You’re just going to have to accept that Natalie Portman and Ashley Judd are far too glamorous for the roles they inhabit in Where the Heart Is. It’s an issue that probably won’t hurt the film’s reception: Remember Julia Roberts in Steel Magnolias? Your average moviegoer loves movie stars, and…
In the rich mythology of the New Yorker, a periodical renowned for the quality of its writing and the quirks of its writers, no legend carries more weight than that of Joseph Mitchell. On the occasion of the magazine’s 75th anniversary, it is currently great sport among the literati to…
You can bet your last kopeck that newly elected Russian president Vladimir Putin hasn’t so much as breathed Josef Stalin’s name while prosecuting an expensive war in Chechnya and setting his old secret-police comrades loose in pursuit of the new Russia’s capitalist bandits and money-launderers. In the former KGB agent’s…
Love & Basketball is divided into four quarters. Thank God there’s no overtime. The directorial debut from writer Gina Prince-Bythewood — who once penned scripts for A Different World and Felicity — is a film built upon transitions so weak and obvious it’s astonishing the entire thing doesn’t collapse on…
Although its themes are about as revelatory as those of an average Cathy comic strip (clothes don’t fit, job too busy, male not clairvoyant, AACK!), there’s something irrefutably charming about Philippa “Pip” Karmel’s debut feature, Me Myself I. The editor of the Academy darling Shine has scripted a laundry list…
Rehab, sweet rehab. Last resort of the alcoholic, the drug addict and the would-be suicide. Free room and board, lots of tender loving care and a whole herd of fellow recovering screwups who’ll always be there for you, and are willing to apologize and admit their imperfections at the drop…
Where the Money Is is Hollywood’s latest attempt at a geezer vehicle — in this case, for Paul Newman. Despite his unassailable movie-star credentials and his still-handsome mug, Newman is faced with the inevitable dilemma of the aging leading man: Either make a film that appeals only to other oldsters…
It’s quite possible that American Psycho is a brilliant movie. It’s also quite possible that it’s a dreary, obvious chop-’em-up dressed in Alan Flusser suits and Ralph Lauren boxers, drenched in Pour Hommes aftershave, all to disguise it as bracing satire on the greed-is-good ’80s. The option audiences choose to…
It’s difficult to reconcile American perceptions of Iran, a rigidly authoritarian Islamic fundamentalist society, with the captivating and compassionate films that emanate from the country. Most of these pictures, including 1995 Cannes Film Festival Camera d’Or winner The White Balloon and 1998 best foreign-language film Oscar nominee Children of Heaven,…
At least for the moment, the great (and greatly persecuted) Chinese film director Zhang Yimou has a new muse. Startlingly, she is a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl who has never before appeared on-screen, but in Zhang’s new film, Not One Less, Wei Minzhi manages to carry most of the freight once borne…
By their very nature, fundamentalist religions demand conformity. Original thought and personal aspirations are subordinated to duty and ritual as prescribed by scripture — be it the Bible, the Koran or the Torah. Members who do not strictly adhere to the precepts of the faith are ostracized, shunned, even expelled…
What’s your pick for the most ridiculous movie ever made? The Conqueror, starring John Wayne as Mongol emperor Ghengis Khan? How about The Manitou, in which the grizzled head of an Indian medicine man sprouts from Susan Strasberg’s neck? The musical remake of Lost Horizon surely deserves a couple of…
Titus, Julie Taymor’s gorgeous film version of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, may be the most lavish release of last year…and also the most perverse, on nearly every front. It’s easy to see why there has never been a feature version of this tragedy. Of the most commonly mounted Shakespearean plays, at…
In Stephen Frears’s new comedy High Fidelity, leading man John Cusack is forever looking the camera (and us) in the eye and explaining what’s wrong with him today, or why he was unhappy yesterday, or how his first girlfriend dumped him back in the seventh grade. Gazing into the lens,…
Not so long ago, The Skulls would have starred Tom Cruise — but in which role? He could have been either lead; the one he didn’t choose could have landed in the lap of, say, James Spader or Rob Lowe. One can easily imagine Cruise as Luke McNamara, the beefy,…
The screen is Jim Jarmusch’s playground. Or so it appears. The quirky director of Down by Law and Mystery Train has attracted a following as loyal as the Quentin Tarantino cult, because his stuff, too, is hip, ironic and resolutely contrary. Jarmusch seems to take a kid’s unqualified pleasure from…
Is America ready for Hong Kong’s action style? Certainly there are many fans of the more balletic, guns-and-martial-arts, fly-through-the-air movies that have inspired everyone from Quentin Tarantino to the Wachowski brothers. And yet Hollywood seems to have had trouble marketing the concept. Yes, John Woo gets high-profile projects, but the…
O! Sweet vulture of love! Picking through the bones and sinew of doe-eyed fools the world around! How exquisite is thy rending, how blissful the release! Spirits in crimson rivulets swirled, souls as carrion shredded! Two vibrant hearts made still as one, to sate thy gnashing beak! Blessed bloody bird,…
Even the press kit is up front about it: Whatever It Takes is less a film than a product of marketing research and demographic considerations. It might as well have been written on a bar graph, so fetishistic is it about making sure it appeals to teens and their parents…
Among the qualities that make Fred A. Leuchter Jr. a buffoon who’s also an accomplice to evil, his desperate hunger for attention is the most obvious. He’s like the hick-town wallflower who’s always getting lured into the visiting hustler’s backseat for a quickie. When the state of Tennessee asked Leuchter…
It’s okay. You can say it. Just five little words. Don’t be shy. “I…am…a…wrestling fan.” You certainly wouldn’t be alone if you said it. Recent surveys show that as many as one in four Americans watch professional wrestling, and the World Wrestling Federation routinely has the number-one rated program on…
The film is called Erin Brockovich, but it might as well be titled Julia Roberts. Never before in the actress’s erratic career has a film been so custom-made for her; it’s as though a screenwriter has been replaced by a seamstress who knows Roberts’s every curve. No matter that she…
