The beautiful little conceit at the heart of Brad Anderson’s Happy Accidents is that audiences will sit still once more for the crackpot notion of time travel — and in a movie that’s not science fiction. To his credit, and with an implied bow to Back to the Future and…
Filmmakers don’t get any more sensitive than Paul Cox. When it comes to jerking a tear or tugging a heartstring, this Dutch-born, Australian-raised veteran is a master. Just ask anyone who saw My First Wife (1984), in which a workaholic disc jockey falls to pieces when his neglected wife has…
Faced with yet another sports movie in which a group of lovably troubled kids triumphs over adversity, it’s easier to scoff and grumble than to feel even partially uplifted. So let’s do it — let’s scoff and grumble. At least for a moment. In Brian Robbins’s Hardball, a degenerate gambler…
There are so many reasons to detest the French that it’s hard to choose the best ones. Their capitulation to Hitler during World War II holds up pretty well, as does their icy disdain for anyone with the nerve to be from another country. As movie director Billy Wilder once…
Woody Allen’s latest romp through old New York combines (among other things) a skirt-chasing insurance investigator with the charm of a rodent, a wise-cracking Vassar grad who takes no guff and a nightclub hypnotist in a sequined turban who doubles as a major jewel thief. The year is 1940. The…
Have you heard? Baseball players are as sensitive as ballerinas. Slip a single off-color rose into your favorite center fielder’s bouquet and he’ll weep at the beautiful incongruity of it. Should ancient Mrs. Trumpington speak crossly at Madame Beltone’s fortnightly reading circle, the average big-league shortstop will avert his eyes…
The social lessons of Captain Corelli¹s Mandolin, all of them suitable for framing in just about any dorm room, are these: War is bad. Love is good. The Italians love to sing, even when they’re supposed to be at war. The Greeks are freedom fighters. And whatever you do, don’t…
If Sergeant York and Captain Willard ever run into each other on the battlefield — or the backlot — they’ll have plenty to talk about. Army food. The firepower of the Springfield ’03 versus the M-16 carbine. Mud and grime. The night sweats. Overwrought assistant directors. They might even discuss…
Tran Anh Hung’s beautiful meditation on family ties and family traumas, The Vertical Ray of the Sun, marks a captivating new chapter in the career of the writer-director who was the first to give Americans a glimpse of Vietnamese filmmaking. In 1994, Tran’s The Scent of Green Papaya made its…
Now that the Stanley Cup’s in the trophy case and the Rockies are in the toilet, local sports junkies can return to their first love in good conscience. All eyes are fixed on Greeley, a grim backwater drenched in brutal heat and stockyards perfume, where the Denver Broncos and their…
When last we spotted indie icons Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau on screen together, they were knocking back fruit-flavored martinis and chasing L.A. skirt in the inventive Gen-X hit Swingers. The goofy charm of that phenomenon now gives way, sad to report, to a labored fringes-of-the-mob comedy called Made, in…
The crooks, whores and liars who run the Olympic Games have a weakness for symbolism almost as powerful as their taste for cash. They love their flag-raising ceremonies and their five-ring logos almost as much as they love bribery, and they go ape for big pots of fire. Most of…
Talk about mood swings. Just about the time you grab a sonic handle on the Blue Noise Band (“Listen, Margaret, there’s a real purty steel-guitar waltz”), it slips away and the tune instantly morphs into something else (“Jesus, Mags, it’s Napalm Death!”). Born and raised in the musical melting pot…
Wherefore art thou, Tony? Let us count the ways, Cal. America’s love affair with sports heroes can be a pretty sordid business, based more on flash than substance. One year, the madding crowd worships a steroid-stuffed behemoth who whacks lots of Flubber-filled cowhide into the cheap seats. The next, they…
In the movies, dead husbands and dearly departed boyfriends have an irksome habit of revisiting the women who once loved them — usually at inconvenient moments. Consider Demi Moore in Ghost. Poor thing had to put up with the dramatically challenged shade of Patrick Swayze, who droned on and on…
German filmmaker Tom Tykwer has a gift for fusing psychological complexity and crackling plot without forsaking the excitements of either. The success of Run Lola Run didn’t exactly turn Tykwer into a household name, but it earned him his props as a young lion of the art houses. Moviegoers hungry…
Miles Dewey Davis was a man of many parts, and since his death ten years ago this September, jazz fans and cultural critics have continued their long struggle to put him together. To champions of artistic understatement, he was the ultimate exponent of cool, a musical genius whose lean phrasing…
Who can fathom the mystery of Michael Jordan? The man has enough National Basketball Association championship rings to open a chain of pawnshops. But the gold and the diamonds and everything they stand for are not enough. Millions of awestruck kids wear Jordan’s $150 sneakers, eat his Wheaties, slurp his…
In the annals of social change, Alma Schindler is strictly small potatoes, and Bruce Beresford’s new biopic, Bride of the Wind, unwittingly threatens to erase her altogether. For those who don’t have the history of the Austro-Hungarian empire at their fingertips, Alma (Sarah Wynter) was an outspoken party girl from…
Those who fear that jazz is dead or dying or in a weird state of suspended animation need look no further than the Rodriguez family to find the heart of the music beating true. Ignore the bickering over styles and stances that presently keeps musicians and fans spinning their wheels:…
Race drivers combine the sleek daring of matadors with the bullheaded resolve of interior linemen. The average leadfoot would run his grandmother’s old Studebaker into a ditch if it meant getting to a checkered flag first. Race drivers don’t put much stock in sentiment; they’re going too fast to think…
Measured by its screaming dive-bombers, multiple-explosion mayhem and flaming carnage, the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced Pearl Harbor is just the kind of eye-popping, ear-splitting blockbuster the summer movie throngs crave. Here is Hollywood bombast — $140 million worth — at its most shameless pitch and in its most glorious profusion. Bruckheimer and…
