In the closing years of the twentieth century, lowbrow white America finally learned to enjoy an ironic laugh at itself, led by Hollywood’s cheerful mockery of the culturally challenged working class. Outside the system, John Waters had this stuff pegged from the get-go, but the American grotesqueries of the original,…
Three decades after Rosemary’s Baby, two decades after The Tenant, and after a series of five non-horror films, Roman Polanski returns to the supernatural thriller with The Ninth Gate. What could be more promising? Regardless of what one thinks about Polanski’s personal life or legal status, the man is clearly…
Garry Shandling does not have a face for the big screen. He has a mug that seems to spread to the edges of the theater; it’s like an approaching storm front, a sky full of billowing clouds roaring in from the north. And it’s a face built for two emotions:…
If you think the prevailing attitude toward sex in the United States is somewhat backward, consider that of late 1960s Ireland, as depicted in Agnes Browne, the new movie directed by Anjelica Huston. When asked by her best friend Marion (Marion O’Dwyer) if she misses “it,” the recently widowed Agnes…
Director John Frankenheimer has been putting bad guys on the street since Luca Brazzi slept with a teddy bear, and he shows no sign of letting up at age seventy. In Reindeer Games, a relentless, and relentlessly witty, crime thriller set in the frozen wastes of northern Michigan, a sleazy…
In the early ’90s, British actor Tim Roth made his bones with American audiences as one of Quentin Tarantino’s anointed hipsters: After getting gruesomely shot to pieces in Reservoir Dogs and sticking up a pancake house with batty Amanda Plummer in Pulp Fiction, Roth’s credentials as a bad cat were…
Step right up, youth of the world, and receive the boomer inoculation that is Wonder Boys, the first feature from director Curtis Hanson since his much-lauded adaptation of James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential. Then marvel at Michael Douglas showing off his wide spectrum of inert doldrums and tedious self-pity. Thrill to…
Twenty-seven-year-old Ben Younger delivers the message of his first feature, Boiler Room, with all the subtlety of a car bomb. To wit: Greed is alive and well in the new century, fueled by the material dreams of a generation bent on instant gratification and the distorted expectations of neophyte investors…
Even at just 92 minutes, Hanging Up feels endless. Intended as a humorous, heartwarming take on dysfunctional family relationships, this film doesn’t work as comedy or drama or anything in between. Given its wealth of above-the-line talent — director and costar Diane Keaton, writers Delia and Nora Ephron and actresses…
Moviegoers, rejoice! The first fun movie of the year has arrived. Oh, Leo’s little seaside adventure was pretty to look at, but its attempts at depth were a real bummer. And let’s not even talk about Scream 3: Even the first one was highly overrated, and it’s been downhill from…
Beware the shrieking teenagers who saw Titanic ten or twelve times and have been conducting their own shipboard romance fantasies with Leonardo DiCaprio ever since. They will be massed and marching in Bombay-at-rush-hour numbers this week, maybe in Chinese-army numbers, and anyone over the age of seventeen who doesn’t feel…
The heroine of Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke is a bold and impressionable Australian girl named Ruth Barron (Kate Winslet), who flees her middle-class suburb with friends for a spiritual adventure in exotic India. Inevitably, she is thunderstruck by a saucer-eyed guru named Baba, who quickly reveals the source of absolute…
Film director Agnieszka Holland is the daughter of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, but she was raised in communist Poland in an atmosphere of state-imposed atheism. If those bona fides don’t qualify her to make a two-hour movie about the timeless tug of war between faith and reason,…
The subject matter is surely the stuff of which can’t-miss movies are made: Jacqueline Susann, author of the best-selling Valley of the Dolls and other jerk-off (pardon — “maddeningly sexy,” to quote Helen Gurley Brown) classic lit. There was nothing at all pedestrian about this woman regaled in her day…
The evening of March 14, 1885, was an auspicious one in the annals of musical theater. Less than four years had passed since the opening of London’s Savoy Theatre, which was built specifically for the productions of librettist William Schwenk Gilbert and composer Arthur Seymour Sullivan. The partners’ first six…
The besmirched hero of Sweet and Lowdown, Woody Allen’s valentine to swing-era jazz and the furies of creative temperament, is a fictitious ’30s guitarist called Emmet Ray. Self-absorbed but brilliant, crass but lyrical, Emmet is the embodiment of the notion that a great artist needn’t be a good guy or…
Boo hoo! Frank McCourt had a miserable childhood! Honestly, who can say their childhood wasn’t impoverished in some way…or in many ways? That Mr. McCourt survived and eventually published his inescapable memoir is nice, of course, and the book is indeed a poignant and crafty piece of work. Nonetheless, it…
In Cradle Will Rock, his third directorial outing, Tim Robbins takes on an almost insurmountably ambitious project: the re-creation of an era into which characters imaginary, obscure and famous are woven into a tapestry representing the texture of the time. It’s a tall order. E. L. Doctorow was able to…
It’s easy to see how Play It to the Bone, writer-director Ron Shelton’s latest comedy-drama, got started. Shelton obviously wanted to do for boxing what he’d already done for baseball in Bull Durham, golf in Tin Cup and pick-up basketball in White Men Can’t Jump. But somewhere along the way,…
Director Chen Kaige is best known in the U.S. for Farewell, My Concubine, the most successful Chinese production ever released here. As many pointed out at the time, the Oscar-nominated 1993 epic of modern Chinese history may have been wholly Chinese in both content and viewpoint, but it was still,…
Although some people really are crazy, “crazy” is a relative term. Does it apply to someone who feels he might spin off into outer space and never be able to get back down to earth? Or is it only crazy when you have to cling to the nearest table or…
Of the readers who bought four million copies, in no fewer than thirty languages, of David Guterson’s 1995 bestseller Snow Falling on Cedars, many have been looking forward to the movie version. Others have been dreading it. For better or worse, this multifarious story about nativist bigotry, forbidden love, sons…
