Director John Herzfeld’s last feature, the droll and underrated 2 Days in the Valley, from 1996, was a more than adequate counterbalance to the catastrophe of his first feature, Two of a Kind, a 1983 John Travolta vehicle which, together with Moment by Moment, put its star on the fast…
Leave it to Hollywood to sell us the insipid romance of a thoroughly irritating white couple as the solution to an archaic Latin American mystery. As pure bang-up adventure, The Mexican is certainly more user-friendly than childish junk like The Way of the Gun, but the attempt to weave adult-relationship…
With In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-Wai solidifies his stature as the subtlest and most idiosyncratic of Hong Kong’s directors. In an industry best known for its accessible, crowd-pleasing comedies and action films, Wong has turned out a series of increasingly risky dramas that make little or no concession…
Van Gogh was a lunatic who cut off his ear. Picasso was a self-absorbed cur who abused women. Warhol turned out to be a weird, desperate loner, Basquiat a doomed junkie. Try as he might, shriveled little Toulouse-Lautrec failed miserably at romance. As for El Greco’s explosive affair with that…
Sara is quirky and free-spirited. That, at least, is the premise of the hilariously wretched new weeper Sweet November, of which Sara, embodied by the breathtaking Charlize Theron, is the heroine. But if you’re usually smart enough to run in terror at the threat of a movie character who’s quirky…
That anyone should consider making a film of Reinaldo Arenas’s memoir, Before Night Falls, is curious. That the person to do it should be painter-turned-film-director Julian Schnabel is truly unusual. And that the results should be as good as they are is most remarkable of all. It would appear that…
Given the horrors of war and scourges of bloody stupidity that have plagued the world in the past three decades, the murder by Palestinian terrorists of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich now seems like a minor episode in the history of our collective folly –…
Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, with a screenplay by David Mamet and Steven Zaillian, is being released exactly ten years after Silence of the Lambs, the film that established Hannibal Lecter as an iconic villain in our culture, right up there with Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger, Friday the 13th’s Jason…
Watching Malena is like watching a donkey being beaten for ninety minutes, so egregiously is the title character treated and so powerless does she appear against her offenders. That the abuse is treated in a comedic fashion for a good part of the film makes it even more unacceptable. Perhaps…
At last you can take a deep breath and relax, consumers of American cinema, for our trilogy of virtually unrelated cheerleader movies is now complete. Having reappraised youthful sexuality in But I’m a Cheerleader and celebrated ass-kickingness in Bring It On, we now accomplish both, sort of, in Francine McDougall’s…
With the canon of Jane Austen all but exhausted, literary filmmakers continue their assault on Edith Wharton, another sharply observant writer of yore with something timeless to say about the plight of women. Terence Davies’s The House of Mirth, from Wharton’s beautifully detailed, ironically titled 1905 novel about a mannerly…
The doomed are often a remarkably energetic and productive lot, especially when it comes to creating portraits of their personal horrors. Themes vary in intensity between slow self-destruction and grand devastation, but vampirism covers the full spectrum of ghastliness. This is because the imbalance represents so much to so many…
There’s definitely something weird going on in the British pop scene. Years after tasteful Yanks allowed classic works such as Saturday Night Fever and Grease to dissolve into our vast iconic array, villainous Limey programmers were still hyping them over there. Thus, the dual plagues of disco and ’50s rock…
This is some damn fine coffee you got here in Twin Peaks. And some damn good cherry pie. But I have to tell you something, sheriff: Last night, I had a dream in which a dancing midget talked backward, thus leading me to believe that our killer is a man…
Skeptics will not take easily to the optimism in Thomas Carter’s teen love story Save the Last Dance, and outright cynics may find the whole thing absurd. The notion that a sheltered white girl from shopping-mall country and a knowing black boy from the inner city can dance their way…
Thirteen Days is a suspenseful look at the American government in the grip of a crucial, minute-to-minute, real-life crisis that threatens to destroy the country. No, it is not — as the brief time span of the title makes clear — about the recent election struggles, or the 1998 impeachment,…
The War on Drugs has become this generation’s Vietnam, the unwinnable conflict that will, in the end, destroy the innocent and reward the guilty. That, in a coke vial, is the premise of Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, a film that gives flesh and face to bloodless government statistics and statements seldom…
The year 2000 was by no means the best of times for moviegoers, but only a curmudgeon would fail to find, say, ten points of light in a darkened room. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Once, we marveled at the flying gymnastics of Bruce Lee. Now it’s Ang Lee who moves…
Finding Forrester is the latest film from Gus Van Sant, one of the true American originals to emerge in the ’80s and ’90s. When Van Sant is at his best, he gives us stories and images we’ve never seen before. Finding Forrester, however, is not Gus Van Sant at his…
It’s where Walter Huston found paradise at the end of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, where the murdering lovers Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw rode into the sunset at the end of The Getaway, and where Thelma and Louise were headed when they ended up at the Grand Canyon…
If you consider Northern Ireland a part of Ireland proper, then An Everlasting Piece may easily be the best Irish film of the year (not that the competition was too stiff — anyone remember The Closer You Get?). If, on the other hand, you consider the six counties to be…
Playwright/filmmaker David Mamet has the sharpest gift imaginable for shooting down the sins of American greed, the con games people run to get ahead and the corruption that comes with success. Whether he’s haunting a secondhand junk shop, poker games or an outlying real-estate office, he always finds enough horror-tinged…
