After Santa’s overstuffed sack of Oscar qualifiers is disgorged every December, Hollywood dumps its lost-cause features during the first few weeks of the new year. In recent times these have included the airplane “thriller” Turbulence (1997), Bio-Dome and Two If by Sea (1996), and Cabin Boy (1994). This year we’ve…
One of the conceits to which every critic must be genetically predisposed is the idea that, at the end of the day, his or her opinion actually matters. That some unknown phantasm at a nonspecific coffee shop sits immersed in said critic’s latest ill-advised screed, imbibing every word as if…
Martin Scorsese’s Kundun is a deeply ceremonial experience; it’s like watching a serene pageant of colors, rituals, and costumes. It tracks the life of the Dalai Lama — recognized as the fourteenth reincarnation of the Buddha of Compassion and the spiritual and political leader of Tibet — from his childhood…
Swedish director Jan Troell’s Hamsun, starring Max von Sydow, is easily the greatest film I’ve seen in years. It takes you as far out as you can go — to the limits of feeling. As a movie about a great and grievous artist made by an artist of equal rank,…
Where would Irish filmmakers these days be without the Troubles? In just the past couple of years we’ve seen The Crying Game, In the Name of the Father, Michael Collins, Some Mother’s Son, and now The Boxer, the latest collaboration between director Jim Sheridan, screenwriter Terry George, and Daniel Day-Lewis…
When was the last time an audience applauded a trailer and the movie lived up to it? Independence Day enticed millions with its preview shot of the White House blown to smithereens, but that film was a dumb, elephantine sci-fi pastiche. The trailer for Wag the Dog, a far more…
The new Gus Van Sant film Good Will Hunting is like an adolescent’s fantasy of being tougher and smarter and more misunderstood than anybody else. It’s also touchy-feely with a vengeance. Is this the same director who made Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy? Those films had a fresh way of…
The ad line for As Good As It Gets is “A comedy from the heart that goes for the throat.” Isn’t this simply another way of saying, “You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll gag”? Jack Nicholson plays, of all things, a prolific romance novelist who’s a virulent xenophobe and a hopeless…
With 1994’s Exotica, Atom Egoyan secured his reputation as Canada’s leading director; his new film, The Sweet Hereafter, based on a celebrated novel by Russell Banks, should solidify Egoyan’s hold on that title. Egoyan’s work in general is small-scale enough to seem arty and plain enough to be accessible. The…
If Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown hadn’t arrived weighted with post-Pulp Fiction (1994) expectations, it might be easier to see it for what it is: an overlong, occasionally funky caper movie directed with some feeling. It’s derived from Elmore Leonard’s 1992 best seller Rum Punch, with the location shifted from Palm…
Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry is a film made by a free man — free certainly in a good way, and perhaps also in a not-so-good way. Liberated, for whatever reason, from the need to play a nice guy, Allen can play the bad man he does here free of the…
If one is in a biblical frame of mind, the sinking of the White Star Line’s Titanic about 400 miles off the southern coast of Newfoundland in 1912 could well be characterized as a divine act of one-upsmanship. The 46,328-ton “ship of dreams” was struck down on its maiden voyage…
Now that the Japanese Tora-san series — with 50-odd entries in 30 years — has presumably drawn to a close after the death last year of star Kiyoshi Atsumi, the James Bond films constitute the longest-running series around. They’ve had their ups and downs, but something about the Bond formula…
Wes Craven’s Scream, which opened almost exactly a year ago, was the surprise hit of an overcrowded Christmas season. The success was a triumph partly of counterprogramming: In the midst of a glut of classy Oscar contenders, Scream was the only teen horror film. It was also helped by the…
Steven Spielberg’s Amistad is being given the Big Picture treatment — Schindler’s List big, not Jurassic Park big. Last week’s Newsweek featured the film on its cover, calling it “Spielberg’s controversial new movie,” even though it had not yet been released and the only “controversy” was a legal one about…
What does it take to be an independent filmmaker? A few credit cards to max out, a few friends willing to work cheap, and a little faith in your own talent are about all you need to make a movie in the United States. But in China, to be any…
First, The Heiress was unofficially remade as Washington Square, then Ace in the Hole as Mad City, and The Day of the Jackal as The Jackal. But now we get The Absent-Minded Professor all dressed up in new threads as Flubber. In this frenzy of plundering the past, is nothing…
You can’t exactly call Alien Resurrection a pleasurable experience, but then again, you wouldn’t say that about its predecessors either. Directed by the Frenchman Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who previously co-directed (with Marc Caro) Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, this fourth installment in the Alien onslaught is once again designed…
Miramax held on to the Spanish comedy Mouth to Mouth (a.k.a. Boca a Boca) for better than a year before releasing it early this fall — usually a bad omen. (The film did screen locally as part of this year’s Miami Film Festival.) But although this romp from director-cowriter Manuel…
Over the past three years, 20th Century Fox has built an ambitious new animation studio in Phoenix, putting the promising Don Bluth and Gary Goldman in charge. The two were obvious choices. Since the animators defected from Disney Studios in 1979 to form Don Bluth Productions, they’ve turned out the…
John Grisham’s The Rainmaker lulls you into the mindset you get while reading a best seller at the beach. What a sad thing to say about a Francis Ford Coppola movie! Rather than heighten your awareness the way The Conversation or The Godfather did, The Rainmaker makes you feel lazy…
Documentarian Errol Morris is by far best-known for his 1988 feature The Thin Blue Line, which is often described as the only film that ever got an innocent man off death row. But he got his start with very different sorts of material: His first two films, Gates of Heaven…
