You say you always wanted to go to film school but you couldn’t afford the tuition? You panic when some pompous cineaste such as me expounds upon the parallels between Pauly Shore’s work in Bio-Dome and Charlie Chaplin’s in Modern Times? You wouldn’t know Meliäs from Mayles, or Battleship Potemkin…
What a deliriously twisted opening to a wondrous flight of fancy called The City of Lost Children: Like millions of other children around the world, young Denree stays awake late on Christmas Eve awaiting Santa’s arrival. Suddenly the tail end of a rope appears at the bottom of the fireplace…
Last year one husband-wife/director-star team — Renny Harlin and Geena Davis — ran off to Malta to make a movie with some 70 million dollars of studio funds, then returned with nothing to show for it but an insipid little bit of derivative drivel entitled Cutthroat Island. Meanwhile, another husband-wife/director-star…
Finally, director Terry Gilliam (Brazil, The Fisher King) and screenwriters David Peoples (Blade Runner, Unforgiven) and Janet Peoples (The Day After Trinity) have managed to address the complaints of moviegoers upset by the quantity of gratuitous female nudity and the corresponding dearth of male nekkidness on display in modern U.S…
If you thought Anthony Hopkins made a convincing psychopath in Silence of the Lambs, just wait until you see Nixon. Hopkins doesn’t so much imitate the vile, vindictive little megalomaniac as reconstruct him from the ground up. From the browbeaten face poking out turtlelike from between hunched shoulders to the…
Frankie Starlight strives mightily (and succeeds intermittently) to couch itself in the warm, magical glow of a fairy tale. The story doesn’t start out much like a fantasy, though: Beautiful young Bernadette (Anne Parillaud) watches four of her friends get blown to bits by a mine that washes ashore on…
While Quentin Tarantino is no stranger to American audiences, one of his contemporary idols — Hong Kong noir director John Woo — is far less known on these shores. Woo’s unfortunate decision to team up with Brussels muscleman Jean-Claude Van Damme for the director’s big shot at crossover success, 1993’s…
If you took 1978’s California Suite, replaced screenwriter Neil Simon and director Herbert Ross with four of Hollywood’s hottest young filmmaking guns, each writing and directing his or her own twenty-minute segment, and then coated the whole thing with a fizzy, retro Love, American Style vibe, the end result would…
I hate compiling year-end top-ten movie lists. No, I don’t have a Woody Allen-esque objection to the concept of ranking works of art in a competitive fashion. Nor am I one of those haughty nose-in-the-air types who tell anyone within earshot that there weren’t ten films worthy of approval this…
When was the last time you saw a decent pirate movie? In recent years screen buccaneers have had better luck sacking filmmakers’ careers than they have a-pillagin’ and a-plunderin’. In 1980 Michael Ritchie’s The Island managed the extraordinary feat of out-dumbing the imbecilic Peter Benchley novel from which it was…
A young woman named Sabrina Fair, the daughter of the chauffeur for Long Island’s obscenely wealthy Larrabee family, misspends much of her youth perched in a tree spying on the dashing playboy David Larrabee as he seduces (and presumably abandons, although we never see the ugly part) a succession of…
“He loves her but she loves him And he loves somebody else, you just can’t win.” — J. Geils Band, “Love Stinks” The leap from Jane Austen novel to J. Geils Band song is not as great as you might think. In Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, dignified Colonel Brandon yearns…
Sometimes I wish these guys would just fuck and be done with it. When you blow away the cloud of steam generated by the generic cops, robbers, and one-last-heist-that-goes-bad plot line, Michael Mann’s new film Heat boils down to a love story between two men. But because this is a…
Jennifer Montgomery’s semiautobiographical Art for Teachers of Children positions itself as a dispassionate, disquietingly original take on underage sex and the line between child pornography and art. From the get-go the film assails your notions of exactly what the age of consent is — or ought to be — as…
In 1991’s Father of the Bride, doting suburban white-bread proto-papa George Banks (Steve Martin) went deeply into debt to stage a perfect wedding for his suddenly all-growed-up little girl Annie (Kimberly Williams). Nina Banks (Diane Keaton) sighed a lot and tried to allay her husband’s anxieties. In the newly released…
La Dolce Vita meets the Magic City with the arrival of Cinema Italiano Oggi (Miami’s Italian Film Festival). A five-day orgy of new movies, restored classics, elegant parties, and hobnobbing with the leading lights of modern Italian cinema, the festival kicked off yesterday, November 29, with the screening of Michele…
Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant was an overwrought but distinctively stylish variation on an overworked cinematic genre — the corrupt cop movie. His latest release, The Addiction, takes an unconventional bite into an even more played-out category: the vampire movie (or, to be more specific, the unhappy-vampire movie). After being accosted…
As the opening titles for White Man’s Burden unscroll, you know right away that you’ve entered a very different world. White lawn jockeys adorn the tidy estates of affluent black suburbanites. Caucasians slink furtively through the shadows of city streets at night, dealing drugs, selling their bodies, and looking for…
You don’t want to wager against Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro), a professional sports gambler whose handicapping prowess is so formidable that he can change the odds merely by placing his bet. Ace makes scads of money for a coterie of delighted Midwestern mob bosses, who eventually reward him…
Some of the finest movies of the past three years have been documentaries: Hoop Dreams, The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, and Crumb. Add Steven M. Martin’s thoroughly absorbing Theremin to that list. The movie is so fascinating, frightening, and hilariously funny that no one could have made it…
Memo to James Bond To: James Bond From: Todd Anthony Re: GoldenEye Welcome to the Nineties, 007. I thought you were dead, a victim of the changing times and the inability of the guardians of the Bond legacy to find a suitable actor to play you. Pierce Brosnan will never…
Just what the world needs — another girl-meets-girl movie. The chicks-who-dig-chicks love story minigenre has pretty much played itself out since go fish made a splash at the Sundance Film Festival nearly three years ago. Last year’s Heavenly Creatures was probably the category’s apogee; the new When Night Is Falling…
