It’s an ironic title: There’s not much joy in The Joy Luck Club, and the characters’ luck is almost always bad. The Joy Luck club is not really a club at all, but a mahjong circle comprising four middle-age Chinese women living in San Francisco. The circle’s founder, Suyuan, has…
If Malice is a good example of Hollywood’s idea of suspense — tracking down a mysterious psychopath — Un coeur en hiver aspires to a higher order of thriller that the best art explores: unraveling the mysteries of the human heart. That is the puzzle presented by Stephane, a violin…
Malice, Harold Becker’s high-profile career gaffe, is one of the strangest films I’ve seen in a long time. Or maybe I should say two of the strangest films, because there’s so little connection between the first 45 minutes and the balance of the film that they should have been separate…
Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. As a team they’ve been responsible for three of the finest movies of the past quarter-century: Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull. Even their near-misses have made for compelling filmmaking; it’s hard to imagine a director-actor tandem alive that wouldn’t be proud to…
Seems like only yesterday the prevailing view was that the advent of pay-per-view movies, videotape rentals, and laser-disc technology would combine to spell doom for the nation’s movie theaters. The summer of 1993 proves just how little the pundits actually know. From the last week of May through the first…
There’s a lot of Travis Bickle in Clarence Worley, and there’s a lot of Taxi Driver in True Romance. Clarence and Travis are both lonely guys. Misfits. Taxi Driver’s Travis is an insomniac who frequents Times Square porno palaces late at night, in part because they’re the only movie theaters…
If the boys and girls of summer tend to get overlooked come Oscar time, the opposite is true of their fall and winter counterparts. In November and December Hollywood traditionally rolls out the heavy artillery, both to take advantage of holiday moviegoers and to ensure that the big star vehicles…
For those of you who only read the first sentence of a movie review to find out whether the critic liked a film or not: RUN DON’T WALK TO SEE SON OF THE PINK PANTHER, THE LAFF RIOT OF THE SUMMER! For the rest of you: stay away at all…
Derivative, contrived, and predictable — Tim Metcalfe’s screenplay for Kalifornia hits the big trifecta. How’s this for a far-fetched plot: Brian Kessler is a struggling writer whose girlfriend, Carrie, is a photographer. He received an advance to do a book on serial killers, but when the movie opens he’s already…
Diehard Patrick Swayze fan that I am, I counted down the minutes with bated breath until the opening of his latest masterpiece, Father Hood. I was not disappointed. Keep your DeNiros and Brandos, your Garcias and Washingtons. Give me Patrick Swayze in a film that can’t make up its mind…
They’re having a devil of a time up in tiny Castle Rock, Maine. Ever since the arrival of sinister old Leland Gaunt and his quaint little antique shop, the town’s been going to hell. Literally. At first Sheriff Pangborn, a former homicide detective from Pittsburgh who moved to Castle Rock…
“Fuck fuckin’ Hollywood, those queer dick-smokin’ motherfuckers,” snarls Billy, the hot-tempered, acid-tongued suburban brat-turned-mobster at the core of Amongst Friends. Every incendiary frame of 26-year-old Long Island native Rob Weiss’s stunning feature film debut echoes the sentiment. The independently-produced Amongst Friends came out of nowhere to galvanize audiences at this…
The bad guys have Jean-Claude Van Damme cornered in an abandoned warehouse packed with surreal floats from bygone Mardi Gras parades. He’s outnumbered twenty to one. They have motorcycles, automatic rifles, grenade launchers — you name it. All he’s got is an old pump shotgun. Blam! Make that nineteen to…
There’s a lot to like about Orlando, Sally Potter’s new film based on the 1928 novel of the same name by Virginia Woolf. It’s smart, it’s funny, it’s hip, and it’s a visual feast (a feat made all the more remarkable by writer-director Potter’s paltry four-million-dollar budget). There’s also a…
Welcome home, Woody. We’ve missed you. Manhattan Murder Mystery marks the return to form of the reigning king of one-liners, Woody Allen, and his reluctant queen, Diane Keaton. If the year’s ugliest custody battle accomplished nothing else, at least it scratched Mia Farrow from the lineup and reunited Annie and…
Hollywood’s fascination with plots involving benevolent ghosts who interfere in humans’ lives peaked with Topper in 1937. Since then it’s all been downhill. There have been exceptions — Heaven Can Wait and All of Me, for example — but ever since Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore slopped a lump of…
The cinematic version of the long-running (or maybe it just seemed that way) TV series The Fugitive has so little in common with its small-screen progenitor that truth in advertising laws would have seemed to mandate a name change. On the small screen, phlegmatic sourpuss David Janssen played the indefatigable…
What is it about summer weather that propagates bad comedies like Nebraska corn? Anyone who has suffered through Life with Mikey, Son-in-law, Weekend at Bernie’s Part 2, Dennis the Menace, Hocus Pocus, and Another Stakeout knows what to expect if the sewer line beneath Biscayne Bay finally blows: wave after…
It’s easy to see why Michael Crichton, who wrote the novel and the first draft of the screenplay for Rising Sun, eventually became so upset with director Philip Kaufman’s vision that, depending on whose version of the story you believe, he either abandoned the project or was removed from it…
Lesbians have always gotten a pretty raw deal from Hollywood. They’ve generally been portrayed as either villains or seductresses, take your pick. Sure, you’ll find the occasional self-consciously sensitive film (usually made by a man) like John Sayles’s Lianna or Robert Towne’s Personal Best, which took themselves so seriously that…
You don’t always get what you pay for. Weekend at Bernie’s II and Son-in-law are lame excuses for comedies, but seeing them will still lighten your wallet noticeably. Meanwhile Studentfilms, Inc., an offshoot of Robert DeNiro’s Tribeca Film Center in New York City, has compiled a touring exhibition of eight…
Remember Vic Hitler, the narcoleptic comic in Hill Street Blues? Terry Kiser received an Emmy Award nomination for his portrayal of the comedian with the penchant for nodding off just when he had an audience rolling in the aisles. Like most of the quirky characters who populated Hill Street, Vic…
