In writer-director James Toback’s quicksilver sex comedy Two Girls and a Guy, Robert Downey, Jr., plays Blake Allen, a struggling New York City actor who lives in a spacious loft in SoHo that he probably can’t afford. He’s a pampered prince who has worked out for himself a cozy romantic…
The John Grisham industry has claimed another heavyweight. Late in 1997 Francis Ford Coppola delivered up John Grisham’s The Rainmaker, and now Robert Altman sails into view with The Gingerbread Man, based on an “original” Grisham story, although it’s basically a recycling of other Grisham recyclings. Who would have guessed…
From its very first frame, Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy whooshes us inside the rollicking, deranged world of twelve-year-old Francie Brady (Eamonn Owens). Francie is a redheaded rascal who lives with his alcoholic “Da” (Stephen Rea) and screw-loose mother (Aisling O’Sullivan) in a small town in the north of Ireland…
If nothing else, The Big One, the current edition of Michael Moore’s continuing self-love fest, has a great subject: the desperation hidden inside a “thriving” U.S. economy. While politicians and financial wizards point to unemployment on the wane and profits on the rise, Moore notes that the largest employer in…
When you think about how some of the smartest, most surprising films about women have been made by men — and vice versa — you start to realize that directors should dare to speak for the other gender more often. Few filmmakers know the ritual bonds and betrayals of men…
Lovers of American movies used to joke that foreign films wouldn’t seem so good if you saw them without subtitles. John Sayles’s new movie Men with Guns plays better than his previous films because it does have subtitles. Bald dialogue always sounds better in Spanish or in Indian dialects. Set…
Though critics often compared Virginia Woolf’s nonlinear, almost Cubist narratives to the then burgeoning cinema’s use of montage, closeups, flashbacks, tracking shots, and rapid cuts, the strength of Woolf’s novels lies in the rhythm of her arresting style, and in her heroines’ poignant and melancholic musings, which insidiously seep through…
Probably every film director itches to make a Western, so let’s be thankful that, with The Newton Boys, Richard Linklater has scratched his itch. Now he can go back to making movies about subjects he has some genuine feeling for. Linklater should not be begrudged his chance to “stretch.” But…
In his 1993 book Sarajevo: A War Journal, the Bosnian journalist Zlatko Dizdarevic reported about an eleven-year-old child who was waiting in line for water when snipers killed his mother and father: “After the shooting, this boy started to fetch and pour water over the bodies of his dead parents…
If ever there was a movie destined to be written about in an “elevated” realm beyond the movie pages, it’s Primary Colors. Thanks to Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones, the Hollywood-Washington nexus has lifted director Mike Nichols’s picture, based on the 1996 bestseller by Joe Klein, into a higher stratosphere…
Dangerous Beauty presents a sixteenth-century Venice filled with statesmen who hop from bed to bed without fear of “bimbo eruptions.” That’s because the courtesans aren’t bimbos, and they aren’t hidden: Everyone from the admiralty to the bishopric patronizes them. Having developed their minds along with their erotic skills, they’re boon…
British actor Gary Oldman, who made his mark playing a punk in 1986’s Sid and Nancy and a playwright in 1987’s Prick Up Your Ears, wrote and directed Nil By Mouth, which has already drawn comparisons to the class-conscious dramas of Mike Leigh (Naked, Secrets & Lies). The film, which…
Jeff Bridges is so euphorically wacked as a social dropout in The Big Lebowski that you get a secondhand high just looking at him. Padding around Venice, California, in a T-shirt that barely covers his midriff bulge, he comes off like a beach bum who bowls instead of surfs. His…
Palmetto is a film noir set in a torpid seaside Florida town. It’s based on the 1961 James Hadley Chase novel Just Another Sucker, and when we first see Harry Barber (Woody Harrelson), he fits that description exactly. He looks dazed and confused — a sucker incarnate. Suckers are, of…
Back in the Sixties and Seventies, when its animation unit was in the doldrums, the Disney studio made a number of genuinely funny live-action “family” comedies (1976’s No Deposit, No Return and 1977’s Freaky Friday, among them) that were, within their limited ambitions, genuinely funny. The studio’s most recent film,…
The science-fiction writing of the late great Philip K. Dick hasn’t been particularly well-served on-screen. The most recent adaptation of one of his works, Screamers, was junk; Total Recall (1990) had its moments but was less ingenious by half than the short story on which it was based. Blade Runner…
When Quentin Tarantino started up his boutique releasing company Rolling Thunder in 1996, his first release was, unsurprisingly, a Hong Kong production. After all, Tarantino has been one of the most vocal boosters of Hong Kong cinema in the United States. What was surprising was that he chose to release…
This period tale of two gamblers — Oscar, a failed minister, and Lucinda, a glassworks owner — is too wispy to be an objet d’art and too clumsy to be a toy. Its key symbol is a tiny glass teardrop known as the “Prince Rupert drop,” which can withstand a…
His eye trained on the manic collision of Catholicism and consumerism, Spanish director Pedro Almodovar has made some of the most lively, genre-bending films of the past two decades. The guru of a visual style that emphasizes bright primary colors and bold geometry, he’s in love with the glittering surfaces…
In these paradox-ridden times, producers in search of cutting-edge fantasies look back — they visit their boyhood or girlhood rooms and ransack their old books and videos, or peruse their studio’s property list for works that scored well in other media. In the mid-Nineties, the English company Working Title Films…
The fifteenth Miami Film Festival continues apace Thursday through Sunday with two works by Japanese director-actor Takeshi Kitano, a star-studded entry from venerable new-wave filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, and the most recent movie made by playwright David Mamet. Not forgetting a closing-night screening of Italy’s Il Ciclone, which has become that…
You will give yourself a migraine if you attempt to divine a theme running through the 26 films that make up the fifteenth Miami Film Festival. Don’t bother trying. A readily apparent theme does not exist — not that one needs to. International in everything but name, this year’s renewal…
