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…
Illiteracy and philistinism, America’s most unremitting woes in the age of homogenized tube culture, could scarcely have found two wittier, more delightful exponents and defenders than Saturday Night Live’s Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar, the hyper-juvenile, heavy-metal yarn spinners whose late-night, public-access cable show, direct from Wayne’s basement in Aurora,…
What is to be done with the Miami Film Festival? The question has plagued critical columns (mine and those of others throughout South Florida) for years, and based on a predictably limited advance peek at this year’s festival selections, the answer for me remains as elusive as ever. On one…
“Glamour, excitement, and ennui” promises the press release about the Ninth Miami Film Festival ready to roll this Friday at Gusman Center for the Performing Arts. In keeping with such promises over nine years, at least you can count on one being fulfilled this year – ennui. I shouldn’t yet…
It takes a supremely perverted sense of humor allied to a well-meaning foolhardiness to conjure up something like Kafka. The new film, delivered in The Third Man thriller style, has the added cachet of being loosely based on the life of – and employing themes taken from works by -…
Thorough, profound, astonishing, and insufferable imbecility envelops the screen in Shining Through, a Hollywood-formula spy thriller-romance set in a woebegone World War II, finding a permanent home there for two hours and twelve minutes. It’s one of the worst movies to come my way in a long while, which is…
As the science fiction thriller Freejack would have it, the big Apple seventeen years hence is a grimy midnight junkyard blanketed by noxious gas, infested with drug-crazed snipers engaged in open warfare, and run, police-state style, by the hired goons of all-powerful corporations. Nuns armed with machine guns curse like…
Juice, a coming-of-age picture about a group of four young black men growing up in a New York City ghetto, is the kind of film you root for during the first hour, then pray for during the second. Ernest Dickerson’s movie looks great, of course, but the former cinematographer doesn’t…
Tom Berenger has never been as imposing and remote – or as doggone silly – as he is in At Play in the Fields of the Lord, Hector Babenco’s new film based on the Peter Matthiessen novel of white mischief in the rain forests of South America. Berenger plays Lewis…
