Back in 1993 Disney released Swing Kids, a dead-earnest portrait of rebellious German jazz fans during the Third Reich. This bizarre hybrid (a blend of Footloose and Schindler’s List, of Dead Poets Society and The Diary of Anne Frank) pitted big bands against armbands; it was a classic case of…
The Deep End of the Ocean starts out as a maternal horror movie and ends up as a family therapy session. Michelle Pfeiffer plays the photographer wife of a restaurateur (Treat Williams) and mother of two sons and an infant daughter. While checking into a jammed hotel for her fifteenth…
The Corruptor should come as something of a relief to fans of Hong Kong superstar Chow Yun-Fat who were mostly disappointed with last year’s The Replacement Killers, Chow’s American screen debut. Among the producers of that action thriller was John Woo, who in the Eighties and early Nineties directed five…
A picture, as the saying goes, speaks a thousand words. Sometimes the same is true of reactions to pictures, like the brief notes written in the visitors’ book at Jill Freedman’s exhibition of photographs, Resurrection City: A Look Back, currently at the Miami-Dade Public Library. “I’m very sad how whites…
At the movies the fun-loving temptress has been liberating the buttoned-up clod ever since Katharine Hepburn’s leopard made off with Cary Grant’s dinosaur bone in Bringing Up Baby, 61 years ago. Maybe even longer, if you count pioneer vamp Theda Bara’s effect on a long succession of speechless men. In…
Immodesty becomes Guy Ritchie, the British writer-director who makes a jovial debut on a Jovian scale in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. In this wayward gangster comedy set in London’s East End, Ritchie cooks up a gleefully improbable tale using mismatched ingredients: a rigged card game, a hydroponic marijuana…
For Cruel Intentions, writer Roger Kumble’s directorial debut, he has come up with the clever idea of updating Choderlos De Laclos’s durable eighteenth-century novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses. With its focus on totally amoral protagonists who use sex as a tool to manipulate innocents, often just for the hell of it,…
In the three decades that director Ken Loach has been a steadfast champion of the British working class, his films have lost none of their sting. Whether examining a brutal Belfast police incident in Hidden Agenda (1990) or the plight of an unemployed man struggling to buy his daughter a…
When hit men wore hats and Cadillacs had running boards, the average Mafia don could knock off the Tattaglia brothers in midafternoon and sit down to a nice plate of chicken cacciatora that evening, content that he’d seen to the family business and blazed a path for his first-born son’s…
The independent production/distribution company The Shooting Gallery probably got more attention when Monica Lewinsky showed up in Washington, D.C., wearing a cap bearing its logo than it is likely to receive from the release of this modest, deserving film from writer-director Nancy Savoca. Savoca has made three earlier features: True…
During the opening titles of 200 Cigarettes, we hear Bow Wow Wow’s near-peerless bubble-gum anthem, “I Want Candy.” The movie that follows seems designed to satisfy that craving: It’s sweet, tart, brightly colored, insubstantial, and utterly lacking in nutritional value. It’s also fun to consume, and harmless enough as long…
The sixteenth Miami Film Festival continues this week with even more international fare. On the must-see list are Thursday’s presentation of a sublime offering from French newcomer Erick Zonca that created quite a stir at Cannes, The Dreamlife of Angels. The same day Buena Vista Social Club showcases famed German…
For film buffs it’s two weeks of sheer pleasure: the sixteenth annual Miami Film Festival, featuring 31 pictures from fifteen countries. Naturally Spanish-language features abound, from opening-night dance-fest Tango, courtesy of Argentine director Carlos Saura, to the kinky Spanish thriller Between Your Legs. There are also intimate looks at Cuban…
In The Eel, which won the Palme d’Or at the 1997 Cannes International Film Festival, director Shohei Imamura once again demonstrates his empathy for the outsiders and aliens of Japanese society. In this case he muses on the tormented relationship between a paroled wife-murderer who is struggling with his past…
The worst thing about French director Manuel Poirier’s Western, which was nominated for multiple Cesar Awards (the French equivalent of the Oscars) and won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, is its title. Despite the strained attempts of the movie’s production notes to convince us of…
Short of nuclear holocaust, a major sale at Kmart, or a confirmed Clint Eastwood sighting in rural Iowa, there’s probably no way to keep the movie version of Message in a Bottle from overwhelming the tender emotions of the hearts-and-flowers crowd. After all, this relentless assault on the tear ducts…
The new Mel Gibson vehicle Payback is arguably the first major-studio release this year to have even a modicum of aesthetic ambition. For his directorial debut, Brian Helgeland — who won an Oscar for his 1997 L.A. Confidential screenplay (cowritten with director Curtis Hanson) — has chosen to adapt The…
Jimmy Cagney brought the same electric physicality to gangsters that he did to song-and-dance men. He gave a bright-eyed mug like his character in Public Enemy extraordinary powers of attraction and repulsion. In The General, Brendan Gleeson enacts the part of a real-life criminal chieftain — Dublin’s notorious Martin Cahill…
Between the current nostalgia for platform shoes and the epidemic of midlife crisis that has so many baby boomers in its grip, director Brian Gibson’s Still Crazy just might be able to find an audience among the disturbed, the deafened, and the disenchanted. It is, after all, the comic tale…
The worst thing about French director Manuel Poirier’s Western, which was nominated for multiple Cesar Awards (the French equivalent of the Oscars) and won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, is its title. Despite the strained attempts of the movie’s production notes to convince us of…
Elevate The Jerry Springer Show a notch or two — in other words, dispense with the one-legged serial killers who are having sex with their blind mothers, and other such nonsense — and you’ve got Willard Carroll’s Playing by Heart. Too harsh a judgment, some will say. After all, this…
The cold-hearted among us have watched Camille die tragically on the late show and have seen Brian Piccolo run his last yard through the cancer ward often enough to understand the hazards of Hollywood “disease” movies: false sentiment, synthetic emotion, and tears for tears’ sake. It is with wariness, then,…
