Now must we brace ourselves for the start of the silly season. Richard Donner’s undigestably dreadful Lethal Weapon 3 opened this past Friday, and the box-office blitzkrieg continues this Friday with the return of Sigourney Weaver’s parasite-pulverizing space mama, Ripley, in Alien 3, Encino Man (another SoCal comedy), and finally…
And now for the other film nominated for an Academy Award for 1991’s “Best Foreign Language Film,” the one that eventually beat Raise the Red Lantern for the Oscar: from Italy, Gabriele Salvatores’s Mediterraneo. It’s not by any means a bad film, nor, I hasten to add, is it especially…
When it comes to heaping praise on foreign films, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has not been, traditionally speaking, a very good judge of quality – artistic, scientific, or other. Any audience member with a journeyman knowledge of the movies can casually bet his house that, of…
Now that the fledgling Irish film industry has gained a toehold, it seems intent on waxing native to a fault. These days, Ireland’s most marketable cinematic exports bask in picturesque charm, scenic beauty, and boozy wit. It’s an amalgam of the Emerald Isle’s folk art, calculated to strike a sentimental…
Some memories of seemingly insignificant origin can last a lifetime. Ten years ago, I took a taxi from La Guardia Airport to Manhattan, and struck up a conversation with an elderly cab driver during the 30-minute ride to my apartment on the East Side. It began almost as a ritualized…
The opening tracking shot, at eight minutes even more protracted than the famous single-shot title sequence in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (on which it is obviously – and deliberately – modeled), launches Robert Altman’s new film, The Player, on a virtuosic, inspirational high. As the credits roll, the fast-moving…
Though E.M. Forster was a nonagenarian upon his death, it’s interesting to note that most of his novels – with the exception of his last one, A Passage to India – were written when the author was still in his twenties and early thirties. Forster the essayist traversed a sizable…
It’s one of history’s sublime inversions that, just as Marco Polo traveled to China during the Thirteenth Century for egocentric discovery reasons, the wealthy Westerners of our own Twentieth Century cavort throughout the slums of India in pursuit of – can you guess? – selflessness. Which does not disparage the…
By the time Orson Welles set about playing Othello in 1948, he had already established himself as one of the great cinematic innovators in the short history of the medium, as well as a gifted man of the theater – something people tend to forget nowadays, for understandable reasons. Indeed,…
What is fashion? Is it a craft devised to reflect the times, an enduring art, or an agent of change? Is there a parallel existence between Western and Eastern cultures that clothes can represent, address, and resolve? Are high fashion and film comparable artistic means? If so, are they suited…
When we first see Ray Levoi he’s cruising the Beltway donning opaque aviator Ray-Bans, a crisp white shirt, and regimental-stripe tie. As he impatiently twists the dial on the car radio, we can see he’s another ambitious young striver on his way to work in the nation’s capital. Another loyal…
After all the elevated blood pressures regarding Basic Instinct and its allegedly graphic bisexual assignations, it’s a pleasure to report that Vicente Aranda’s Lovers, a 1991 movie from Spain, has a more palpable sexual charge than Sharon Stone and Michael Douglas could ever manage, is engrossing in a way the…
A movie’s genre will often dictate a critic’s approach to it. Which is why, under normal circumstances, Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct, a sister-slashing film noir, and the new Woody Allen film, Shadows and Fog, would scarcely be whispered in the same breath, let alone survive being paired as a tandem…
The label that has come to be known in the moviegoing lexicon as “the woman’s film” continues to strike an empty, intellectually fraudulent note, for the often-taken assumption is that its filmic sensibility has been honed by – and is directed exclusively toward – one audience: women. Thus, the argument…
It’s hard to begrudge the success of an Italian-American character player who doesn’t bawl like a child upon winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, but instead merely shuffles up the gangway to receive his statuette, whispers into the microphone, “It’s my pleasure,” and walks away. But when that…
As director of John Hughes productions such as Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful, Howard Deutsch has heretofore only been paid to point his teenpic camera at Molly Ringwald’s carrot crew cut, Andrew McCarthy’s BMW, Mary Stuart Masterson’s drumsticks, and Eric Stoltz’s stupefied mope. Both these films had…
In The Theory of Psychoanalysis published in 1913, Carl Jung speculated as to how the small world of childhood, with its familiar surroundings and characters, can be a model for the greater world. “The more intensively the family has stamped its character upon the child,” wrote Jung, “the more it…
If Gate II isn’t a good horror movie, what is? Good horror movies (rare ones such as George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and John Carpenter’s Halloween, to name two) work best as suburban morality play – a dark, desolate setting far away from mainstream society, a group of…
Imagine a cross between a backstage drama like Punchline and a sisterhood saga like Mermaids – that’s Nora Ephron’s directorial debut, This is my life, in a nutshell. Ephron, you may remember, wrote the script for the rather ordinary, if Oscar-nominated, When Harry Met Sally…, and in the past has…
Just when you begin to suspect that intelligence, wit and charm have vanished from the movies under the haunches of full-grown dogs like For the Boys and Shining Through, a sleeper pops up to restore your faith. Hear My Song, an Anglo-Irish comedy made on a shoestring, features elements of…
If anyone ever doubted to what extent English and Spanish have been mingled, maimed, or mangled over the course of 33 years of Cuban exile in the United States, I have a suggestion: Rush to your nearest movie theater this weekend and catch The Mambo Kings. The gallery of rogue…
Last year, in a review of Oliver Stone’s The Doors for this paper, Ben Greenman delivered a brilliant parting shot aimed at Stone, concluding that the best Doors movie ever was Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Admittedly it’s a loaded sentence – Coppola’s Vietnam War movie isn’t about The Doors at…
