Those who choose to dismiss Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson’s dark (and darkly humorous) meditation on loneliness and regret in the San Fernando Valley, will probably see it as self-important and philosophically inflated — the kind of three-hour ordeal that university professors can dissect at their leisure while ordinary folks shy…
You hope for Dorothy Lamour, reclining against a palm tree in her sarong, when you hear the title The Hurricane. Instead, you get well over two hours of Denzel Washington huddled in a cell. In the poster art, Washington glowers, one bandaged fist cocked for a right to our jaw…
In Albert Brooks’s summer comedy The Muse, a ravishing daughter of Zeus — in the person of Sharon Stone — gives a burned-out Hollywood screenwriter a fresh jolt of inspiration. For a price. Brooks’s desperate scribbler must first lavish Tiffany trinkets on his newfound benefactor, put her up at the…
Let’s hear it for sports movies! Although the most avid sports fan is occasionally bored by lackluster games on the field, even a casual spectator can appreciate what the big screen can do for an athletic contest: the closer-than-life closeups, the dramatic use of slo-mo (preferably highlighted by driving rain),…
At first glance, Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother seems uncharacteristically grim for a filmmaker with such a demonic sense of humor. Within ten minutes, the heroine’s seventeen-year-old son is hit and killed by a car, which propels her and the events of the film into motion. In the next…
Millennial hysteria takes many forms. Some people fall prey to a travel agent and book a cruise to the Aegean, bent on passing New Century’s Eve with Aristotle’s ghost and a nice plate of moussaka. Others of appropriate age and inclination vow to get drunk and copulate at the stroke…
It is rare to find a movie that is as accomplished, multilayered and rewarding as the novel from which it was adapted, but The Cider House Rules is such a film. Directed by Lasse Hallström (My Life as a Dog, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?), the film displays the kind of…
Nobody is innocent in America, but there is one segment of the population that seems doggedly determined to deny its own ignorance, ugliness and violence. So hands up: Who really likes rednecks? The sludge on the bottom of the melting pot, this embarrassing offshoot of European ancestry continues to this…
I sincerely hope that Jodie Foster gets a chance to relax and unwind this holiday season, because the lady has obviously worked like a horse to instill her latest role with humanity and significance. As intrepid British widow Anna Leonowens, in the huge and poetic new Anna and the King,…
The heroines of Gavin O’Connor’s offbeat road movie Tumbleweeds are a struggling single mother named Mary Jo Walker (Janet McTeer) and her feisty twelve-year-old daughter, Ava (Kimberly J. Brown), who set out together from a back hollow in West Virginia to make a new life — or something like one…
Have you ever endured a relationship in which your partner beat you up mercilessly just so he could “heal” you and play the redeemer later on? Granted, that’s a weird question perhaps better explored via Akbar and Jeff in Matt Groening’s “Life in Hell” comic strip, but it relates closely…
The last half-decade has been very good to Jane Austen: Besides Ang Lee’s estimable 1995 version of Sense and Sensibility, we’ve been given film or TV adaptations of Emma, Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice, not to mention Clueless, Amy Heckerling’s remarkably apt updating of Emma. Now Miramax and the BBC…
A tangible sense of sadness and longing hangs over The Legend of 1900, the mesmerizingly beautiful and poetic new film from Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore, best known in the United States for his Academy Award-winning Cinema Paradiso. Based on a dramatic monologue by contemporary Italian novelist Alessandro Baricco but filmed…
The last time Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in an apocalypse-themed action movie with a Guns N’ Roses theme song, it was Terminator 2, the biggest and loudest action movie that had thus far ever been seen. Since that time, he’s produced one bona fide balls-to-the-wall action flick (True Lies), one pale…
How do you make a sequel to a nearly perfect film? Toy Story, the 1995 hit from Disney and Pixar, not only was the first fully computer-animated feature, it was also as brilliantly written and directed a film as any of the classic Disney releases. Pixar did nearly everything right,…
The world’s demand for minimally talented thirty-year-old high-school dropouts who believe they’re great poets or great musicians or great movie directors isn’t going to catch up with the supply anytime soon. That won’t keep the strivers from striving, of course; nor will it snuff out their dreams. Case in point:…
The engaging and delightful low-budget feature Where’s Marlowe? began life as an unaired one-hour TV pilot. Somehow director Daniel Pyne and John Mankiewicz, his co-writer, have managed to expand their footage to roughly an hour and forty minutes without any of the seams showing. That would be an accomplishment in…
“Yesterday I wasn’t even sure God existed,” laments Bethany (Linda Fiorentino), the reluctant yet divinely touched heroine of Kevin Smith’s ambitious new film, Dogma. “Now I’m up to my ass in Christian mythology.” As it turns out, so are we. Strutting to a spiritually snappy groove not observed in mainstream…
The mutant children of Dr. Hannibal Lecter and his star pupil, agent Clarice Starling, remain doggedly at large in moviedom. There’s no serial killer (and no gruesome method of dispatch) that Hollywood now refuses to indulge, and no detective, no matter how hackneyed, who cannot be assigned to the case…
Luc Besson, director of La Femme Nikita, The Professional and The Fifth Element, is not the first name that would leap to mind to helm a biopic of Joan of Arc. Sure, he’s French, and sure, most of his films have women/girls as the protagonist or savior, but this is…
Much like the religion that has swirled around the Star Wars trilogy for twenty-some years, the fanaticism evidenced among American fans of Japanese anime remains a mystery to some of us. Writer-director Hayao Miyazaki’s megahit Princess Mononoke does very little to cast light on this obsession. And more’s the pity,…
Susan Sarandon is one of the screen’s most gifted actresses, a fiercely intelligent artist who invests her roles with depth, compassion, wit and humor. She has the ability to elevate even mediocre material, taking a potentially schmaltzy part, as in Stepmom, and making it totally believable. In her best films…
