Taking Flight

When Roy Haynes was attending grammar school in his native Boston — it’s been an age — a teacher once sent him to the principal’s office because he couldn’t stop drumming his fingers on the desk. Little did the authorities know: Soon the distracted imp in their midst would become…

A Plan for Shanny

Let’s see: In the last two weeks, Steve Spurrier unexpectedly quit after twelve years as head football coach at the University of Florida because he wants to try the NFL. On the other hand, coach Chan Gailey left the pros for college, and Tyrone Willingham quit Stanford for Notre Dame,…

Working Girls

The combatants in Patrick Stettner’s compelling first feature, The Business of Strangers, are a middle-aged software executive (Stockard Channing) wearing a steel-blue suit and an air of professional hauteur; the executive’s mysterious new assistant (Julia Stiles), fresh out of Dartmouth and full of self-righteous aggression; and a cocky “headhunter” (Frederick…

Top Ten of 2001

In the Bedroom. First-time director Todd Field turns a dark tale by the late short-story master Andre Dubus into a precocious film masterpiece about murder, grief and repressed marital rage set in quiet Camden, Maine. Tom Wilkinson and likely Oscar nominee Sissy Spacek star as the highly civilized parents of…

Avs Lead the Parade

The horror and sadness that gripped America after September 11 brought the sports world low, too, and weeklong suspensions of play in college and pro football, major-league baseball, stock-car racing and golf served as fitting tributes to the dead. So did the astonishing outburst of patriotism that rang through stadiums…

Timely Traveler

The tricked-up charms of James Mangold’s Kate & Leopold may be precisely what the moment demands — as long as you accept the existence of chivalry, the possibility of time travel and the stream of bubbles emanating from Meg Ryan. Skeptics need not apply. Having toured the psychiatric ward in…

The Greatest Challenge

The most daunting role for an actor is to portray a god, and when the god comes equipped with a tangle of myths and the quickest left jab in history, the actor’s job can soon veer into guesswork. To Will Smith’s credit, he has managed to get at least partway…

Discmania

The year 2001 produced its share of catastrophes: major terrorist campaigns in D.C. and New York, a widespread anthrax scare — and J. Lo’s solo debut. Fortunately, there’s plenty worth remembering about the first official year of the new millennium, as artists of every genre proved that music still matters,…

Heavy Stuff

The air of danger that surrounds Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl (À Ma Soeur) never lets up, which is unusual for a film that wasn’t meant to be a thriller. Rather, it’s a merciless look at adolescent insecurity, the mixed signals of emerging desire and the ruthlessness of carnal gamesmanship that,…

Buffs Taken Aback

Don’t bother calling Ripley’s Believe It or Not or the supermarket tabloids, because they won’t believe it either. On Sunday afternoon, a crazed computer from Morristown, New Jersey, snuck up behind a buffalo in Boulder, Colorado, and forced nonconsensual sex on the hapless beast. That’s not all. It also proceeded…

The Wizard at Odds

His earthly triumphs interrupted by exhaustion and injury, home-run king Mark McGwire retired a couple of weeks ago. This came as unhappy news in baseball-savvy St. Louis, where the massive, red-headed slugger made home-run history in 1998, and in countless other precincts of the grand old game. It’s a good…

Dental Loss

It takes a nimble mind to mix light and dark, to wed humor with treachery. In Novocaine, newcomer David Atkins is not always up to the task. Neither is Steve Martin, who wants to be taken seriously while reserving the right to produce the occasional sick yuk. If you still…

Owners Get Batty

Paul O’Neill, the dour, longtime New York Yankees outfielder, won a world championship with the Cincinnati Reds in 1990 and four more rings with the Yankees in the last six years. Suddenly, that’s not much of an achievement. It looks like the Arizona Diamondbacks will now get a shot at…

Emma Goes to France

The heroine of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s bold and bracing new comedy, Amélie, is Amélie Poulain, a doe-eyed crusader with the face of a porcelain doll and a sleek helmet of jet-black hair. From her high perch in Montmartre, where she works as a cafe waitress, Amélie secretly resolves to emancipate all…

Condemned Property

Like the lovable baseball catcher in Bang the Drum Slowly, like John Wayne’s poignant gunfighter in The Shootist, like hundreds of doomed movie protagonists before him, the hero of Life as a House doesn’t have long to live. By the second reel, you may find yourself wishing his time on…

A Black and White Delight

Joel and Ethan Coen’s periodic genuflections to classic Hollywood are inevitably accompanied by a knowing wink from one brother and a wry smile from the other. These devoted movie buffs’ versions of vintage gangster pictures (Miller’s Crossing) or the populist comedies of Capra and Sturges (The Hudsucker Proxy) are not…

Meet the Slide Rulers

For as long as anyone in Golden can remember, there have been some surefire ways of knowing you are at a Colorado School of Mines football game. One: You pay six bucks and sit almost by yourself at 5,000-seat Brooks Field. Two: There are mules grazing in the corral beyond…

Odd, Touching Couple

It might take a major suspension of disbelief (or the ignorance of a space alien who’s never seen a movie) for the average ticket buyer to embrace My First Mister, the good-natured and eventually uplifting first feature film directed by actress Christine Lahti. Because the premise here is that a…

Swing and a Myth

Have you heard? Barry Bonds is an arrogant egotist who has three lockers in the San Francisco Giants clubhouse but not three friends on the entire team. He’s a slugger who hit 73 home runs this season but wouldn’t score 23 points in a fan approval poll. He’s uncouth, ungrateful…

Take 24

Director/film scholar Peter Bogdanovich, actress Debra Winger and Slackers creator Richard Linklater will be among the guests at the 24th Denver International Film Festival. The city’s annual cinematic debauch gets under way Thursday at the Buell Theatre with an opening-night showing of Lantana, a tense psychological drama from Australia’s Ray…

The Awful Truth

Combine teenage angst with suburban emptiness and you’ve got a movie formula with an appreciable advantage over some other current movie formulas — particularly in the eyes of those who believe the American family has disintegrated and most of us are headed for eternal damnation. This is not to say…

Pray Ball

On a sunny day in 1974, I stood in the awestruck company of thousands of my fellow native New Yorkers as a tightrope walker named Philippe Petit crossed the dizzying void between the tops of the two towers of the World Trade Center. A quarter mile above our craned necks…