The soon-to-be-talked-about sensations in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream include three or four flashing near-subliminal montages that combine an eye’s iris and dilating pupil, an extreme closeup of heroin cooking in a teaspoon, and a sucking hypodermic needle; a surpassingly frightening sequence in which Ellen Burstyn, in the midst…
At first glance Paragraph 175, a documentary by Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, doesn’t appear to be must-see moviegoing. Epstein and Friedman are well-known award-winning documentarians with a string of notable successes: The Celluloid Closet, Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, and The Life and Times of Harvey Milk among…
No one likes to be seen as the roadblock to a revolution. The unfortunate soul–or the dumb bastard–who chooses to impede progress is likely to be mowed down by those charging toward tomorrow. He will become a thing to be wiped off the shoes of those who march, march, march…
November may mean Thanksgiving to most of you, but in the film biz, it means a rush of “serious” films trying to gouge an impression into the short memories of Oscar voters. This shouldn’t be a bad thing, but since the relationship between “Oscar” and “actual interesting filmmaking” is nearly…
Canadian filmmaker Denys Arcand (Jesus of Montreal) isn’t the first guy to skewer what Tennessee Williams called “the bitch-goddess of success.” Or to lay bare the absurdity of Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame. Or to otherwise annihilate celebrity worship. But in his observant, swiftly paced Stardom Arcand does it…
Gopher. Explosives. Gopher … explosives. Gopher! Explosives! There. Now you know exactly what was running through this critic’s mind during The Legend of Bagger Vance, the impeccably aimed new tranquilizer dart from Hollywood’s Mr. Honeydrip, Robert Redford. Of course it’s really not fair to compare this meditative drama to that…
Let’s get this out of the way right now, because so many of you will find this hard to believe: Yes, Mad magazine still exists. It is still being published 48 years after it was created by Harvey Kurtzman and William Gaines, neither of whom lived long enough to see…
The opening credits of Charlie’s Angels hint at a movie that never appears in the film’s expurgated 94 minutes; the tease is too soon rendered a disappointment. A Mission: Impossible-style prelude suggests a live-action cartoon as directed by Robert Altman; a camera stalks the aisles of a jumbo jet, capturing…
To put it mildly, it is uncomfortable and embarrassing to have one’s cynical ass whipped by a huge hulking Hallmark card, and this is exactly the sensation one takes away from Mimi Leder’s Pay It Forward. Not that the near-total emotional submission isn’t preceded by a knock-down drag-out battle for…
Renowned Brazilian director Carlos Diegues has attempted to make a movie worthy of the music that has provided his nation with a soundtrack for the past century. But Diegues’s samba-inspired Orfeu doesn’t prove a very good dance partner. Like the floor charts sold to North Americans eager to learn the…
Before others could reject him, Michael Chabon had convinced himself no one wanted to read an epic novel about comic-book creators, mythical Jewish monsters called golems, New York in the 1930s, daring escapes from Lithuania, Nazis, and the Empire State Building’s elevator system. He wanted to write the book–desperately, one…
It’s Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival time again: Time for more than 100 movies from dozens of countries. Time for screenings at locations from southern Palm Beach County to Miami-Dade’s South Beach. Time for foreign and domestic features, documentaries, and short subjects, along with the affiliated parties and other festivities…
Any moviemaker who ventures into the sewers of New York City corruption will find Sidney Lumet’s wet footprints. In classics like The Pawnbroker, Serpico, and Q&A, this streetwise film master has explored, among other things, individual morality in the face of big-city vice and individual transcendence in ethnic conflict. Other…
It has often been written of Chris Guest–or, if you prefer, Fifth Baron Christopher Haden-Guest, son of diplomat Peter Haden-Guest, who could once vote in Parliament–that he has the demeanor of cold stone and the temperament of the dead. He possesses, one often hears, an impenetrable façade, that of the…
The past month or so hasn’t been good for the local film scene. The death of the venerable Alliance Cinema in South Beach was a decided blow to independent film programming in South Florida. Combined with a few months without much film festival activity or many special screenings, the area’s…
Let’s be honest: As much as people may complain about Spike Lee’s public pontifications on race, or his controversial stances, or his being a rabble-rouser, that’s the way we like him. What first comes to mind when you hear his name mentioned? Certainly not Girl 6 or The Original Kings…
A cold breeze blows through an open window, and a football game silently unfolds on the television screen. The old man sitting on the couch regards the game with mild interest, though not long ago, football was his passion, a way of pocketing a little scratch during those long stretches…
Richard Gere, as Dallas gynecologist Sullivan Travis, has never been more likable onscreen, perhaps because he’s never been more human, more vulnerable, more there. After so many years of so many duds, after so many years of playing ladies’ man to little girls (and the recent Autumn in New York…
Somewhere near the halfway mark of The Broken-Hearts Club, the latest gay romantic comedy (they really seem to be piling up these days) comes a not-unexpected scene where a rock-solidly avuncular older man (John Mahoney) tells a tremulously insecure younger one (Ben Weber) the “message” that’s at this film’s core:…
The setting of Stephen Daldry’s uplifting comedy Billy Elliot, which is about a working-class boy who wants to be a ballet dancer, is a beleaguered coal-mining town in the north of England, circa 1984. A coat of grime covers the squat brick row houses, drying laundry flaps sadly in the…
John Wesley Hall believes justice is a myth taught in classrooms, a fable found in law books, as imaginary as the unicorn and the mermaid. The Arkansas attorney mentions case after case in which he represented an innocent who wound up imprisoned or, worse, executed; in the course of a…
Meet the Parents has just enough class to make for Prestige Pop: Robert De Niro as star, Randy Newman as composer, Blythe Danner as wallpaper, Ben Stiller as schmuck. It has just enough “comedy” to qualify as a crowd pleaser: sight gags (Stiller chasing a cat across a roof before…
