For film buffs it’s two weeks of sheer pleasure: the sixteenth annual Miami Film Festival, featuring 31 pictures from fifteen countries. Naturally Spanish-language features abound, from opening-night dance-fest Tango, courtesy of Argentine director Carlos Saura, to the kinky Spanish thriller Between Your Legs. There are also intimate looks at Cuban…
In The Eel, which won the Palme d’Or at the 1997 Cannes International Film Festival, director Shohei Imamura once again demonstrates his empathy for the outsiders and aliens of Japanese society. In this case he muses on the tormented relationship between a paroled wife-murderer who is struggling with his past…
The worst thing about French director Manuel Poirier’s Western, which was nominated for multiple Cesar Awards (the French equivalent of the Oscars) and won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, is its title. Despite the strained attempts of the movie’s production notes to convince us of…
Short of nuclear holocaust, a major sale at Kmart, or a confirmed Clint Eastwood sighting in rural Iowa, there’s probably no way to keep the movie version of Message in a Bottle from overwhelming the tender emotions of the hearts-and-flowers crowd. After all, this relentless assault on the tear ducts…
The new Mel Gibson vehicle Payback is arguably the first major-studio release this year to have even a modicum of aesthetic ambition. For his directorial debut, Brian Helgeland — who won an Oscar for his 1997 L.A. Confidential screenplay (cowritten with director Curtis Hanson) — has chosen to adapt The…
Jimmy Cagney brought the same electric physicality to gangsters that he did to song-and-dance men. He gave a bright-eyed mug like his character in Public Enemy extraordinary powers of attraction and repulsion. In The General, Brendan Gleeson enacts the part of a real-life criminal chieftain — Dublin’s notorious Martin Cahill…
Between the current nostalgia for platform shoes and the epidemic of midlife crisis that has so many baby boomers in its grip, director Brian Gibson’s Still Crazy just might be able to find an audience among the disturbed, the deafened, and the disenchanted. It is, after all, the comic tale…
The worst thing about French director Manuel Poirier’s Western, which was nominated for multiple Cesar Awards (the French equivalent of the Oscars) and won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, is its title. Despite the strained attempts of the movie’s production notes to convince us of…
Elevate The Jerry Springer Show a notch or two — in other words, dispense with the one-legged serial killers who are having sex with their blind mothers, and other such nonsense — and you’ve got Willard Carroll’s Playing by Heart. Too harsh a judgment, some will say. After all, this…
The cold-hearted among us have watched Camille die tragically on the late show and have seen Brian Piccolo run his last yard through the cancer ward often enough to understand the hazards of Hollywood “disease” movies: false sentiment, synthetic emotion, and tears for tears’ sake. It is with wariness, then,…
Genius can be a terrible, destructive gift. Jacqueline du Pre, the brilliant British cellist who enraptured audiences in the Sixties and Seventies with her musical passion and intensity, lived a life of great renown and acclaim, but also one of harrowing loneliness and emotional turmoil. Her story is movingly told…
“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” sings Kris Kristofferson in his most beguiling song, “Me and Bobby McGee.” Stephen Frears’s The Hi-Lo Country tries in vain to be just as lyrical about love and liberty. In this twentieth-century Western, a cattle rancher named Pete (Billy Crudup) narrates…
Writer-director Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, his adaptation of James Jones’s 1962 best seller about the World War II battle for Guadalcanal, arrives in theaters carrying an almost unbearable weight of expectation. After graduating in the first class at AFI’s Advanced Film Studies program and working briefly as a…
Somewhere under the glossy imbecility of Varsity Blues lurks an idea that could make a great American movie: a coming-of-age story in a setting where no one else has come of age, a place where the hero must find his way to maturity without a mentor. The setting, in this…
Because it revealed the coke-snorting, ego-fueled corruption of Hollywood in the early 1980s with such acid wit, David Rabe’s play Hurlyburly became a huge audience hit when it burst on to Broadway in 1984. Here was the inside stuff from the Left Coast, gotten up in a frenetic new language…
The great attorneys of our time — Tom Cruise, Susan Sarandon, Tom Hanks — must now make room in the firm for a new partner. John Travolta, who in past lives has been a disco king, a hip hit man, and a deep-fried presidential candidate, reinvents himself in A Civil…
The relentless charm of Kirk Jones’s Waking Ned Devine lies in its embrace of two lovable Irish geezers who manage to work beautiful mischief on the world, in the raw beauty of their sun-splashed coastal village, and in the general notion that Ireland is the land of poetic conversations, enduring…
Denmark was the first Scandinavian country to have a film industry, but with the exception of the revered Carl Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc, Ordet), whose career lasted from the middle silent era through the Sixties, the nation’s filmmakers until recently functioned in the shadow of Swedish directors…
Silver lining or slender thread? That question nags at me as I go over my best-of-the-year list. There were some terrific movies in 1998 — eight, according to my count. But the average film keeps on getting worse. If movies remain as synthetic and incompetent as they are for the…
In 1933 producer Merian C. Cooper, director Ernest B. Schoedsack, and pioneering animator Willis O’Brien created one of this century’s most indelible and powerful archetypes: King Kong. Then they did a peculiar thing. As if appalled at what they had wrought, but also delighted at the money it made them,…
The talents of Maya Angelou — she is or has been a teacher, memoirist, prize-winning poet, actress, civil rights activist, editor, playwright, composer, dancer, producer, theater and TV director, and adviser to three presidents — range so far and deep that no feat she accomplishes should come as a surprise…
Given the manipulative tendencies of many mainstream pictures, Stepmom could have easily slipped into a sticky morass of sentimentality and melodrama. Instead, it proves to be a genuinely affecting movie that approaches its adult themes with intelligence, maturity, and rare authenticity. The film stars Susan Sarandon as Jackie, a divorced…
