In Return of the Jedi, the last chapter of the Star Wars trilogy, an intergalactic window display of creepy and cuddly critters upstages the human characters. All the conflicts are resolved between the virtuous rebels–Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), Han Solo (Harrison Ford), and Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher)–and the wicked Imperials,…
Moviegoers who believe that David “Who killed Laura Palmer?” Lynch is the greatest genius to hit the big screen since Dali and Bunuel slit that poor donkey’s eyeball in Un Chien Andalou are going to get a serious kick out of Lost Highway–and probably spend a couple of hours afterward…
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Hard Eight aspires to be gritty and tough and tender all at once, but its tones keep getting in one another’s way. In his feature-film debut, Anderson has conjured up the tale of a courtly old gambler, Sydney (Philip Baker Hall), who inexplicably takes under his wing…
During the first few minutes of Howard Stern’s romp through his inexplicable life, he spells out his mission: Private Parts will both convert the nonbelievers and entertain the cult. Stern wants to give you plenty of hot lesbian action (and freed from FCC restrictions, he takes real pleasure in saying…
The vision of race war that Boyz N the Hood director John Singleton conjures up in Rosewood comes at a precarious moment in our national history. Polarized reactions to the O.J. Simpson verdicts have demonstrated how deep the rift between black and white remains–forty years after the civil-rights movement hit…
It has taken 22 years to release When We Were Kings, Leon Gast’s documentary about the tumultuous October 1974 Muhammad Ali-George Foreman fight in Kinshasa, Zaire, because the filmmaker’s original backers kept running into bad luck. One of them died in a plane crash; another was shot by a Liberian…
The ingredients are familiar: Donnie Brasco stars Al Pacino as a Mafia soldier and Johnny Depp as an FBI undercover agent who infiltrates the mob. But there’s a twist. Based on a true story, the film is a grunt’s-eye view of the Mafia, and it’s not remotely “operatic” or Scorsese-ish…
January and February are good times for taking a vacation–very good times. Not because the airfares are low or because the weather sucks, but because what a movie critic must endure at the beginning of the year is so grim. It is almost impossible to maintain any semblance of optimism…
The second most important room in their houses is the boudoir, so the sophisticated French are good at sex farce. If anything, the warm-blooded Italians are even better. The occasional American moviemaker–Billy Wilder, Mike Nichols, Woody Allen–can turn the trick, too, wedding absurdity to desire and coming up with dark…
Billy Bob Thornton isn’t going to snatch the matinee-idol title away from Tom Cruise, Kevin Costner or Denzel Washington anytime soon. At the age of 41, the former Hearts Afire regular is also a grizzled acting veteran of low-rent slasher flicks like Chopper Chicks in Zombietown and modest critical successes…
Irvin Kershner’s The Empire Strikes Back, the continuation of George Lucas’s Star Wars, is a classic fantasy in its own right. I vastly prefer it to the first film. Its textures are richer, its emotions deeper, and it’s an honest-to-Jedi movie–not a dozen jammed-together entries of a serial. On its…
Elmore Leonard’s Touch is identified on the paperback as a mystery and carried in stores next to Leonard’s celebrated crime novels (like Get Shorty). But this wan little book is actually the problem child of Leonard’s oeuvre–the only crime it involves is lack of truth in advertising, and that’s on…
For generations, the heftier works of Leo Tolstoy have challenged undergraduate lifting power and speed-reading skills as much as they have confounded the world’s moviemakers. That dark tribute to nineteenth-century adultery, Anna Karenina, was filmed in America three times, beginning with Garbo in 1935 and ending with Jacqueline Bisset in…
Since Baby LeRoy first put the screws to W.C. Fields back in the 1930s, the intractable child who torments the cranky old man has rampaged through movie history like a wild force of nature. The most celebrated recent example, of course, saw little Macaulay Culkin befouling the burglary schemes of…
In Absolute Power, Clint Eastwood plays Luther Whitney, a master thief who burgles on little cat feet. He’s as stealthy as the Pink Panther pilferer, though not nearly as amusing. Luther, you see, is presented to us as an artist. We first see him at the National Gallery dutifully copying…
Robert E. Howard, the subject of Dan Ireland’s wonderful debut film The Whole Wide World, created the sword-and-sorcery genre with his Conan stories. Howard had a grand yet coarse-grained consciousness. His Conan stories, set in a fictitious primordial age full of demons and killers, boasted swift, cartoon-flavored action (“He moved…
Andre Techine’s Les Voleurs (Thieves) is stuffed with sex, blood and grand-theft auto, and at its heart lurks a homicide detective who’s deeply compromised himself in the investigation of a big case. But before anyone gets the wrong idea, please note that neither Clint Eastwood nor Arnold Schwarzenegger got within…
The spookiness that has seeped into first-time director Vondie Curtis Hall’s surreal action comedy Gridlock’d is the kind of dramatic bonus no moviemaker hopes for. It derives from the gang murder last September of the film’s 25-year-old co-star, Tupac Shakur, and it colors the entire length of this dark farce…
“In the constant struggle of man against nature,” the press notes inform us, “it is the most devastating adversary of all–a force… which suddenly explodes to wreak havoc and destruction on an unsuspecting population.” The notes are, of course, referring to a volcano. But…wait! Didn’t I read the same thing…
If the brutal miscarriage of British justice that drove In the Name of the Father didn’t send you running to the nearest Sinn Fein recruiter and the fiery romanticism of Michael Collins didn’t have you putting together a tidy shipment of machine guns for the Provisionals in Belfast, maybe Some…
At a twenty-year remove, Star Wars comes off less as the work of a wizard than as the weird obsessive outgrowth of an eccentric American primitive. George Lucas is a tycoon version of those self-taught craftsmen who fill backyards, storage rooms and cramped city apartments with paintings, gewgaws or wire-hanger…
Eight years after A Fish Called Wanda rang up $200 million at the box office and won an Oscar for its manic villain, Kevin Kline, the cast has reunited in hopes of putting another dark charge into movie comedy. Fierce Creatures is not a sequel but a major departure, and…
