Any moviemaker who ventures into the sewers of New York City corruption will find Sidney Lumet’s wet footprints. In classics like The Pawnbroker, Serpico and Q&A, this streetwise film master has explored, among other things, individual morality in the face of big-city vice and individual transcendence of ethnic conflict. Other…
The stark simplicity of A Time for Drunken Horses, one of the few films that has slipped out of post-revolutionary Iran to the West, does nothing to obscure its emotional power or the complexity of the geopolitical issues underlying it. Filmed on location in wintry Kurdistan, it is the heartbreaking…
Italian-Americans may be glad to note that Two Family House, which centers on the Italian community in Staten Island, features not a single gangster, gun or ring to be kissed. They might be even happier if the film had also chosen not to depict the men as fat, pasta-eating, quick-tempered…
The setting of Stephen Daldry’s uplifting comedy Billy Elliot, about a working-class boy who wants to be a ballet dancer, is a beleaguered coal-mining town in the north of England, circa 1984. A coat of grime covers the squat brick row-houses, drying laundry flaps sadly in the breeze, and the…
To put it mildly, it is uncomfortable and embarrassing to have your cynical ass whipped by a huge, hulking Hallmark card, and this is exactly the sensation you take away from Mimi Leder’s Pay It Forward. Not that the near-total emotional submission isn’t preceded by a knock-down, drag-out battle for…
Richard Gere, as Dallas gynecologist Sullivan Travis, has never been more likable onscreen, perhaps because he’s never been more human, more vulnerable, more there. After so many years of so many duds, after so many years of playing ladies’ man to little girls (and the recent Autumn in New York…
Early in the stunning new film by Spanish director Carlos Saura, the great nineteenth-century painter Francisco de Goya wakes from a disturbing dream and rises to see an apparition of his lost love, the Duchess of Alba. Following her down a surrealistically white hallway, the 82-year-old protagonist suddenly finds himself…
Meet the Parents has just enough class to make for Prestige Pop: Robert De Niro as star, Randy Newman as composer, Blythe Danner as wallpaper, Ben Stiller as schmuck. It has just enough “comedy” to qualify as crowd-pleaser: sight gags (Stiller chasing a cat across a roof before setting fire…
Every now and then, a movie comes along that makes you feel as though you’ve fallen face-first into a stale cat box filled with grouchy baby asps. Come to think of it, this seems to happen, oh, one to three times a week, especially when the movie is about “real…
With global overpopulation neatly intertwining with the advent of the home-video camera, we have been afforded several near-miracles. For instance, when supersonic jets explode, or when mobs impolitely loot and riot in urban centers, the common consumer can now document the event and sell it to the networks for our…
Based on the true story of how a football team brought together the segregated town of Alexandria, Virginia, in the early 1970s, Remember the Titans is the first film from producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s Technical Black production company, which is meant to offer more contemplative and slower-paced films than his hollow,…
In The Opportunists, the debut feature by writer/director Myles Connell, the stakes are low, the relationships are subtle, and Christopher Walken hardly raises his voice, barking only a single syllable in a fleeting moment of anguish. Of course, one of the many pleasures of Walken is watching him lose his…
Much has changed for urban gays in the two decades since William Friedkin’s Cruising. That controversial serial-killer thriller — set in the leather bars and after-hours sex clubs of New York’s West Village — was derided by gay-rights activists as a piece of cheapjack sensationalism leading only to trouble, seemingly…
Aimée & Jaguar tells the true story of a love affair between two women: one a Jew passing as a Gentile while working for the underground, the other a German housewife honored by the Third Reich as an “exemplar of Nazi motherhood.” Felice Schragenheim was a German Jew who, unlike…
Some may find reason to embrace the romantic comedy Woman on Top as the nonsensical, sweet-tempered fantasy of two South American filmmakers who don’t understand life in this country very well but grasp all the magical powers of Brazil. After all, Brazil ranks second only to fashionable Tibet on every…
This song explains why I’m leaving home and becoming a stewardess,” says Anita Miller (Zooey Deschanel) to her well-meaning, overbearing mother as the soundtrack begins to swell with the low hums of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. Just a few seconds earlier, Elaine Miller (Frances McDormand) had insisted she wouldn’t…
In recent years, the fabulous Chilean expatriate director Raoul (sometimes Raul) Ruiz has moved from shoestring-budgeted features that could qualify as avant-garde to increasingly opulent movies with major art-house stars and a shot at mainstream success. Not yet sixty, he has made more than sixty films since his 1968 debut…
There’s a trio of duets in Duets. The film is set in the world of karaoke singing, but the title really refers to three sets of paired-off actors performing pas de deux to the tune of John Byrum’s Golden-Age-of-Television-ish dialogue. Only one of the three duos shakes fully to life,…
Humans and their stories, my, oh my. Somehow, the familiar themes just keep coming around, again and again, ad infinitum. Of course, most of them have already been captured and processed by Shakespeare. From the bitter young man to the crazy old king, from the flirty young thing to the…
Here’s the beginning of The Way of the Gun that you will not see, because it was written but never filmed: Two men, Parker and Longbaugh, urinate in an open grave in front of mourners, beat up a priest, steal organs meant for transplant and shoot a dog. The introduction,…
The strange love affair that rules Patrice Leconte’s Girl on the Bridge is full of old-fashioned European art-movie attractions. The young heroine, Adele (pop singer and Chanel model Vanessa Paradis), is a delicate, doe-eyed woman-child who can’t tell love from sex and is so melancholy that she wants to leap…
Amanda Peet has some really large teeth. Seriously. Even given the fact that it’s in vogue for a hot, young, would-be sex symbol to have a set of brightly polished choppers prominent for all to see (think Neve Campbell, Casper Van Dien or Denise Richards), Amanda’s impressive ivories take the…
