The versatile British director Peter Yates once made American tough-guy movies like Bullitt and The Friends of Eddie Coyle, as well as such quirky little comedies as Breaking Away. Now he’s joined the Irish charm cult. The Run of the Country is a coming-of-age story set in an Irish village…
Easy Rollins, the smooth private eye at the heart of four Walter Mosley novels, occupies the same city (Los Angeles) and the same period (the fertile 1940s) as his celebrated counterpart in the detective trade, Philip Marlowe. Both of them are stained by the violence of their antagonists and, quite…
Koy Detmer and Ki-Jana Carter probably don’t want to hear about it, but–yeah, sure, of course–there are plenty of good things to say about artificial turf: 1. It’s cheap–at least for team owners and college athletic departments. According to the manufacturer of AstroTurf, it costs about $5,000 a year to…
In the cold, gray, unnamed city where David Fincher’s bloody thriller Seven takes place, it’s always raining. There’s a coating of grime on every door lock and lampshade, the coffee cups are all chipped and smudged, and every dark staircase in every tenement is collapsing. So is the tenement. All…
Jerry Garcia had been at the undertaker’s about five minutes when a filmed valentine to his true believers hit the street. Your enthusiasm for Tie-Died: Rock ‘n Roll’s Most Deadicated Fans will likely depend on your tolerance for cult argot in general and Deadhead blather in particular, but make no…
The rain falls cold and steady this afternoon, and the home nine are in far-off California, facing the test of their young lives. Still, it is nice to sit for half an hour or so in section 125, behind the Rockies dugout. In the flat light of the heaving storm,…
Actress Diane Keaton has declared herself a film director, and she hasn’t taken long to set a style. In Unstrung Heroes, a bittersweet tearjerker combining a twelve-year-old boy, his dying mother, his geeky father and two crackpot uncles, Keaton leans toward solemn silences and worried faces reflected in windowpanes. She…
Once your acne starts to clear up, there’s not much reason to see an Allan Moyle movie. Or so it first seems. The Montreal-born director specializes in high-test teenage fantasy, so it’s unlikely that anyone with less than a compelling interest in picking out a prom dress or getting a…
Hey, y’all. This here’s Jerry Jones, and I wanna tell you this afternoon ’bout a couple of changes to our fuhball team that’s gonna git us back in the Super Bowl faster’n a coyote goes in heat, I’m pretty sure. Now, some folks said the Dallas Cowboys were finished, that…
Spike Lee’s in-your-face moviemaking style–the pounding insistence that we get it–is familiar by now. So there’s little surprise when Clockers, which explores the complex, uneasy relationship between cops and bottom-rung drug dealers around a decaying Brooklyn housing project, opens with a grim montage of bloody police crime-scene photos interspersed with…
Earlier this year Andre Techine’s Wild Reeds won four major Cesar Awards–France’s version of the Oscars–and the movie has attracted big audiences in that country. But not all French delicacies travel well. The four interwoven coming-of-age stories at the heart of the film are interesting enough because raging teen hormones…
If you don’t watch where you walk–well, you know. Any time 400 dog lovers and their pets get together in one place, the footing can get hazardous. But that’s not the only thing. Confused Labrador retrievers sometimes leap over the rail and scamper up the backstretch in the wrong direction…
Just when we thought nothing else could go wrong on this beleaguered planet, environmentalists and medical researchers have unearthed something called “multiple chemical sensitivity.” Ten U.S. government agencies currently acknowledge the existence of this politically correct affliction, which is probably nine more than knew about it an hour and a…
Apparently, Mr. Selznick’s search for Scarlett O’Hara had nothing on this affair. Robin Williams, James Spader, Stephen Dorff, John Cusack and Robert Sean Leonard were among the throngs answering the casting call for To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. But none of them landed a job. None of…
The canned crowd noise roaring through empty Folsom Field last Wednesday had a surreal ring to it. With the volume pumped way up to approximate the beer-fueled frenzy the team would face three days later in Wisconsin’s Camp Randall Stadium, it’s a wonder CU center Bryan Stoltenberg could hear the…
A wise man–or was it a wise guy?–once cautioned that there are two things you should never watch being made: sausage and movies. (Consider the ingredients.) Nonetheless, directors have convinced themselves from time to time that the moviemaking process itself is suitable material for a movie. Most notable was the…
British director John Boorman’s fondness for exotic locations and quasi-mystical quests give his best films, like the memorable Southern river trip Deliverance, an air of heightened reality, while his botched forays into Arthurian legend (Excalibur) or Amazonian splendor (The Emerald Forest) reveal the boisterous-tourist side of him, along with a…
That was no optical illusion. And it wasn’t fear playing mind tricks on mere mortals–although there was plenty of that to go around, too. Fact is, Monica Seles has grown another inch during her 28-month absence from tennis, and she’s gained six or seven pounds of sheer muscle. Up at…
If you work mainly at home, get your mother to do the catering and play one of the lead roles yourself, you might be able to eke out a feature-length movie for $16,000. That’s what 27-year-old Edward Burns did. The surprise is not that Burns got The Brothers McMullen into…
The most unnerving–and delectable–skill of film noir masters like Huston, Wilder and Dassin may have been the way they turned all of human relations into a slippery fiction, a pack of lies, an extended alibi. In the dangerous netherworld of these movies, no love was true, no emotion sound, no…
From the beginning, that big white clock outside Coors Field has had a mind of its own. So at 3:54 last Thursday afternoon, this unreliable timepiece assured the gathering throngs on Blake Street that it was 3 p.m. By evening, 54 minutes were still missing in action and, for all…
Like Keanu and company above, the restless young characters in French-Canadian director Denys Arcand’s Love and Human Remains are also searching for love and family. But most of them are initially so unlikable that we don’t care much if they succeed. Consider the gay actor-turned-waiter David (Thomas Gibson), a hard-shelled…
