Excess Baggage, Alicia Silverstone’s first feature from her First Kiss Productions, turns out to be a rather shaggy and uninvolving jaunt. As Emily T. Hope, the moneyed teenager looking for love from her emotionally distant single dad (Jack Thompson), Silverstone pouts a lot while trying to wring our sympathy. Even…
Mike Leigh’s new film Career Girls is compact and minor. I don’t mean that as a slam, exactly. After the dawdling expansiveness of last year’s Secrets & Lies, his latest one is something of a relaxation — it’s appealingly small-scale. Leigh isn’t doing anything here he hasn’t done better before…
In G.I. Jane, Demi Moore plays a naval intelligence officer, Lt. Jordan O’Neil, who is recruited to be the first female SEAL. She gets a buzzcut. She endures the indignities of the male volunteers snickering at her in the food line. She rolls huge barrels through the surf and clambers…
When the beautiful entomologist rips open the chest cavity of a huge bloodthirsty insect in the sci-fi nightmare Mimic, it turns into Thoracic Park. This movie, like Spielberg’s, features evolution gone haywire and dramaturgy gone to hell. In the prologue, the heroine — the reckless and courageous (or foolhardy and…
The cops in Cop Land carry on like a bunch of goombahs. On the take from the Mob, they mimic the Mob. The fuzzy line dividing cops and crooks is the subject of many a strong police movie, but Cop Land goes a step further — it says there is…
In the not-so-brave new world of independent filmmaking, low-budget movies premiere at Sundance or Cannes and win plaudits from over-psyched audiences, publicity from desperate feature writers, and distribution from boutiques that are usually subsidiaries of major studios. Right now Tarantino-style thrillers are out; crazy-clan stories and upstairs-downstairs tales are in…
In the Company of Men is about Chad (Aaron Eckhart) and Harold (Matt Malloy), two thirtysomething white-collar execs who have recently been passed up for promotions and rejected by their girlfriends. En route to a six-week business trip to the home office, Chad, the bristlier and wilier of the two,…
Jerry Fletcher, the hero of Conspiracy Theory, is a comic, glamorous variation on Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Like Travis, he’s a New York cabbie obsessed with protecting a woman from the world’s hidden malignancies. Unlike Travis, Jerry snaps when he achieves sanity. Mel Gibson has been almost too willing…
187, a number favored by adolescent thugs, is the California state penal code for homicide — and a harsh sentence for all involved in this hopeless, hapless movie. The gifted Samuel L. Jackson stars as a high school teacher who cracks under the constant threat of rabid teen machismo and…
In Picture Perfect Jennifer Aniston tells a whopper of a lie partially to win the attentions of a guy who has heretofore ignored her, interrupts a wedding, and humiliates another guy at his workplace. This follows on the heels of My Best Friend’s Wedding, which finds Julia Roberts trying to…
At first glance, the new Japanese comedy Shall We Dance? appears to be an Asian remake of the Australian hit Strictly Ballroom. But in fact the similarities are only surface-deep, and just barely that. Part of the difference is rooted in the cultural gap between the two nations, but wider…
Mrs. Brown (a Cannes hit and Miramax release) is dignified to the dead max — brownish-gray in mood and look and spirit. It’s based on the true story of the platonic but controversial bond between Queen Victoria (Judi Dench) and a Highlander named John Brown (Billy Connolly), who had been…
Not satisfied with the president you have? Here’s Harrison Ford’s James Marshall in Air Force One: Vietnam war hero, straight as a ramrod, devoted husband and father. We first see him delivering a speech before a roomful of Russian dignitaries. Departing from the prepared, wishy-washy text, Mr. President fire-breathes his…
What must those poor guys in Insane Clown Posse be thinking? After all, the sad white rap act only made a record that included profanity, and still they got drop-kicked off a panicky Disney-owned Hollywood Records, a label whose greatest catalogue asset is Queen. Martin Lawrence, on the other hand,…
Just in time for Bastille Day, the consulate general of France in Florida and CocoWalk 16 Theatres are offering the inaugural Franco-Hispanic Film Festival (July 11 through 13; see “Showtimes” or “Calendar Listings” for a complete schedule), whose raison d’etre appears to be to spotlight cinema that’s co-produced or co-distributed…
A lot of ink has been shed in the press lately about the “seriousness” of the new Robert Zemeckis film Contact, starring Jodie Foster as an astronomer who receives humankind’s first extraterrestrial message. Forrest Gump made Zemeckis a guru; now he’s being primed as a philosopher king. Just abouxt every…
Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s final film shares with the late Cuban director’s Letters from the Park (a sweetly lyrical film based on the Gabriel Garcia Marquez story about a man who ghostwrites love letters) and Strawberry and Chocolate a tone of wistful romanticism. Like a Garcia Marquez novel, Guantanamera, which screened…
One speech and one prop from Men in Black combine to sum up the movie. An alien in four-legged earthly form delivers the speech: “You humans, when’re you gonna learn that size doesn’t matter? Just ’cause something’s important doesn’t mean it’s not very, very small.” The most refreshing thing about…
The title of John Woo’s Face/Off is meant to be taken literally. John Travolta and Nicolas Cage play adversaries who swap faces. Here’s how: FBI agent Sean Archer (Travolta) has been single-mindedly tracking terrorist nut Castor Troy (Cage) ever since Castor’s botched assassination attempt six years earlier, in which he…
Slapstick decadence is the dominant style at the Disney studios this summer, reaching all the way from Touchstone Pictures’ action hit Con Air to the 35th Walt Disney animated feature, Hercules. It’s a moviemaking mode that weds anything-for-a-laugh to anything-for-a-jolt, leaving imagination and authenticity in the lurch. Instead of creating…
The Van is being billed as “the final chapter in the Barrytown Trilogy,” Irish author Roddy Doyle’s group of novels set in a fictional north Dublin suburb that also consists of The Commitments and The Snapper. That “final chapter” label, courtesy the production notes, gives The Van the aura of…
British filmmaker Peter Greenaway sits near a window in the dining room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel; he indicates with his eyes a man walking along the sidewalk toward Hollywood Boulevard. In trying to explain his use of multiple imagery in his new film The Pillow Book and separating it…
