The New York character actor Joe Pesci (“I’m funny? How’ya mean, funny? You find me amusing?”) is at his best when sniping, kibbitzing and wise-cracking from the edges of street-tough movies like Raging Bull and Goodfellas. Whenever the spotlight hits him, he gives a film a lift, a shot of…
As with young Irish gun Kenneth Branagh, whose Dead Again is the summer’s most stunning achievement and a fully successful resurrection of the Muscle-bound Hollywood Romance, the truth about Ethan and Joel Coen lies in the past. But while countless critical search parties aimlessly spelunk for the Coens’ source-stream in…
Voyeurism is an amazingly supple subject for films. The whole cinematic process reeks of it – sitting alone in a darkened room, watching the actions of characters unaware of you, prying into their personal lives and innermost secrets. And many acclaimed films have explored it overtly: Rear Window, for instance,…
Filmmaker Scott Dittrich probably hates Patrick Swayze. If he doesn’t, he should reconsider. A former UCLA economics grad student, Dittrich (what? – you thought it was going to be Swayze?) has spent the past seventeen years as one of the nation’s foremost practitioners of the surf movie. In their pure…
Alone on the sidewalk in front of her house, a little girl (Natalie Morse) jumps rope, counting – and naming – the stars in the night sky. Her hoop skirt juts out alarmingly from her hips; her shadow is huge on the white wall behind her. From corner to corner,…
The British melodramatist and amateur muckraker Alan Parker has the blunt gift of a cartoonist, but he’s not much good at filling out his movie-essays. Give him a cause – any cause – and he’s likely to trivialize it. Set the cause to music, though, and you’ll want to start…
Galvanized by the raw vernacular of the Dublin streets, the language of The Commitments is dense and extremely local, kind of like a radically ethnic take on Bill and Ted’s most resplendent San Dimas-speak. Given the limits of the provincial tongue, director Alan Parker has found it in his culturally…
In the galaxy of young directors, there’s a short list of the brightest stars that critics recite like a litany: Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, the Coen brothers, Kenneth Branagh, Jane Campion. Every season, another auteur – John Singleton, John McNaughton, Richard Linklater, Tony Spiridakis, even Kevin Costner – twinkles briefly…
It’s pay-back time for Jean Vigo. In early-Thirties France, Vigo was a hot property, too hot for some, in fact, given that his schoolboy-satire Zero de Conduite (A Zero For Conduct) incurred the wrath of French censors for its irreverence. When it came time for a follow-up project, Vigo tried…
The white supremacists that populate Blood in the Face, a bracing, entertaining documentary about the far tip of the right wing, work hard to mass assassinate the characters of other ethnic groups. Jews, of course, are power hungry and corrupt. Hispanics reproduce mindlessly. Blacks, or “mud people” are subhuman brutes…
Sure, there was shit smearing and fork stabbing, but the most horrifying aspect of Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover was not the violence, the sadism, or the scatology, but rather the obsessive sense of order. In the maelstrom of rapes and beatings and trucks…
Dark Obsession is neither very dark nor very obsessive, but that does not disqualify it. On the contrary, all the fools and fops, snips and snobs you recall from British manor-house dramas past seem to have been coaxed out of retirement for one last go, and you’re bound to enjoy…
Giuseppe Tornatore is not the first young filmmaker to wilt in the heat of devotion to a past master (see: DePalma, Brian vis a vis Hitchcock, Alfred), but he may be the most gifted. When the young Sicilian scored an international hit last year with the boyhood reverie Cinema Paradiso,…
The latest in a series of pathetic American movies that baldly rip off foreign films, Pure Luck – based on the misadventure comedy Le Chevre (The Goat) – proves that international trade regulators should set aside important issues and get right down to the trivia. These French missed connections, which…
In the peculiar garden party that opens John Greyson’s Urinal, it’s June 1937, and some of the leading cultural figures of the decade have been assembled in a modest Toronto house. Harlem renaissance poet Langston Hughes is there, as are Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, Japanese author Yukio Mishima, and Mexican…
The age-old question “Is there a doctor in the house?” is answered in duplicate this week with The Doctor and Doc Hollywood. In the wake of a bombs-away July in which Hollywood hardly showed a pulse, these early-August offerings, both about physicians, both based on books written by physicians, have…
The real Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, and Frank Costello were four ugly-mug Lower East Side rough boys who learned to live with each other, amassed an empire based on bootlegging, narcotics, gambling, and protection money, and became kings of the New York streets. In Mobsters, a laughably vacant…
Chuck Workman’s Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol goes heavy on the times and light on the life. Warhol, the celebrated pop artist who died unexpectedly in 1987 after minor gallbladder surgery, was a bizarre character. Sickly despite the vigor of his art, seemingly anesthetized despite the sensual…
Natalie (Jo Beth Williams) has a problem. It’s her son, Doyle (Ethan Randall), a sullen, abusive kid who blames his parents’ divorce on his virtuous mother and apotheosizes his rich scumbag father Reed (Christopher McDonald, who played Geena Davis’s poor scumbag husband Daryl in Thelma and Louise). When Dad skips…
All hail the San Dimas, California, duo of William S. Preston, Esq., and Ted “Theodore” Logan, benignly disaffected teens with lazy minds, heavy-metal dreams, and their own special language. Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) first wandered into theaters in 1988, when Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, a sleeper…
Whatever the new generation of black moviemakers lacks in dramatic sophistication and deep-pockets funding, it makes up for in freshness and passionate certainty of purpose. Witness the admirable first efforts of newcomers Matty Rich, age 19, and John Singleton, a geezer at 23. Rich’s Straight Out of Brooklyn, a roughhewn…
If you want to see Ronald Reagan rob a bank, hop in the car and drive to the nearest showing of Kathryn Bigelow’s crime-and-surfing drama Point Break. As the leader of a holdup gang called the Ex-Presidents, Reagan terrorizes savings and loans along the Southern California coast. It’s bipartisan felony,…
