Neil Simon is the most prolific and successful of contemporary playwrights. And the most maligned. Legendary director and theatrical scholar Harold Clurman wrote an article back in the Sixties called “In Defense of Neil Simon.” Whereupon Simon’s business manager asked Clurman “why a man who earns $40,000 a week needs…
As the science fiction thriller Freejack would have it, the big Apple seventeen years hence is a grimy midnight junkyard blanketed by noxious gas, infested with drug-crazed snipers engaged in open warfare, and run, police-state style, by the hired goons of all-powerful corporations. Nuns armed with machine guns curse like…
Juice, a coming-of-age picture about a group of four young black men growing up in a New York City ghetto, is the kind of film you root for during the first hour, then pray for during the second. Ernest Dickerson’s movie looks great, of course, but the former cinematographer doesn’t…
Tom Berenger has never been as imposing and remote – or as doggone silly – as he is in At Play in the Fields of the Lord, Hector Babenco’s new film based on the Peter Matthiessen novel of white mischief in the rain forests of South America. Berenger plays Lewis…
On a fateful night in February, 1964, en route to pick up custom-made plaid tuxedos for their first big gig, an eager but amateur singing quartet is slammed broadside by a busload of parochial-school virgins bound for the Beatles’ debut on the Ed Sullivan Show. All four members of the…
When Hollywood producers scan their in-boxes for hot scripts, they look for a story with a “through line.” They’d like you to believe this term refers to a strong, lean narrative that pulls you through the movie and keeps you interested. But it really refers to a concept you can…
In this era of slob humor and assault comedy, it’s a pleasure to stumble across a movie that comes at you as obliquely – slyly, even – as Mike Leigh’s offbeat Life Is Sweet. This wry slice of life, filmed in the north London suburb of Enfield, concerns the quiet…
Rita, a working-class hairdresser from the north of England, bumbles and bounces into the life of Frank, an overeducated college tutor and failed poet. Sporting a red fright-wig and rag-doll clothes, she comes on teetering heels to the open university, which she aptly dubs “degrees for dishwashers.” Here she hopes…
It’s amazing what passes for deep thinking in Southern California. Lawrence Kasdan’s godawful Grand Canyon combines a heavy dose of New Age psycho-babble, some lame platitudes about race relations, and a spoonful of pseudo-mystical pap on the possibilities of transcendence in evil, chaotic Los Angeles. Kasdan (The Accidental Tourist, Body…
Depending on which school of style you consult, William S. Burroughs comes up as a neglected literary genius or a dithering fraud still awash in the tame excesses of the Beat era. Cultists and detractors agree on one thing, though: For more than 30 years, Burroughs’s complex, scabrous fantasies have…
The durable cottage industry created by the events of November 22, 1963 (six hundred books, just for a start) has never seen anything quite like the Coming of Oliver Stone – or the $40 million Warner Bros. poured into his three-hour epic, JFK. To hear the self-appointed guardian of the…
At the age of eight, after the bite from a cottonmouth snake failed to scare him, Truman Capote visited a legendary witch in his hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. Armed with Grandma’s ornamental necklace – stolen to bribe his fondest wish out of the crone – he demanded to become a…
It’s hard to talk about what’s wrong with Claude Chabrol’s static retelling of Madame Bovary without mentioning the glossy 1949 version, directed by Hollywood musical master Vincente Minnelli. Few of the nine celluloid stabs at Bovary pleased Flaubert’s fans (Jean Renoir’s 1934 fantasy version probably came close, because it used…
The ads for The Prince of Tides, Barbra Streisand’s latest directorial effort, sell the film as a love story. But the romance feels secondary, because the story’s really about a rangy South Carolina football coach named Tom Wingo (Nick Nolte) struggling to understand how his dysfunctional childhood disfigured the rest…
The prototypical Steve Martin character has evolved into a decent, beleaguered goof who can but roll his eyes, dip into that little trademark mambo step, and try to persevere in the face of domestic distress. He’s true-hearted but baffled — Buster Keaton with facial expressions. This is the striving Dad…
Bugsy, the biography of Forties gangster Ben “Bugsy” Siegel, the man who built Las Vegas, is directed by Barry Levinson, who knows a thing or two about the way men think; his previous films, including Diner and Tin Men, are about how men relate to one another while ignoring or…
“Work in progress” — it’s a theatrical tradition, a sacred one that conjures up visions of feverish writers and composers relentlessly chiseling masterworks into perfection, guided by enthusiastic audiences and patient critics. Unlike the novel, rarely revised after its formal public introduction, musicals and plays may be recrafted several times,…
West German writer and director Monika Treut has devoted her film career to a study of sexuality, especially those sexualities viewed as taboo or deviant. Since she selected de Sade’s Juliette and Sacher-Masoch’s Venus In Furs as the primary texts for her Ph.D. thesis, Treut has forged bravely ahead with…
Any Trekkie worth his stars can probably fix the precise moment when Kirk, Spock, and Bones replaced the Three Stooges (or the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost) in the American popular imagination. The less enthralled among us simply grin and bear the gradual fact of it. In any case, here…
Rita and Peter, New York singles tentatively looking for love, find each other at a friend’s garden party, pursue a relationship, and marry after only six weeks. But at the wedding, an old lush kisses Rita and transacts a soul switch, leaving Peter with a stranger in his bed and…
If you’ve started to swallow this generation’s subtle ethnic-assassination campaign – resolving Japan’s dominance of world business by denigrating the Japanese as button-down, honor-bewildered, investment-confounded numberheads – you should probably hop in your Toyota and go see Black Lizard. If you’ve ever hankered for a detective story in which the…
Consider the plight of the Garcia family, which faces the biggest decision of nearly any Cuban-American’s life: To return to the island or not if Castro falls. Part Cuban, part Miamian – to varying degrees, depending on the generation – the Garcias mark el exilio time, waiting for a free…
