A wise man–or was it a wise guy?–once cautioned that there are two things you should never watch being made: sausage and movies. (Consider the ingredients.) Nonetheless, directors have convinced themselves from time to time that the moviemaking process itself is suitable material for a movie. Most notable was the…
The most unnerving–and delectable–skill of film noir masters like Huston, Wilder and Dassin may have been the way they turned all of human relations into a slippery fiction, a pack of lies, an extended alibi. In the dangerous netherworld of these movies, no love was true, no emotion sound, no…
If you work mainly at home, get your mother to do the catering and play one of the lead roles yourself, you might be able to eke out a feature-length movie for $16,000. That’s what 27-year-old Edward Burns did. The surprise is not that Burns got The Brothers McMullen into…
With hearts full of hope, the people at 20th Century Fox are trumpeting A Walk in the Clouds as Keanu Reeves’s debut as a romantic leading man–despite a resume that lists party animal, acrobat cop and ersatz Buddha as his most notable movie accomplishments. Predictably, neither the clatter of press…
Like Keanu and company above, the restless young characters in French-Canadian director Denys Arcand’s Love and Human Remains are also searching for love and family. But most of them are initially so unlikable that we don’t care much if they succeed. Consider the gay actor-turned-waiter David (Thomas Gibson), a hard-shelled…
Discussing 1993’s year in movies, veteran Hollywood scriptwriter William Goldman–who wrote the screenplays for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men and Marathon Man and authored the classic how-to book Adventures in the Screen Trade– singled out Free Willy as a story he wished he’d written. He…
If American adults are still capable of being shocked by the behavior of teenagers–I’ll lay six to five that they’re not–then Larry Clark’s Kids is the movie that will shock them. The New York teens we meet here for one harrowing 24-hour period talk dirty. They pursue sex and drugs…
You don’t always get what you pay for. As everyone knows by now, Waterworld is the most expensive movie ever made. Fierce Pacific thunderstorms, logistical nightmares, a nasty feud between director and star, the star’s insistence that scenes be reshot because he didn’t like the way his hair looked–such were…
It has taken a week or two to catch up with an exceptional children’s movie called The Indian in the Cupboard, and the wait was worthwhile. The director is Muppet-meister Frank Oz, the screenplay is by Melissa Mathison, who wrote the family blockbusters E.T. the Extraterrestrial and The Black Stallion,…
For Westerners, at least, the events leading up to the Tiananmen Square massacre are symbolized by the image of a lone, nameless Chinese student standing in the path of a huge army tank on a street in Beijing. Played and replayed on the evening news, these few seconds of blurry…
For more than half a century, the Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel stood in splendid isolation from his peers. Social subversive, incessant joker and deep thinker, he took it upon himself to lambaste some of the world’s most cherished institutions–notably the Roman Catholic Church, middle-class morality and vintage political correctness–without regard…
James Gray, the 25-year-old writer/director of Little Odessa, seems to be aiming higher than most of his fellow film-school graduates. Gray’s dark and bloody family melodrama, which is set in the Rus-sian-American neighborhood of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, aspires to both Greek tragedy and Shakespearean weightiness, and while his efforts sometimes…
Clearly, the Art Cinematic has made great strides since the days when extraterrestrial invaders were all huge, featureless carcasses encased in blocks of ice, or spiders blown up to beach-umbrella size by atomic radiation. In the name of progress, the killer alien in Species is a gorgeous blonde (former model…
The absorbing drama Red Firecracker, Green Firecracker is set on a family estate and in a bustling northern Chinese river town at the end of the Ching Dynasty. These are the years leading up to the 1911 revolution, and director He Ping squeezes every bit of dialectic he can find…
Wayne Wang’s astonishing little film Smoke sneaks up on the viewer in wonderful ways. Superficially, it’s a “slice of life”–half a dozen related slices, actually–about the people who frequent a Brooklyn cigar store in 1990. But just underneath a deceptively simple surface, we come upon serious matters: the need to…
Devotees–and detractors–of the underground comics pioneer R. Crumb may be startled to learn that this trafficker in headless female sex objects, anxiety-ridden male outcasts and pornographic kitty cats was probably the happiest member of his family. That’s just one of the things we learn in the course of Terry Zwigoff’s…
What can you say? Apparently, that’s a hundred million dollars’ worth of darting laser ray, jet-powered car and black rubber suit up there, and if the whole shebang goes in one eye and out the other before you even get back to the parking lot, that’s too bad. They probably…
Steven Soderbergh’s directing career has hit a couple of snags since he enlivened the independent filmmaking scene five years ago with a cool-tempered study of yuppie obsession called sex, lies & videotape. Since then, Soderbergh’s gloomy Kafka has probably played best in Prague, and his beautifully wrought adaptation of A.E…
For now, citizens of the New Russia have more important things to do than revitalize their creaky old movie industry. Like keeping the St. Petersburg mafia at bay. Getting the telephones to work. Importing millions of hair dryers, brassieres and car alarms that play the lambada, usually from the United…
If the star of your summer fantasy/adventure movie happens to be a gorilla–or rather, a gorilla suit with a tiny actress stuffed inside–you naturally get a little stingy with the rest of the casting. That’s what the makers of Congo have done. The bogus primate is called Amy, and she…
Hal Hartley’s Amateur flirts with pretension, but Hartley always pulls its head out of the clouds with dark humor. Consider: A French ex-nun named Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), who believes the Virgin Mary has appeared to her, is now living in New York, writing pornographic sketches for a skin magazine. A…
Trying to squeeze the goo out of Robert James Waller’s romantic bestseller, The Bridges of Madison County, must have been like cleaning up the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Wherever you look, there’s another mess. Clint Eastwood, a man of few words, and screenwriter Richard LaGravenese, a man of patience, have…
