When Sinclair Lewis received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930, one bemused onlooker, George Bernard Shaw — a winner of the same award in 1925 — made the following observation: “I have defined the hundred percent American as ninety-nine percent an idiot.” No doubt Shaw’s scintillating wit would be…
Eddie Murphy’s metamorphosis from foulmouthed ghetto comic into suave leading man is now almost complete, but so far it’s been about as successful as Woody Allen’s bumbling reincarnation as a lox-and-bagel Cary Grant. Because at least when Murphy was talking dirty and raising feminist hackles, he brought some hyperkinetic energy…
Set in a hazy, non-specific, post-apocalyptic future, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s black-hearted satirical comedy from France, Delicatessen, makes no attempt to conceal its sources of inspiration, pictorial and thematic: A predominant one is Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (which, of course, drew from wide literary sources such as Orwell’s 1984 and…
One False Move is a knuckleheaded title for a diminutive detective thriller — particularly as, both in its plot and the filmmaking in general, there are about as many false moves as barbecued ribs at a wild hog jamboree. Directed by former actor Carl Franklin and written by another actor,…
A work of mesmerizing lyrical power and profoundly human dimension, Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust celebrates the bond of women, the richness of culture and tradition, and the mystery of nature with bracing, impressive authority. Unlike so many of our contemporary media products passed along the popular-culture conveyer belt,…
“An opera – a gothic, Teutonic, thickly textured hybrid of various theatrical and cinematic conventions. To call this film Wagnerian would be understating the case, because even the Ring has its light and shade…[it] recalls the elliptical and symbolic world of Strauss-Hoffmannsthal’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, with its somber metaphysical…
As Goldie Hawn traipses through it early in Housesitter, the fictional New England town of Dobbs Mill (Concord and Cohasset, Massachusetts) is a patch of retro-colonialist Americana: star-spangled flags hang over modestly ornamented homes, the wood-panel architecture recalls the idealistic haze of Norman Rockwell’s illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post,…
The Hollywood office of the CIA has pulled off its slickest trick in years. When last we saw him, singlehandedly combating the Evil Empire in The Hunt for Red October, the agency’s ace analyst, Jack Ryan, looked remarkably like the heartthrob actor Alec Baldwin. His new mission for the Langley-based…
Never having put much stock in the concept of acquired tastes, the films of Derek Jarman, for all their incidental beauties, continue to leave a bad impression on me: too much flash, too little insight is the short of it. Jarman belongs to a generation of British filmmakers who came…
Whoopi here, Whoopi there, Whoopi everywhere. Like a coral-bound moray eel furiously biting off more than it can chew, the ubiquitous Goldberg has been, in the main, an eyesore since she blazed on Broadway in her 1984 subcultural solo act. In one comedy spectacle after another – Jumpin’ Jack Flash,…
Every moviegoing generation must contend with the fact that great directors don’t come in bunches, though, as P.T. Barnum observed long ago, suckers do. And it’s to these poor, born-every-minute souls that Slacker, a subcultural tribute to vagrancy by first-time filmmaker Richard Linklater, is unwittingly dedicated. The film is populated…
Don’t be misled by her sex: She’s big. She’s mean. She’s bald. In a world filled with scampering rodents calling themselves macho, she stands firmer and taller than a forest oak tree. In the solitude and vastness of outer space, she fears no evil. No challenge is too great. No…
There are doubtless many people who will see The Waterdance and deem it courageous, dignified, powerful even, for its well-intentioned compassion toward the disabled. I beg the forbearance of those whose lives have been afflicted with disability, and beg to differ with those whose contention it is that any movie…
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,…
