While Quentin Tarantino is no stranger to American audiences, one of his contemporary idols — Hong Kong noir director John Woo — is far less known on these shores. Woo’s unfortunate decision to team up with Brussels muscleman Jean-Claude Van Damme for the director’s big shot at crossover success, 1993’s…
If you took 1978’s California Suite, replaced screenwriter Neil Simon and director Herbert Ross with four of Hollywood’s hottest young filmmaking guns, each writing and directing his or her own twenty-minute segment, and then coated the whole thing with a fizzy, retro Love, American Style vibe, the end result would…
I hate compiling year-end top-ten movie lists. No, I don’t have a Woody Allen-esque objection to the concept of ranking works of art in a competitive fashion. Nor am I one of those haughty nose-in-the-air types who tell anyone within earshot that there weren’t ten films worthy of approval this…
Penis envy may be ludicrous. The analyst’s couch may be passe. Still, there’s no eradicating the imprint Sigmund Freud’s theories of personality have left on our collective psyche in the last 100 years. Through his writing and research, Freud popularized dream interpretation, recognized infant sexuality, and acknowledged the wounds we…
Stand-up comic Jeff Garlin learned how to make people laugh from the bathtub. As a toddler, he cracked up his parents by filling a plastic toy with water and announcing that it was “concentrated.” He garnered even more chuckles with words such as girdle and Jamaica. A shtick that only…
Not surprisingly, boats, the most obvious symbols of exodus and displacement, have emerged as central pictorial components in the work of contemporary Cuban exile artists. The images of watercraft created by Cuban immigrants to Miami typically document real-life occurrences — most recently the rafter crisis in the summer of 1994…
When was the last time you saw a decent pirate movie? In recent years screen buccaneers have had better luck sacking filmmakers’ careers than they have a-pillagin’ and a-plunderin’. In 1980 Michael Ritchie’s The Island managed the extraordinary feat of out-dumbing the imbecilic Peter Benchley novel from which it was…
A young woman named Sabrina Fair, the daughter of the chauffeur for Long Island’s obscenely wealthy Larrabee family, misspends much of her youth perched in a tree spying on the dashing playboy David Larrabee as he seduces (and presumably abandons, although we never see the ugly part) a succession of…
“He loves her but she loves him And he loves somebody else, you just can’t win.” — J. Geils Band, “Love Stinks” The leap from Jane Austen novel to J. Geils Band song is not as great as you might think. In Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, dignified Colonel Brandon yearns…
Sometimes I wish these guys would just fuck and be done with it. When you blow away the cloud of steam generated by the generic cops, robbers, and one-last-heist-that-goes-bad plot line, Michael Mann’s new film Heat boils down to a love story between two men. But because this is a…
Jennifer Montgomery’s semiautobiographical Art for Teachers of Children positions itself as a dispassionate, disquietingly original take on underage sex and the line between child pornography and art. From the get-go the film assails your notions of exactly what the age of consent is — or ought to be — as…
Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde touched a collective nerve when it was first published in 1886. The provocative story of a scientist who unleashes the darkest parts of his nature by drinking an elixir spawned its first staged version the following year,…
In 1991’s Father of the Bride, doting suburban white-bread proto-papa George Banks (Steve Martin) went deeply into debt to stage a perfect wedding for his suddenly all-growed-up little girl Annie (Kimberly Williams). Nina Banks (Diane Keaton) sighed a lot and tried to allay her husband’s anxieties. In the newly released…
Imagine an ethnically mixed inner-city neighborhood devoid of drug deals and drive-by shootings. Older residents leave their apartments without fear of getting mugged. Young black men are not harassed by police. And every morning in this urban enclave a Jew, a Chicano, and a black man gather in a corner…
Two school security guards in green T-shirts and khaki pants stand inside the doorway of Horace Mann Middle School as a group of seventh graders excitedly gather around a large mural painted in the front hallway. The face of a young man with a determined expression stares out from the…
La Dolce Vita meets the Magic City with the arrival of Cinema Italiano Oggi (Miami’s Italian Film Festival). A five-day orgy of new movies, restored classics, elegant parties, and hobnobbing with the leading lights of modern Italian cinema, the festival kicked off yesterday, November 29, with the screening of Michele…
Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant was an overwrought but distinctively stylish variation on an overworked cinematic genre — the corrupt cop movie. His latest release, The Addiction, takes an unconventional bite into an even more played-out category: the vampire movie (or, to be more specific, the unhappy-vampire movie). After being accosted…
As the opening titles for White Man’s Burden unscroll, you know right away that you’ve entered a very different world. White lawn jockeys adorn the tidy estates of affluent black suburbanites. Caucasians slink furtively through the shadows of city streets at night, dealing drugs, selling their bodies, and looking for…
You may not know that the 1966 musical Man of La Mancha takes place in a prison cell during the Spanish Inquisition. You may not know that the play’s main character is Miguel de Cervantes, the sixteenth-century Spanish author who wrote the masterpiece novel Don Quixote. And you may not…
You don’t want to wager against Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro), a professional sports gambler whose handicapping prowess is so formidable that he can change the odds merely by placing his bet. Ace makes scads of money for a coterie of delighted Midwestern mob bosses, who eventually reward him…
Some of the finest movies of the past three years have been documentaries: Hoop Dreams, The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, and Crumb. Add Steven M. Martin’s thoroughly absorbing Theremin to that list. The movie is so fascinating, frightening, and hilariously funny that no one could have made it…
Memo to James Bond To: James Bond From: Todd Anthony Re: GoldenEye Welcome to the Nineties, 007. I thought you were dead, a victim of the changing times and the inability of the guardians of the Bond legacy to find a suitable actor to play you. Pierce Brosnan will never…
