Nobody is seriously going to accuse writer-director Alexander Payne of being chickenshit. For his first feature, the hilarious Citizen Ruth, he has not only chosen the number-one issue a filmmaker is likely to get killed over — abortion and a woman’s right to make a personal decision on the subject…
Cult auteur David Cronenberg crashes and burns — his talent, that is — in Crash, a vain attempt at a techno-age Persona. It follows a demented explorer named Vaughan (Elias Koteas) into an insane new world where twisted metal, curvy skin, automotive oil, and bodily fluids merge in an explosive…
When Paramount Pictures releases The Godfather tomorrow, it will be both honoring itself and perpetrating a crime. The honor is that one of the greatest and most influential films ever made is being re-released on the occasion of its 25th anniversary. The crime is that Paramount, according to a studio…
In the last chapter of the Star Wars trilogy, Return of the Jedi Special Edition, an intergalactic window display of creepy and cuddly critters upstages the human characters. All the conflicts are resolved between the virtuous Rebels — Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), Han Solo (Harrison Ford), and Princess Leia (Carrie…
City of Industry starts out promisingly and then turns into the kind of crime thriller only a pointy-headed postmodernist could love. Since a lot of critics these days have pointy heads, you might just want to brace yourself for a lot of steaming compost in the press about how “existential”…
Waiting for Guffman is such a funny mess that it keeps you laughing even when you realize it’s not much better directed than a cable-access talk show. Christopher Guest’s is-this-where-I-point-the-camera? auteurism, last seen in The Big Picture, is redeemed by the performers — himself most of all — and the…
During the first few minutes of Howard Stern’s romp through his inexplicable life, he spells out his mission: Private Parts will both convert the nonbelievers and entertain the cult. Stern wants to give you plenty of hot lesbian action (and freed from FCC restrictions, he takes real pleasure in saying…
Marvin’s Room, starring Diane Keaton and Meryl Streep as estranged sisters, is one of those movies about people who confront the choices they’ve made and become better people for it. Adapted by the late Scott McPherson from his popular 1992 play and directed by Broadway veteran Jerry Zaks, the film…
The ingredients are familiar: Donnie Brasco stars Al Pacino as a Mafia soldier and Johnny Depp as an FBI undercover agent who infiltrates the mob. But there’s a twist. Based on a true story, the film is a grunt’s-eye view of the Mafia, and it’s not remotely “operatic” or Scorsese-ish…
In the two decades since Eraserhead, David Lynch has established himself as American cinema’s premier surrealist, our own Wizard of Weird. Although his first two Hollywood projects — The Elephant Man (1980) and Dune (1984) — had room only around the edges for the sort of spooky shit at which…
Like a black Jay Gatsby with a bulging build, Muhammad Ali possessed a special radiance in his championship years that came from his ability to realize his wildest dreams. Nobody expected that his attention-grabbing line “I am the greatest” would prove to be the expression of a pride so enormous…
Irvin Kershner’s The Empire Strikes Back, the continuation of George Lucas’s Star Wars, is a classic fantasy in its own right, and I vastly prefer it to the first film. Its textures are richer, its emotions deeper, and it’s an honest-to-Jedi movie — not a dozen jammed-together entries of a…
In Absolute Power, Clint Eastwood plays Luther Whitney, a master thief who burgles on little cat feet. He’s as stealthy as the Pink Panther pilferer, though not nearly as amusing. Luther, you see, is presented to us as an artist. We first see him at the National Gallery, dutifully copying…
Robert E. Howard, the subject of Dan Ireland’s wonderful debut film The Whole Wide World, created the sword-and-sorcery genre with his Conan stories. Howard had a grand yet coarse-grained consciousness. His Conan tales, set in a fictitious primordial age full of demons and killers, boasted swift, cartoon-flavored action (“He moved…
Billy Bob Thornton’s richly observed Sling Blade opens with a prologue that can only be described as its own small film, a laconically eerie sequence that, as the rest of Sling Blade unfolds, begins to take hold in the memory like a particularly dense nightmare. As Daniel Lanois’s quietly atmospheric…
William Faulkner’s novella Old Man has a biblical magnetism, a primal moral pull. During the horrifying Mississippi flood of 1927, convicts are conscripted for disaster relief. A guard orders two of them to take out a boat, find a woman stuck in a cypress tree and a man clinging to…
The second half of the fourteenth Miami Film Festival, which concludes this Sunday, February 9, volleys from sweet (Argentina’s Wake Up, Love) to bittersweet (Spain’s Balseros), with most of the entries falling somewhere in between, including new releases from Richard (Slacker) Linklater and Stephen (My Beautiful Laundrette) Frears: subUrbia and…
Sometimes whispering, sometimes screaming, the fourteenth Miami Film Festival (January 31 to February 9) corrals thirty-two full-length films and five shorts, including eleven U.S. premieres, from fourteen different nations. The mix, as usual, leans heavily on recent U.S. (six), Spanish (five), and Latin American (five) works, but also features the…
At a twenty-year remove, Star Wars comes off as less the work of a wizard than the weird obsessive outgrowth of an eccentric American primitive. George Lucas is a tycoon version of those self-taught craftsmen who fill back yards, storage rooms, and cramped city apartments with paintings or gewgaws or…
Hamlet (Kenneth Branagh) is Prince of Denmark. After his father (Richard Briers) dies, his uncle Claudius (Derek Jacobi) takes the throne and marries Hamlet’s mother Gertrude (Julie Christie). When the late king’s ghost reveals he was murdered by Claudius, Hamlet must decide what action to take. Meanwhile, he has been…
You can bet that at one point or another some executive wanted the title of this long-awaited nonsequel to 1988’s A Fish Called Wanda to be A Lemur Called Rollo (the story does include such a character). While that wouldn’t have been the most commercial of titles, neither is Fierce…
Lars von Trier is, perhaps consciously and defiantly, one of the least-commercial brilliant directors in the world. His best-known movie, the 1991 Zentropa, and his earlier The Element of Crime both open with hypnotic voice-overs, seemingly daring us to succumb to sleep before the credits are even over. Nonetheless, if…
