“You and me?” asks catcher Gus Sinski (John C. Reilly) of his old friend, veteran pitcher Billy Chapel (Kevin Costner). “One more time?” It’s a poignant moment, the top of what may be the last game of Chapel’s career before he’s either traded or quits the game he has loved…
The six friends in When Love Comes hang on to music, drugs, and one another in search of that one intoxifier they don’t have: love. Middle-age pop diva Katie (Rena Owen) is trying to put her singing career on track; she was once a great star of late ’70s Americana…
Whether it’s bad or good commercial luck that the thriller Stir of Echoes follows so closely on the heels of The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan’s wildly successful ghost-story sleeper, it’s bad critical luck. The film has some startling parallels to The Sixth Sense: Both concern psychic communication with the…
Although the French-Canadian separatist movement of the 1970s and the production of a Noh play in Osaka, Japan, may seem like very disparate, not to mention esoteric, events to overlap in a film, Robert Lepage’s Nô is, in the end, a satire on the universal frailties of man and his…
There’s the low-budget film, and then there’s the no-budget film, the latter category of which The Following is a member. It’s a story of intrigue, the soul of darkness, and imagery shot with a hand-held camera in sixteen-millimeter black and white. The film loosely focuses on Bill (Jeremy Theobald), who…
Get ready for the sweet life. For seven nights starting September 10, the Absinthe House is running the greatest hits of Federico Fellini in a brief retrospective, ¡Fellinissimo! There are no majorly remastered versions with “missing half-hours” reinserted being shown, but it is a chance to see the best of…
As a filmmaker, actor John Turturro clearly believes in drawing from personal experience: His directorial debut, 1992’s Mac (which won the Camera D’Or at Cannes), was avowedly based on his father’s life. For his second feature, Illuminata, Turturro takes a look at the theater, showing us the ambitions, fears, and…
In the opening scene of Leila, we’re shown, through an Iranian holy ceremony, the intimacy of a present-day Iranian family. But family ties are strained and the modern world is tested as Leila (Leila Hatami) and her husband, Reza (Mohamad Reza Sharifinia), discover that she will never be able to…
Of all the atrocities committed by the United States government, the internment of Japanese Americans in prison camps during World War II deserves a spot in the top ten. The legal and moral implications of this dark period in our history have been explored by civil libertarians. But what about…
It seems like only yesterday that movies dealing with gay and lesbian life were synonymous with extravagant displays of gloom and doom. From the suicides of The Children’s Hour and Advise and Consent to the serial killers of Cruising and Basic Instinct, same-sexuality was no fun — in the worst…
What is it they say — that even a flea can reach Mount Olympus riding in Pegasus’s mane? Well, in the case of the new Albert Brooks comedy The Muse, Brooks is the flea and Pegasus is his delectable costar, Sharon Stone. But I get ahead of myself. In The…
A somber, meditative film from the Greek master Theo Angelopoulos, Eternity and a Day tells the story of a terminally ill writer Alexandre (played with creaky eloquence by German star Bruno Ganz) as he moves out of his seaside home and begins to look back over his life on the…
It has been almost 40 years since Eric Rohmer, riding the crest of the French New Wave, embarked on the first of his Six Moral Tales. The series eventually would include at least two classics: My Night at Maud’s (1969) and Chloe in the Afternoon (1972). Linked by theme, style,…
If Kevin Williamson has anything to say about it, the good works of noble movie schoolteachers like Mr. Chips and Miss Dove and Mr. Holland will be wiped out in one fell swoop. In their place the creator of TV’s hormonal Dawson’s Creek series proposes an unmitigated horror: a high…
Filmmaker Bobby Bowfinger, the lead character in the intermittently funny Hollywood satire Bowfinger, starring Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy, has a dream: He sees a FedEx truck cruising down the street toward his office, but instead of driving by, as it does every day, the truck stops, and the driver…
Spike and Mike’s 1999 Classic Festival of Animation, Spike and Mike’s latest edition of their annual festival (which is definitely not to be confused with their grosser, inferior Sick and Twisted fests) is their best compilation yet. There’s not a single stiff in the batch. The material is all new…
Joan Chen, director and co-writer of Xiu Xiu the Sent Down Girl, is best known as an actress: American audiences probably identify her most readily as the doomed wife in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor or as Josie Packard, the alternately evil and innocent character in David Lynch’s weird-o-rama Twin…
London-born novelist-screenwriter Hanif Kureishi doesn’t have Margaret Thatcher to kick around anymore, as he did so incisively and effectively in My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, but his concerns have not wandered too far afield. Rather the hard edges merely have been softened. Universal issues still inspire…
Do not be fooled: Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley, and Peter Criss receive top billing in Detroit Rock City, but Kiss doesn’t actually appear in the film until its final three minutes. And when the band members do show up, clad in their de rigueur leather-and-greasepaint getups, it’s simply…
Dan Ireland’s impressive debut feature The Whole Wide World died quietly at the box office despite making many a critic’s ten-best list for 1996. His followup, The Velocity of Gary, may suffer the same fate, given its modest budget and a story line focused on male bisexuality. That would be…
First published under the title The Iron Man in Great Britain in 1968, The Iron Giant is a minor classic of twentieth-century children’s literature. The slim volume by the English poet laureate Ted Hughes is a pacifist parable in the guise of a sci-fi hero fantasy. Hughes spun his yarn…
It’s always amusing when the movie industry discovers its spiritual side. Profoundly secular institution that it is, Hollywood promotes, at its peril, the notion that teenagers spewing pea soup in Georgetown can be purged of their demons by Catholic priests, that angels from heaven intercede in the lives of ballplayers…
