Courage comes in an infinite variety of forms and faces, but who among us would be brave enough to relive our high school years, face the horrors of homeroom, and confront hallways so fraught with danger that the most treacherous battlefield would look as placid as a meadow? It is…
Steve Martin says he doesn’t want audiences to expect the same old Steve Martin whenever he stars in a comedy. But that means one thing when he’s referring to Roxanne and L.A. Story, two inspired flights of romantic farce (based on his own scripts), and another when he’s talking about…
Six Ways to Sunday is only director Adam Bernstein’s second theatrical film, so it’s a little early to attempt a coherent analysis of his career. On the surface this young-mobster story couldn’t be more different from his earlier effort, the egregiously unfunny It’s Pat, which foolishly bloated Julia Sweeney’s one-gag…
Has any major American director had quite as many career swings as Robert Altman has? Maybe not, but if there’s one thing the past 30 years have made clear, it is that it’s never safe to count Altman out. The mid- and late Nineties have been particularly unfriendly to him…
Ginger and Fred. Shirley Temple and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds. To the list of unforgettable movie dance partnerships, we may now add Omar Epps, the trim, handsome young man who stars as one-third of The Mod Squad, and Michael Lerner, the heavyset middle-age actor who played…
Stuffed full of fantasy comics, addicted to action, and steeped in digital technology, the frenetic moviemakers Andy and Larry Wachowski have done what they must: create an eye-popping, morph-mad, quasi-mythical sci-fi flick that will thrill computer nerds as it kicks serious ass. The Matrix also presumes to (ahem) think deeply,…
There’s an old adage that says that by the age of 40, a man gets the face he deserves. If that’s true then Clint Eastwood, the producer, director, and star of the death-row thriller True Crime, must have committed a capital offense or two of his own. To call it…
Self-serving confessions are a mainstay of best-seller lists; now we’re doomed to see their ilk onscreen. 20 Dates is the not-so-verite story of Myles Berkowitz, a tyro filmmaker in his mid-thirties who tries to advance his career and up his happiness quotient by filming himself on a score of dates…
“I hope it’s better than The Truman Show,” said the woman in line behind me at the publicized sneak preview of EDtv. Afterward a man in my row declared, “That was a lot better than The Truman Show.” Pretentious high-concept films such as The Truman Show often garner accolades and…
Among the best ways to search for oil is the seismic shoot. To make one you drill a hole about 25-feet deep, insert 2.2 pounds of dynamite, and detonate. The explosion causes vibrations in the earth that are recorded by sensitive listening equipment deployed over a large area. The data…
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…
