John Hamburg’s independent comedy Safe Men, which got a look and a distributor at Sundance, trades on one of the oldest comic devices in moviedom: Innocence collides with corruption and changes both of them for the better. From the great silent comedian Harry Langdon, who made a high art of…
If you need new evidence of Hollywood’s current impoverishment of thought and deed, look no further than the ongoing siege against European movies. Not content to crank out sequels and recycle old TV shows into the multiplexes, the safety-first moguls have “remade” (translation: filched and dumbed-down), among others, the Godard…
Nicolas Cage has never seemed more dazzling than he does in the new Brian De Palma thriller Snake Eyes. Playing Rick Santoro, a corrupt Atlantic City cop who likes to think he’s “everybody’s friend,” Cage for almost two continuous hours boogies to his own inner beat. It’s like watching a…
Anna Stockard, the high school senior facing the abyss in Susan Skoog’s Whatever, comes straight out of the dazed-and-confused school of anxiety that now dominates movies about adolescence. Anna’s father has long since vanished. Her mother is a frowzy desperado who rolls home to their suburban split-level at 7 a.m…
As tyrants of the twentieth century go, it’s hard to top Josef Stalin in the mass-murder department. He was pretty nimble with the Big Lie, too. These facts have not been lost on post-Soviet Russian filmmakers, of course: In the dawn of the free marketplace, it’s open season on Communist…
It has taken twenty-six years for some smart aleck to come up with a fullscale parody of The Godfather, so the question now is: Who wants to see it? Many of the 16- to 24-year-olds who flock to movie theaters in the summertime may not know Michael Corleone from Michael…
Can you make a satisfying high-tech thriller for $60,000? You can if you’re 28-year-old Darren Aronofsky, late of Harvard and the American Film Institute’s directing program, and you get everyone you know to chip in a hundred bucks on the prospect that if the picture makes a profit you’ll be…
Do we really need to see the great Kevin Spacey fuming and fussing in one of those we-do-things-my-way-or-we-don’t-do-them-at-all roles? In The Negotiator, he’s playing Chris Sabian, an expert hostage negotiator for the Chicago police, whose job it is to talk down Samuel L. Jackson’s Danny Roman, another police expert who…
The first half-hour of Steven Spielberg’s magnificent and terrifying war epic Saving Private Ryan unfolds at bloody Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944, and is likely the most graphic re-creation of men in battle ever committed to film. Petrified GIs huddling in the wave-bashed landing craft vomit into their…
Hal Hartley’s gallery of troubled eccentrics already features two bickering brothers in search of their lost father (Simple Men), three mix-and-match couples afflicted by identical love woes in three far-flung cities (Flirt) and the unlikely triptych of sexually obsessed virgin, bewildered amnesiac and ex-porn star (Amateur). How do you top…
Billed as the first commercial film written, directed and co-produced by American Indians, Smoke Signals could be a sign of the truth-telling breakthrough they have deserved ever since John Wayne’s cavalry undertook to slaughter the “savages,” Jay Silverheels played sidekick, and Jeff Chandler was cast as Cochise. With the possible…
The last place you want to visit in mid-winter is gray, freezing Buffalo, New York. The last people you want to see in the last place you want to visit are Jimmy and Janet Brown, a pair of comic demons so indifferent, so surreally out of touch, that they scarcely…
In The Mask of Zorro, Anthony Hopkins plays the eponymous masked hero as if he were doing Shakespeare. He’s trying to turn a kitsch hero into a real one, and his efforts are so weirdly off-key that you don’t know whether to applaud or titter. This dolorous Don Diego de…
Michael Bay is the director of Bad Boys and The Rock and the new asteroid-attack movie Armageddon–which should be called The Very Big Rock. Bay has, I’m afraid, perfected a new form: His movies are trailers for themselves. Every scene is all climax and no foreplay. When it’s all over,…
Imps, waifs, big-eyed orphans and lovable mischief-makers have been the movies’ stock-in-trade since the first one-reeler cranked, and apparently they still enthrall the popcorn-munching public as completely as they torment the grownups forced to share credits with them. The presence of a braying Shirley Temple or an intractable Macaulay Culkin…
If you loved Don Rickles as the acid-tongued voice of Mr. Potato Head in Toy Story, wait till you get a load of Tommy Lee Jones’s gung-ho warmonger, Major Chip Hazard, in Small Soldiers. In Joe Dante’s uncommonly clever fantasy, Jones’s “character” is a military action figure just twelve inches…
The 1967 musical Dr. Dolittle, which starred Rex Harrison, was a commercial disaster for its studio, Twentieth Century Fox. The new, non-musical Fox version of this material, starring Eddie Murphy, isn’t in the same overblown category as the Harrison film–its disasters are more mundane. With all the creative range of…
Dedee Truitt, the smirky sixteen-year-old temptress who narrates and dominates Don Roos’s The Opposite of Sex, is a conniving but somehow sympathetic little shrew who’s bailed out on her feelings early in life. A kind of Lolita-without-portfolio, she gets herself pregnant by a Bible-thumping redneck from Louisiana, then sets out…
Here’s welcome news from the Emerald Isle. The obsessions of Ireland’s fledgling movie industry–religion, tragic politics and misty folklore–are nowhere to be found in Paddy Breathnach’s I Went Down. There are no glorious views of the verdant Irish countryside, no half-soused balladeering about the good old days, no impassioned cries…
Too many post-Woody Allen movies have been made about “sex in the head.” The smart, engaging Out of Sight is an action comedy about love in the head. The real thing ignites between bank robber Jack Foley (George Clooney) and U.S. Marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) when she stumbles into…
It’s Christmas vacation, 1958. The movie my dad has chosen for a first-grade pal and me to see is the new Disney live-action adventure Tonka, starring Sal Mineo as a young Sioux named White Bull who traps and domesticates a clear-eyed, spirited wild horse named Tonka. Having seen The King…
It was once said of Honore de Balzac: “Next to God and Shakespeare, he is the greatest creator of human beings.” In his time, which was the first half of the nineteenth century, this driven Frenchman wrote more than sixty novels and countless shorter tales–passionate, sprawling, obsessively detailed. Each was…
