It’s as old as sin, the story of the hopeless square liberated by the freethinker. It’s also as new as several current movies–including Shall We Dance?, wherein a weary suburbanite is revived by the fox-trot, and Dream With the Fishes, in which a suicidal businessman hits the glory road with…
Think Meryl Streep handled the raging white water and the redneck villains pretty well in The River Wild? Come now. That was child’s play. Still like the way La Femme Nikita blew those four-star Euro-creeps away in the middle of their pate de foie gras? Forget about it–namby-pamby, art-movie philosophizing…
Out of the plain strivings of the British working and middle classes, Mike Leigh always manages to make art, even if his movies never announce themselves as such. His latest, Career Girls, is a more modest thing than last year’s superb Secrets & Lies, but he once more finds the…
The cops in Cop Land carry on like a bunch of goombahs. On the take from the Mob, they mimic the Mob. The fuzzy line dividing cops and crooks is the subject of many a strong police movie, but Cop Land goes a step further–it says there is no line…
As another indictment of the male animal and American business ethics, Neil Labute’s In the Company of Men pretty much has it all. The playwright/filmmaker claims–rather coyly, I think–that this pitch-black tragicomedy about a pair of self-absorbed yuppie buddies who hatch a plot to exploit a beautiful deaf woman for…
Jerry Fletcher, the hero of Conspiracy Theory, is a comic, glamorous variation on Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Like Travis, he’s a New York cabbie obsessed with protecting a woman from the world’s hidden malignancies. Unlike Travis, Jerry snaps when he achieves sanity. Mel Gibson has been almost too willing…
Admirers of director Tony Gatlif’s enchanting look at Romany life and music, Latcho Drom, are now in for a treat of another sort. With Mondo, the world’s leading (perhaps only) Algerian-Gypsy-French filmmaker has crafted a poetic fable about friendship, human displacement and belonging that strikes all kinds of chords in…
If you like your summer movies indistinguishable from video games, your heroes straight out of Toon Town and, just to gild the lily, wise-cracking, clown-faced villains who chomp on pizza topped with wriggling green larvae, then Spawn might be the picture for you. Harder-edged than Spielberg’s latest dinosaur epic or…
187, a number favored by adolescent thugs, is the California state penal code for homicide–and a harsh sentence for all involved in this hopeless, hapless movie. The gifted Samuel L. Jackson stars as a high-school teacher who cracks under the constant threat of rabid teen machismo–and retaliates with his own…
There are moviemakers, and there are people who have access to moviemaking equipment. The neophyte documentarians Shainee Gabel and Kristin Hahn fall into the latter group. In a benighted attempt to find “the American Dream,” these innocents packed their cameras and their post-adolescent neuroses into a borrowed Saab and hit…
Assorted historians are happily butting heads this week over the speculation that dour Queen Victoria may have had big eyes for the earthy Scotsman who tended her horse. For better or worse, that is the premise of Mrs. Brown, a witty nineteenth-century soap opera that shows no fear of offending…
Not satisfied with the president you have? Here’s Harrison Ford’s James Marshall in Air Force One–Vietnam War hero, straight as a ramrod, devoted husband and father. We first see him delivering a speech before a roomful of Russian dignitaries. Departing from the prepared, wishy-washy text, Mr. President fire-breathes his new…
It’s no secret that the “new” Jackie Chan releases in the U.S. aren’t really new at all. In fact, they’re not even showing up in chronological order: While New Line is issuing Jackie’s more current stuff in order, Miramax is putting out the star’s relatively recent back catalogue out of…
Talk about tragically hip. The doomed hero of Finn Taylor’s quirky buddy picture Dream With the Fishes is Nick, a surly young thief with a taste for tequila and heroin who just happens to be dying of leukemia. His opposite number is Terry, a straitlaced Peeping Tom whose life is…
Here in unfettered America, where the lamest cowboy insists on doing the Texas two-step and a couple of strawberry daiquiris can transform a retiring housewife into a disco queen, it’s difficult for us to imagine a culture in which middle-class married couples don’t go out in public together and even…
The most astonishing actress in France might be one who goes to kindergarten. She is Victoire Thivisol, the traumatized little heroine of Jacques Doillon’s Ponette. Her performance–if that’s what you call it–as a four-year grieving the death of her mother revives thorny questions about the tricky old dance of life…
Because he often seemed less interested in studying the stars than becoming one himself, the late astronomer-author Carl Sagan had his detractors. Real scientists, they said, don’t have booking agents or worry about trading quips with Johnny Carson. Still, this tireless proponent of science for the masses exerted an influence…
Colm Meaney, the earthy Irish actor, has the puffy face of an ex-welterweight, the bulky grace of a steamroller and, beneath all his bluster, the blithe spirit of an imp. In the Nineties he’s been the heart and soul of two related art-house hits called The Commitments and The Snapper,…
The special effects in the sci-fi comedy Men in Black are an orgy of animatronics, mechanical effects, practical effects, miniatures, computer enhancements, makeup–the whole shebang. The film’s mishmash of tones, from goofball to horrific, is equally all over the map. The trailer for the movie promised a great big Ghostbusters-style…
So far, the only ingenious action movie of this mayhem-stuffed, crash-filled summer is Face/Off, directed by the peerless John Woo. It dispenses enough all-out ass-kicking to satisfy the most hormonal adolescent but manages to balance things up with–are you ready for this?–a bracing little essay on human identity. The high-priced,…
Slapstick decadence is the dominant style at the Disney studios this summer, reaching all the way from Touchstone Pictures’ action hit Con Air to the 35th Walt Disney animated feature, Hercules. It’s a moviemaking mode that weds anything-for-a-laugh to anything-for-a-jolt, leaving imagination and authenticity in the lurch. Instead of creating…
If Speed 2: Cruise Control were a frantic, zillion-dollar disaster movie in which the world’s most luxurious ocean liner hits an iceberg on its maiden voyage and sinks to the bottom of the North Atlantic, people might find it a little hard to believe. If it were a frantic, zillion-dollar…
