With hearts full of hope, the people at 20th Century Fox are trumpeting A Walk in the Clouds as Keanu Reeves’s debut as a romantic leading man–despite a resume that lists party animal, acrobat cop and ersatz Buddha as his most notable movie accomplishments. Predictably, neither the clatter of press…
Peter McNeeley is the heavyweight champion of certain parts of Massachusetts and a couple of saloons in eastern Connecticut. He’s beaten such luminaries as Jesus Rohena, Ron Drinkwater and Howard Kelly. Two years ago he knocked out Miguel Rosa in Revere, Massachusetts, in the second round, and he won a…
1. How ’bout that mixed-doubles badminton final? Don’t let this get around, but while most of us were rotating the tires on the car last week, or repainting the parakeet’s cage, something called the U.S. Olympic Festival snuck into our fair state. This series of athletic exhibitions proved so popular…
You don’t always get what you pay for. As everyone knows by now, Waterworld is the most expensive movie ever made. Fierce Pacific thunderstorms, logistical nightmares, a nasty feud between director and star, the star’s insistence that scenes be reshot because he didn’t like the way his hair looked–such were…
If American adults are still capable of being shocked by the behavior of teenagers–I’ll lay six to five that they’re not–then Larry Clark’s Kids is the movie that will shock them. The New York teens we meet here for one harrowing 24-hour period talk dirty. They pursue sex and drugs…
For Westerners, at least, the events leading up to the Tiananmen Square massacre are symbolized by the image of a lone, nameless Chinese student standing in the path of a huge army tank on a street in Beijing. Played and replayed on the evening news, these few seconds of blurry…
It has taken a week or two to catch up with an exceptional children’s movie called The Indian in the Cupboard, and the wait was worthwhile. The director is Muppet-meister Frank Oz, the screenplay is by Melissa Mathison, who wrote the family blockbusters E.T. the Extraterrestrial and The Black Stallion,…
Every time they see their therapists, Company Commander John Elway and a few other tattered vets of 1990 must surely recall that slaughterhouse offensive the San Francisco 49ers laid on them in Super Bowl XXIV. It is the kind of thing old soldiers never forget: mates gunned down in the…
James Gray, the 25-year-old writer/director of Little Odessa, seems to be aiming higher than most of his fellow film-school graduates. Gray’s dark and bloody family melodrama, which is set in the Rus-sian-American neighborhood of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, aspires to both Greek tragedy and Shakespearean weightiness, and while his efforts sometimes…
For more than half a century, the Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel stood in splendid isolation from his peers. Social subversive, incessant joker and deep thinker, he took it upon himself to lambaste some of the world’s most cherished institutions–notably the Roman Catholic Church, middle-class morality and vintage political correctness–without regard…
Once upon a time, in a land that no longer exists, baseball’s ultimate status symbol was a World Series ring, followed in short order by a .340 batting average, a slinky babe with a mink stole draped off her shoulder and a Cadillac. You’re not a big deal this year…
The absorbing drama Red Firecracker, Green Firecracker is set on a family estate and in a bustling northern Chinese river town at the end of the Ching Dynasty. These are the years leading up to the 1911 revolution, and director He Ping squeezes every bit of dialectic he can find…
Clearly, the Art Cinematic has made great strides since the days when extraterrestrial invaders were all huge, featureless carcasses encased in blocks of ice, or spiders blown up to beach-umbrella size by atomic radiation. In the name of progress, the killer alien in Species is a gorgeous blonde (former model…
Say you’re lounging around the campfire in your animal skins, wondering if all that ice will ever melt, when a couple of underfed mammoths come charging out of the forest. What to do? Fling a stick at them? Probably not a good idea. Go fetch the thirty-aught-six? Forget it, dreamer…
Devotees–and detractors–of the underground comics pioneer R. Crumb may be startled to learn that this trafficker in headless female sex objects, anxiety-ridden male outcasts and pornographic kitty cats was probably the happiest member of his family. That’s just one of the things we learn in the course of Terry Zwigoff’s…
Wayne Wang’s astonishing little film Smoke sneaks up on the viewer in wonderful ways. Superficially, it’s a “slice of life”–half a dozen related slices, actually–about the people who frequent a Brooklyn cigar store in 1990. But just underneath a deceptively simple surface, we come upon serious matters: the need to…
Good morning, inma–, er, students. This is The Principal speaking. Now that you’ve all had your nice cups of gruel, it’s time to get down to the serious business of education. To wit: It has been brought to my attention this morning that some of you are once again up…
Steven Soderbergh’s directing career has hit a couple of snags since he enlivened the independent filmmaking scene five years ago with a cool-tempered study of yuppie obsession called sex, lies & videotape. Since then, Soderbergh’s gloomy Kafka has probably played best in Prague, and his beautifully wrought adaptation of A.E…
What can you say? Apparently, that’s a hundred million dollars’ worth of darting laser ray, jet-powered car and black rubber suit up there, and if the whole shebang goes in one eye and out the other before you even get back to the parking lot, that’s too bad. They probably…
Except for a dozen wronged bartenders and a handful of die-hard Brooklyn Dodgers fans, the whole world’s happy this week that Mickey Mantle continues to recover from liver transplant surgery. We Americans like our heroic myths to go on forever, even in defiance of logic, and the Mick still supports…
If the star of your summer fantasy/adventure movie happens to be a gorilla–or rather, a gorilla suit with a tiny actress stuffed inside–you naturally get a little stingy with the rest of the casting. That’s what the makers of Congo have done. The bogus primate is called Amy, and she…
For now, citizens of the New Russia have more important things to do than revitalize their creaky old movie industry. Like keeping the St. Petersburg mafia at bay. Getting the telephones to work. Importing millions of hair dryers, brassieres and car alarms that play the lambada, usually from the United…
