poor but proud helped drum up support for President Franklin…
When Paul Thomas Anderson’s second feature, Boogie Nights, was released in 1997, critics and film industry types fell over themselves to designate Anderson the next big thing, an auteur in the footsteps of Scorsese and Coppola. His film turned Mark Wahlberg from a has-been underwear model and rapper into a…
“Hell is a sort of high-class nightclub,” wrote George Orwell, “entry to which is reserved for Catholics only.” This sentiment is on stark display in the work of novelist Graham Greene, whose adulterous relationship (with the very married Catherine Welston, a wealthy farmer’s wife) propelled him to scrutinize the mechanics…
Writer-director Anthony Minghella has chosen to follow up his Oscar-laden The English Patient with another literary adaptation — this time, of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. Highsmith is known to film buffs as the author of Strangers on a Train, the basis for one of Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers; but…
At first glance Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother seems uncharacteristically grim for a filmmaker with such a demonic sense of humor. Within ten minutes the heroine’s seventeen-year-old son is hit and killed by a car, which propels her and the events of the film into motion. In the next…
Let’s hear it for sports movies! The most avid sports fan occasionally can be bored by lackluster games, but the casual spectator also can appreciate what the big screen can do for an athletic contest, even one played by actors rather than athletes: the closer-than-life closeups, the dramatic use of…
Ah, what a miracle that Andy Kaufman was. So sublime his wit, so pioneering his spirit. Astonishing! A hero to be loved, adored, and emulated by all artists and performers for the rest of eternity. An opener of doors, a smasher down of barriers, a glorious, luminous, intrepid spirit without…
The heroines of Gavin O’Connor’s offbeat road movie Tumbleweeds are a struggling single mother named Mary Jo Walker (Janet McTeer) and her feisty twelve-year-old daughter Ava (Kimberly J. Brown), who set out together from a back hollow in West Virginia to make a new life, or something like one, in…
It is rare to find a movie that is as accomplished, multilayered, and rewarding as the novel from which it was adapted, but The Cider House Rules is such a film. Directed by Lasse Hallström (My Life as a Dog, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?), the film displays the kind of…
Harmony Korine’s directorial debut, Gummo, was like a hard smack to the face of contemporary cinema. Relentlessly nonlinear, filled with disturbing imagery and impossible to synopsize, it caused many viewers to wince in pain, and persuaded even more to walk quickly past its poster of a slightly misshapen child’s head…
Viscerally exciting, dramatically riveting, emotionally overwhelming, Patrice Chéreau’s Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train definitely is one of the finest works of modern French cinema. That’s easily said. The hard part is citing the fact that it’s also the greatest gay film ever made. We all know the…
Over nine days beginning Saturday, December 11, the Miami Jewish Film Festival, in its third year, will unspool 32 films, mostly at the Regal on South Beach. While the movies all have a Jewish connection, this year’s offerings are an impressively varied and top-quality lot. A few are familiar, such…
When Jacques Demy died in 1990, one might have thought his unique style of filmmaking died with him. For while the history of movie musicals is rich and multifaceted, Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Young Girls of Rochefort, and his lesser-known Room in Town and Three Seats for the…
Much like the religion that has swirled around the Star Wars trilogy for twentysome years, the fanaticism of American fans of Japanese anime remains a mystery to some of us. Writer-director Hayao Miyazaki’s megahit Princess Mononoke does very little to cast light on this obsession. More’s the pity, because Lupin…
Writer-director-star Daphna Kastner seems to have designed her second feature, Spanish Fly, primarily to make out with as many attractive Spanish men as she can. Male actor-directors do this sort of thing all the time, usually with a lot less flair. Perhaps it’s the female touch, but Kastner has a…
