It’s hard to talk about what’s wrong with Claude Chabrol’s static retelling of Madame Bovary without mentioning the glossy 1949 version, directed by Hollywood musical master Vincente Minnelli. Few of the nine celluloid stabs at Bovary pleased Flaubert’s fans (Jean Renoir’s 1934 fantasy version probably came close, because it used…
The ads for The Prince of Tides, Barbra Streisand’s latest directorial effort, sell the film as a love story. But the romance feels secondary, because the story’s really about a rangy South Carolina football coach named Tom Wingo (Nick Nolte) struggling to understand how his dysfunctional childhood disfigured the rest…
The prototypical Steve Martin character has evolved into a decent, beleaguered goof who can but roll his eyes, dip into that little trademark mambo step, and try to persevere in the face of domestic distress. He’s true-hearted but baffled — Buster Keaton with facial expressions. This is the striving Dad…
Bugsy, the biography of Forties gangster Ben “Bugsy” Siegel, the man who built Las Vegas, is directed by Barry Levinson, who knows a thing or two about the way men think; his previous films, including Diner and Tin Men, are about how men relate to one another while ignoring or…
West German writer and director Monika Treut has devoted her film career to a study of sexuality, especially those sexualities viewed as taboo or deviant. Since she selected de Sade’s Juliette and Sacher-Masoch’s Venus In Furs as the primary texts for her Ph.D. thesis, Treut has forged bravely ahead with…
Any Trekkie worth his stars can probably fix the precise moment when Kirk, Spock, and Bones replaced the Three Stooges (or the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost) in the American popular imagination. The less enthralled among us simply grin and bear the gradual fact of it. In any case, here…
If you’ve started to swallow this generation’s subtle ethnic-assassination campaign – resolving Japan’s dominance of world business by denigrating the Japanese as button-down, honor-bewildered, investment-confounded numberheads – you should probably hop in your Toyota and go see Black Lizard. If you’ve ever hankered for a detective story in which the…
Given: Frank Pesce, Jr., (Anthony LaPaglia), the youngest son of a New York trucker, is the hero of George Gallo’s savvy and affecting new comedy 29th Street, based on a true story about a young man who must come to terms with his family and himself. Prove: Frank Pesce, Jr.,…
Goodfellas may have been his finest movie, but Raging Bull is still the seminal masterpiece that future film students will watch to understand Martin Scorsese. Scorsese directs as if he’s boxing, with a powerful mix of physicality and strategy, and he has an uncanny knack for knowing precisely how to…
Los Angeles may be the City of Angels, but Sharon (Mimi Rogers) – the protagonist of Michael Tolkin’s The Rapture – isn’t one of them. At least not for the first movement of this complex, disturbing film, which slips phantasmagorically from religious parable to suburban adventure to supernatural gothic. Thirtyish…
The hope, I guess, was that phenom Patsy Kensit would light up every corner of Twenty-One, Don Boyd’s saga of how a spirited girl in modern-day London learns to juggle sex, love, and satisfaction. The reality is far different. Though Kensit’s wattage is high – she’s brilliantly blonde and beautiful…
Let’s face it – Danny DeVito is typecast. From Louie DePalma on Taxi to the wife-hating husband in Ruthless People, DeVito has specialized in one role, the greedy, unprincipled moneymaker. Sure, he’s escaped from this sleazebag strangle hold with the occasional sweet dolt (Throw Momma from the Train, One Flew…
In a year in which gangster-movie inflation is at its all-time high, director Robert Benton’s Billy Bathgate has turned a profit, and done it the old-fashioned way – with heartfelt storytelling, inspired camerawork, and impeccable timing. Based on the novel by E.L. Doctorow, Billy Bathgate explores the criminal education of…
The prospects for Dede Tate (Jodie Foster) are limited. She’s a high school dropout, a cocktail waitress, a single mother who has no contact with the father of her child. In short, her life is ordinary. But then there’s the matter of her son Fred (Adam Hann-Byrd). Fred – the…
Like the Pacific Northwest landscape that serves as one of its major characters, Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho has both dramatic peaks and flat stretches. In the latest film from the director of Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy, River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves star as two pretty-boy drifters…
After a brush with death, a successful businessman plunges into a coma. The doctors aren’t sure if he’ll make it; his wife frets anxiously and keeps a bedside vigil. But the human spirit is stronger than medicine, and slowly, painfully, he returns to life. There’s only one problem: He cannot…
Garry Marshall once delivered sentimental films that didn’t scrimp on substance (The Flamingo Kid, Nothing in Common), but in the past few years he’s been content to plunk down cliches and wait for the registers to start ringing. He tapped our tear ducts with Beaches and then assaulted our common…
To its credit, Shout never pretends to be anything but a mealy-minded tribute to the liberating power of rock and roll. All this talk about music soothing the savage breast overlooks the fact that more often than not it’s used to inflame that very same breast. You know that feeling…
The New York character actor Joe Pesci (“I’m funny? How’ya mean, funny? You find me amusing?”) is at his best when sniping, kibbitzing and wise-cracking from the edges of street-tough movies like Raging Bull and Goodfellas. Whenever the spotlight hits him, he gives a film a lift, a shot of…
As with young Irish gun Kenneth Branagh, whose Dead Again is the summer’s most stunning achievement and a fully successful resurrection of the Muscle-bound Hollywood Romance, the truth about Ethan and Joel Coen lies in the past. But while countless critical search parties aimlessly spelunk for the Coens’ source-stream in…
Voyeurism is an amazingly supple subject for films. The whole cinematic process reeks of it – sitting alone in a darkened room, watching the actions of characters unaware of you, prying into their personal lives and innermost secrets. And many acclaimed films have explored it overtly: Rear Window, for instance,…
Filmmaker Scott Dittrich probably hates Patrick Swayze. If he doesn’t, he should reconsider. A former UCLA economics grad student, Dittrich (what? – you thought it was going to be Swayze?) has spent the past seventeen years as one of the nation’s foremost practitioners of the surf movie. In their pure…
