First, let us dispense with the obligatory political correctitudes. 1. Beating a woman, not to mention killing her, is wrong. Always was, always will be. Feminist agenda-setters and law enforcement types are not exactly thrilled about the flap out in La La Land, but they’ve taken the opportunity to put…
Nobody handed Jack Nicholson anything. He earned his place early on as one of Hollywood’s big dogs, and twenty-five years later, he’s not afraid to bare his fangs. For instance: A lesser force might not have gone anywhere near Wolf, recalling those campy werewolf flicks in which tormented Henry Hull…
Now that Westerns are back, you can get a fresh, vivid look at the Wyatt Earp/Doc Holliday legend by renting Tombstone at the video store. Released in theaters six months ago, George P. Cosmatos’s swift, concise hayburner features the able Kurt Russell as vengeful lawman Earp and edgy Val Kilmer…
The next time some genius with five or six Miller Lites in him spins around on his barstool and starts regaling you with that old business about how sports reflect the agony and ecstasy of life, tell him to go home and put his head in the sink. Sports reflect…
Clearly Krzysztof Kieslowski has plenty to say. Maybe he’s even got the faintest touch of serial killer in him. In any case, the extraordinary Polish director now makes his movies in bunches. The Decalogue was a relatively obscure series of ten films exploring each of the Commandments, and his “Three…
You’ll find plenty of bombs on every summer’s movie schedule. But this year Hollywood is setting them off on purpose. A little later in the silly season, terrorist Tommy Lee Jones will torment Boston cop Jeff Bridges with his penchant for explosives in Blown Away. For now we must content…
When baseball was the national pastime, the owners smoked two-dollar cigars and the players, even the underpaid ones, went to work with smiles on their faces. In the reserved grandstand (tickets three bucks), fans drank beer out of real bottles, and there was no need to cut them off in…
Penny Marshall probably won’t win the Nobel Prize anytime soon, but the TV-star-turned-director has a minor gift for detective work. After discovering the little boy inside the man (Big) and the ballplayer within the woman (A League of Their Own), Marshall has now unearthed the deep thinker in the dumb…
In recent years, visiting moviemakers have recast Ireland as a kind of cultural theme park packed with nostalgic folk wisdom exhibits, ongoing political tragedy rides and postcard views of verdant countryside. In this fantasyland, picturesque locals loose torrents of reheated Yeats in lilting brogues. At night everyone settles in at…
Soccer is the game nearly 83 Americans love. When the World Cup kicks off next week in nine far-flung U.S. cities, it might have trouble outpointing badminton, ice-fishing and furnace repair in the Nielsen ratings. Aside from a guy named Pele, who retired years ago, your average Yanqui imperialist cannot…
Amid the clatter of summer blockbusters, Red Rock West is the kind of terrific sleeper that could get lost. That would be a shame. Here is a taut little thriller that depends on such classic virtues as the well-timed double-cross, clever plotting and vivid low-life characters, rather than on high-octane…
Has Bernardo Bertolucci flipped out? The man who once explored the frontiers of carnal obsession (in Last Tango in Paris) and the fervid intrigues of Italian politics (The Conformist, 1900) began gazing eastward last decade, coming up with a gauzy Chinese head trip called The Last Emperor. That’s the one:…
The latest wisdom among baseball pundits, most of whom have not swung a bat since Little League, holds that soon the game must produce the most appealing athlete in the country in order to regain its high perch as the national pastime, to restore the mythic dimension that faded away…
Can a quarter-century really have passed since Ratso Rizzo first sneered “I’m walkin’ heaahh!” and Joe Buck grinned at himself in the mirror, straightening the Stetson on that golden Texas rube’s head? Midnight Cowboy returns to the big screen this Friday for a one-week run at the Mayan, and its…
Like his earlier films, Pedro Almodovar’s Kika is the kind of outdated bedroom farce that could only come from post-Fascist Spain, where artistic freedom is still a novelty. As in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and High Heels, this tale of a garrulous Madrid makeup artist’s sexual misadventures flaunts…
This is what things have come to. Hollywood has spent $60 million on a Western movie derived from an old TV show that borrowed heavily from earlier Westerns, which were in turn based on dime novels that glamorized beyond recognition what actually happened on the American frontier. Naturally, the star…
If you’d like a startling new insight into America’s strange love affair with the automobile, try standing beneath one of the underpasses at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway while 230-mile-per-hour race cars scream over the pavement above your head. The sensation is not unlike cozying up to a roomful of tornadoes…
In Spike Lee’s sunny re-creation of Bedford-Stuyvesant circa 1974, laughing kids jump rope and play stoopball on spotless sidewalks. There’s always a parking place for the family car in front of the tidy brownstone. The neighbors may beef at each other about a little misplaced trash, but there’s not a…
Yuppies hit the bottle, too. That’s the lesson of When a Man Loves a Woman, in which pretty Meg Ryan falls through a glass shower door, sweats out detox and fights to reclaim alienated husband Andy Garcia–all without messing up her hair or smudging her makeup. This is another gooey…
For a time this month, your Denver Nuggets became America’s Denver Nuggets–the fulfillment of underdog dreams, the hope of every factory worker who ever fantasized about playing in the bigs, wowing the Grand Ole Opry or sailing a yacht in Monte Carlo. Hey, nice piece in Sports Illustrated. Ain’t that…
Glenn Gould, the eccentric Canadian pianist and celebrated hermit, would be a tough nut for any filmmaker to crack. As a child prodigy who could play Bach before he could read, Gould sat next to the radio, transfixed by Toscanini. But later he announced: “I just don’t like the sound…
It’s no surprise that Cyril Collard’s Savage Nights became an instant cult hit when it was released in France in October 1992. This blunt autobiographical portrait of youthful narcissism and recklessness in the age of sexual peril was the first European film to confront the AIDS epidemic head-on. Not only…
