After a light lead with Bossa Nova, this week the FIU Miami Film Festival comes to an end on a heavier note with the French screen version of Stalin’s world, East-West. The big French offering in this second half is Battle Cries, the story of a pregnant woman with breast…
Is it possible to take in 26 full-length movies in ten days? Most likely not. Although the heart and mind may want to, the eye could have a problem. And that’s not even including the two retrospectives and thirteen shorts unreeling at the FIU Miami Film Festival. (See “Kulchur” and…
Director Chen Kaige is best known in the United States for Farewell, My Concubine, the most successful Chinese production ever released here. As many pointed out at the time, this Oscar-nominated 1993 epic of modern Chinese history may have been wholly Chinese in both content and viewpoint, but it was…
La crème de la coiffure! A mock documentary about, of all things, a Scottish hairdresser who travels to America to compete in an international hairstyling tournament, The Big Tease is a mildly amusing romp that benefits enormously from an ingratiating performance by Scottish actor Craig Ferguson, who also co-wrote the…
Jane Campion’s 1992 film The Piano was an intoxicating work of art, a film of such beauty and power that it literally took my breath away. Nothing the New Zealand-born writer-director has done before or since even comes close to matching it in form, content, or sensibility. And her latest…
She took out her notebook. But he spoke so fast she couldn’t keep up. He paced the stuffy room as he dictated, drifting toward the stove. He lit one trembly cigarette after another, flicking them half-smoked into the ashtray. In October 1866 Anna Snitkina graduated from stenography school and agreed…
Sharon Stone doesn’t appear onscreen until halfway through this tale of three lives unraveling, but when she does, she makes quite an impression as Rosie, the third player in a horse-racing scam. Adapted from a play by Sam Shepard, Simpatico jumps back and forth in time between present day and…
The evening of March 14, 1885, was an auspicious one in the annals of musical theater. Less than four years had passed since the opening of London’s Savoy Theatre, built specifically for the productions of librettist William Schwenk Gilbert and composer Arthur Seymour Sullivan. The partners’ first six works had…
It’s easy to see how Play It to the Bone, writer-director Ron Shelton’s latest comedy-drama, got started. Shelton obviously wanted to do for boxing what he’d already done with baseball in Bull Durham, golf in Tin Cup, and pick-up basketball in White Men Can’t Jump. But somewhere along the way…
Alain Resnais is not only one of the most respected film directors from the French New Wave, but, in this writer’s opinion, he is the most important one. His film Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) showed us a different way to look at movies, and a completely revolutionary way to adapt…
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…
