The twelfth annual Miami Film Festival opens this Friday with local resident David Frankel’s sleek and smart Miami Rhapsody. Second-guessing the festival’s opening and closing selections has become an annual rite. I already have heard grumbling that a “deeper” film should have kicked off the schedule, something less facile and…
It’s a measure of the success of Roman Polanski’s screen adaption of Ariel Dorfman’s suspenseful, provocative play Death and the Maiden that by the end of the film one is not as troubled by the concept of WASP-y Sigourney Weaver playing a Latin woman named Paulina Escobar as by the…
On September 29, 1992, presidential candidate Bill Clinton publicly announced his support of a repeal of the ban on gays and lesbians serving in the U.S. armed forces. The public outcry was immediate. Opinion polls revealed a nation split fairly evenly on the subject. In January 1993, after taking office…
I have a number of bones to pick (sorry) with Demon Knight, a supposed horror movie from the perpetrators of HBO’s Tales From the Crypt anthology series. But the most damning criticism is the simplest: It just isn’t scary. Gross is another story. The filmmakers have trucked in barrels of…
One thing there’s no shortage of in this country is monitoring. Jesse Helms’s people monitor painters and photographers for homoerotic imagery or anti-Christian iconography. School boards monitor classic books for obscenity. There are even quasi-religious organizations out there that can tell you how many times Joe Pesci uttered variations on…
My momma always told me that year-end top-ten lists are like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get. A quick glance through other film critics’ nominations for the best and worst of 1994 confirms Momma’s wisdom. For example, Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers and Entertainment Weekly’s Owen…
“Welcome to Beston,” the sign reads, “Home of the Bulldogs.” It’s a safe bet that the folks residing in that sleepy little upstate New York town never met a bulldog like Bridget Gregory (a.k.a. Wendy Kroy). Bridget is a Manhattan girl from the top of her impenetrable black shades to…
Robert Altman is the most feared slugger in American cinema. When he really connects, as he has in the past with M*A*S*H, Nashville, and The Player, he knocks the ball out of the park. So powerful is his stroke that even when he’s just trying to make contact he’s still…
Any idiot can write a boffo opening to a movie. The hard part is sustaining the suspense, comedy, or action for 90 minutes and then wrapping it all up neatly into a satisfying conclusion. That is why so many movies start with a bang and end with a whimper. It’s…
If you’ve ever watched a junior high school theatrical production of a venerable, time-honored play in which no one gets anything quite right — not the acting, not the sets, not the direction — then you’ll recognize the discomfort caused by the off-pitch romantic comedy Speechless. Screenwriter Robert King (author…
Here we go again. Another painfully sincere filmmaker embraces the enduring myth of the noble savage. Jodie Foster, sweetheart of the Gap-and-Birkenstocks set, not only stars in Nell, she produced it as well. Foster is a talented, articulate actress with both brains and guts, two commodities in short supply in…
There’s something admirably gutsy about an independent filmmaker choosing mother-son incest as the subject of his first film, then making it on a shoestring with a cast of unknowns. No matter how good a picture it may be, a topic this disturbing and depressing is not the sort of thing…
If the life of filmmaker Edward D. Wood, Jr., were fiction, set down more or less as Wood’s cronies tell it, it would be hailed as the great Hollywood satire. It would seem like a creation of Nathanael West, had he survived until the Fifties, or of Tom Robbins, had…
On every level, Quiz Show is astonishing. It’s more than just a satisfying epic melodrama about the television scandals that rocked the broadcast industry almost 40 years ago; it’s the best American movie of 1994, and the most eloquent examination of the country’s contradictory sense of ethics since The Godfather…
Few movies pack as much potential for stirring up controversy as Cyril Collard’s Savage Nights. At heart it’s a traditional love story. But what sets Savage Nights (originally titled Les nuits fauves) apart is its topicality. Consider: Collard adapted the film (in French with English subtitles) from his autobiographical novel…
Redemption. Now there’s something I could use a little of. It’s been one of those weeks, man. Like any red-blooded American boy who ever played in little league, I experienced emotions I never thought were there when I heard about the cancellation of the baseball season. It was without a…
Quentin Tarantino and I have something in common: We’re both movie nuts who once worked behind the counter in video stores. I can’t speak for Tarantino, but most of my customers were couples (or one member of a couple renting something that both would see). And in nearly every case…
Don’t fuck with Fresh. He may be only twelve years old, but Machiavelli himself couldn’t play the street any better than this pint-size prince. Fresh Sr. is a speed-chess hustler in New York City’s Washington Square Park — “Bobby Fischer? Put him on speed and I’ll chew his ass up”…
There are three possible reasons to see Baton Rouge: Antonio Banderas, Victoria Abril, and Carmen Maura. If you’re not fond of the work of at least one member of that triumvirate of popular Spanish actors, you probably will have a hard time sitting through this clumsy Spanish film noir. And…
You can’t really blame the distributors of A Good Man in Africa for emphasizing the presence of Sean Connery in the film’s cast. After all he’s perfect for the role of high-principled Dr. Alex Murray, the only white man in the emerging West African nation of Kinjanja who cannot be…
Be afraid. Be very afraid. Oliver Stone has gone over the edge and he wants to take you with him. Stone’s new film Natural Born Killers is a splatterfest with a heart as black as gunpowder. Think Bonnie and Clyde with assault weapons. Remember that scene in Brian De Palma’s…
While the actors all turn in fine performances in director Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman the real star of the film is the food. Not since Babette’s Feast and Like Water for Chocolate has a motion picture given such mouthwatering due to meals. The film opens with widower Tao…
