It’s quite possible that American Psycho is a brilliant movie. It’s also quite possible that it’s a dreary, obvious chop-’em-up dressed in Alan Flusser suits and Ralph Lauren boxers, drenched in Pour Hommes after-shave, all to disguise it as bracing satire on the greed-is-good Eighties. The option audiences choose to…
It’s Eric Mendelsohn’s turn in the spotlight. The 34-year-old stood behind the camera to shoot his first feature film, Judy Berlin, but the movie’s acclaim has turned the attention around. Mendelsohn is about to have his coming-out party, because Judy Berlin, after garnering him the Best Director award at last…
Sergio Giral’s documentary, Chronicle of an Ordinance, is not at all queer. The strait-laced title gives the first clue that the 50-minute video intends to tell, as simply as possible, the tale of the political struggle over the addition of “sexual orientation” to the long list of identity categories protected…
The Einstein of Sex is a historical drama of epic scope that manages to pull off the surprising trick of achieving low-budget aesthetics. Veteran German filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim (with more than 50 films to his credit) uses digital video in an entirely different way than his Dogme 95 contemporaries…
Gay-theme programming has made a rapid rise to general acceptance in the movie and television industries, and on the public stage as a whole. In the last month Boys Don’t Cry, an arthouse feature based on the true story of a Nebraska teen, snagged a Best Actress Oscar for Hilary…
Pretty and popular Megan (Natasha Lyonne) tromps through what she assumes is the life of a normal high school teen, while her parents secretly pray for her over dinner and plot an intervention with her friends. Quicker than you can say, “Two, four, six, eight. God is good. God is…
For a film exploring the uncharted territory of the black gay experience in West Hollywood, Punks staggers in shallow water. The film is a kind of gay male Waiting to Exhale about a couple of brothers trying to wade through the singles scene. This ensemble comedy features characters whose lives…
Even while opening night looms for this year’s festival, director Robert Rosenberg is making plans for the future. Big plans. “This festival is only two years old, and we have a lot of room to grow,” says Rosenberg, a lanky, energetic ex-New Yorker whose own film experience (he’s an Emmy…
In his award-winning memoir of life in the Middle East, journalist Thomas L. Friedman compares Beirut to a Skinner box, the maze apparatus mice are forced to navigate in psychology experiments. For Friedman, Beirut (the capital of Old World disorder) possessed a particular and brutal capacity for conditioning its inhabitants…
From its opening moments, The Road to El Dorado looks and sounds oddly out of time, as though it were removed only yesterday from a time capsule sealed and buried in 1972. With its Peter Max visuals and Elton John vocals, it’s a decidedly unhip piece of work — Starlight…
Grass director Ron Mann’s archival history of weed, Mary Jane, skunk, boo, mezz — you name it, we’ll smoke it — is damn entertaining, to a point. See, perhaps we made the mistake of actually watching it stoned, which seemed a good idea at the time; I believe the words…
It’s a brave thief who reveals his booty to the man from whom he stole it. But Jim Jarmusch could not resist showing his film, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai to Seijun Suzuki, the 76-year-old Japanese director whose 1967 film Branded to Kill is echoed throughout Ghost Dog…
The gun is a coward’s weapon — always has been, always will be. Likening it to the sword is like equating rape with romance. For reasons that can only be attributed to collective insanity, however, Hollywood absolutely loves to romanticize the gun, serving as an adjunct advertising agency for the…
There’s an old show-business maxim that as soon as you stop chasing your big break, it chases you. Such is the dilemma faced by Lena Machado, the titular character in Lena’s Dreams, an edgy independent feature from the writing/directing team of Heather Johnson and Gordon Eriksen. Set in the gritty…
What if fate has something horrific in store for you, and you can’t escape it? It’s an idea that’s been around for a long time, from Greek myths like Oedipus Rex, to the New Testament, to EC Comics and The Twilight Zone. Cinematically we tend to prefer the idea that…
Paola di Florio’s documentary Speaking in Strings takes a midcareer look at Italian-born violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, who leapt to prominence in 1981 when she became the youngest-ever winner of the international Naumburg Competition. Salerno-Sonnenberg, who moved to the United States at the age of eight, became a child prodigy of…
It’s not a startling breach of conventional wisdom to apply the term masterpiece to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, which is being reissued in a nice restored print that, if memory serves, is better (though not by much) than we’ve seen before. But critical reputations can be as volatile as the…
Three decades after Rosemary’s Baby, two decades after The Tenant, and following a series of five non-horror films, Roman Polanski returns to the supernatural thriller with The Ninth Gate. What could be more promising? Regardless of what one thinks about Polanski’s personal life or legal status, the man is clearly…
The first thought you have while watching The Next Best Thing is, Was Madonna always this bad an actress? It’s a question that soon fades from consciousness to be replaced by, Was Rupert Everett always this bad an actor? and, Was John Schlesinger always this bad a director? Since the…
Willie Morris’s autobiographical novel, My Dog Skip, is a nearly perfect piece of bedtime reading for kids and their parents. Each chapter is virtually a self-contained anecdote, the descriptions of World War II-era Mississippi are lush and dreamlike, and the escapades of the central canine character, depicted as smarter, faster,…
The Cup takes place in a Tibetan monastery-in-exile in Bhutan, where the head abbot (Lama Chonjor) is curious, though not the least bit ruffled, to discover that some of his monks are secretly sneaking off to a nearby town to watch World Cup matches on television. Not surprisingly the abbot…
Think Pretty Woman meets The Monica Lewinsky Story and you’ve got A Girl Called Rosemarie. Based on Germany’s biggest political scandal of the 1950s, Bernd Eichinger’s film (originally a miniseries for German TV) follows Rosemarie (Nina Hoss), an orphan who learned at an early age that sex gives her power…
