In the highly competitive, dog-eat-dog world of the modern-day superhero, the members of the group that eventually becomes known as the Mystery Men (they don’t really have a name through most of the movie) start out with a couple of strikes against them. First off there’s the little matter of…
Runaway Bride, the long-anticipated reunion of Pretty Woman-stars Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, isn’t a sequel, but it feels like one. In everything there is a distinct sense of predestination, of events occurring according to some irresistible force of the inevitable. This makes life especially easy for Garry Marshall, the…
For Morgan J. Freeman (a young writer-director, not the well-known actor), comic timing couldn’t get any worse — or better. That’s because one of the unhappy teenagers in Freeman’s second feature, Desert Blue, is a melancholy girl dressed in moody black who likes to detonate homemade bombs. The Columbine High…
Robert Wise’s 1963 version of The Haunting (from Shirley Jackson’s novel) has long been considered one of the milestones of the horror film. After 36 years, DreamWorks has bankrolled a new version under the direction of Jan de Bont (Speed, Twister) — an idea that should sound unpromising, even to…
Finally Miami gets a proper gay and lesbian film fest, running through Sunday at the Colony and Alliance theaters. The celluloid marathon kicks off with a gala and the latest from Rose Troche, Bedrooms and Hallways, and ends with another gala and the star-studded trick. In between Miami will be…
Roughly halfway through Edge of Seventeen (July 22 at 9:30 p.m. at the Colony Theater, 1040 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach), the hero of this romantic comedy-drama, a very likable kid named Eric (Chris Stafford), is confronted by his mother (Stephanie McVay) in the living room of their home. “Are you…
The Blair Witch Project, the bone-chilling indie by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, is easily the scariest horror picture of the ’90s, a movie that can take a place among the most potent and inexorable of modern shockers, like Night of the Living Dead or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Three…
Eyes Wide Shut, the final motion picture from the late, great Stanley Kubrick, is easily the most anticipated adult film of the year. It’s The Phantom Menace for grownups. Any film by the notoriously painstaking auteur would have achieved this status. Kubrick made only thirteen features in his 46-year career,…
It’s about time we had a talk. Yeah, you know, that talk. The one about how uncomfortable and strange it is to be a young human male, how raging and unforgiving the hormones, how fragile the ego, how mysterious the female form. You see, well, how do I say this?…
This is the third year the Consul General of France is putting on a film festival showcasing movies each coproduced by France and a Spanish-speaking nation. This time around the festival features eight films, two of which co-originate from Mexico, one from Argentina, and two from Spain — all in…
Do you feel snug and secure in your cozy suburban life? Are you happy with your picture-perfect home, your carefully manicured lawn, your kids and their soccer games, and your barbecues? Do you feel safe? Well, the creators of Arlington Road, the ponderous new thriller starring Jeff Bridges and Tim…
Run Lola Run is proof that the influence of MTV on feature filmmaking hasn’t been all bad. The jagged stylistic excess that dominates short-form music videos can be exhausting and irritating when drawn out to feature length: Michael Bay (The Rock, Armageddon) may be the worst offender, though far from…
To hear Spike Lee tell it, Summer of Sam means to be a panoramic view of the summer of 1977 in New York City, when temperatures shot into the high 90s and power blackouts set nerves on edge; when the party agenda included snorting coke at Studio 54 and copulating…
The animated TV show South Park was the big sensation of the 1997-98 season — or at least as big a hit as a cable channel like Comedy Central can manage. It was almost inevitable that creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone would take their batch of foul-mouthed eight-year-olds to…
Woe to the scribbler who presumes to rewrite a master, unless he is so deft that his invasion of privacy produces something new and exciting. Enter British writer-director Oliver Parker. He has the nerve to meddle with Oscar Wilde’s sublime farce An Ideal Husband and the skill to pull it…
Anthology films are an odd-duck genre: While at one time books of short stories were published almost as frequently as novels were, their cinematic equivalent has never amounted to even one percent of the fictional films released. You could argue that Pulp Fiction counts as an anthology, but its stories…
The new Adam Sandler comedy Big Daddy isn’t just the funniest movie of the summer; it’s also the most improbable feel-good movie of the season. It’s improbable because practically everything about Adam Sandler seems so unlikely, so strangely back-assward. His whole phenomenal career (from Billy Madison to Happy Gilmore, from…
Twice Upon a Yesterday seems almost too geared for the Sliding Doors crowd. By relying on the same kind of conceptual sleight of hand as that recent Brit hit (which owed a giant debt of its own to Groundhog Day), this romantic fable’s sense of originality and wit is greatly…
Pretentiousness masquerading as profundity; self-indulgence masquerading as art. The Loss of Sexual Innocence, the dreadful new film from writer/director Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas, One Night Stand), joins the ranks of the worst films ever made. A statement that may, on the surface, seem harsh and heartless but that will…
While Hong Kong movies have been invading Hollywood through the success of Jackie Chan, John Woo, Jet Li, and others, mainland Chinese cinema has invaded the classier neighborhoods of the film industry during the past decade or so. The latest contender is The King of Masks, an affecting melodrama from…
A fine line divides inspired silliness from out-and-out witlessness; it’s a short leap from grin from groan. In 1997’s Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Mike Myers took a thin premise — spoof the Sixties by transplanting a horny Matt Helm-like secret agent into the Nineties — and danced an…
In John Sayles’s Limbo, which is set amid the rough-and-tumble of southeast Alaska, an ex-salmon fisherman with guilty memories (David Strathairn), an itinerant lounge singer with a lousy voice (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), and the singer’s melancholy teenage daughter (newcomer Vanessa Martinez) become stranded, Robinson Crusoe-style, on a remote island. This…
