It won’t be easy for Joel and Ethan Coen to top Fargo anytime soon, because it was the culmination and pinnacle of a personal style they had been refining for years. The small-time greed, hilariously bungled deceptions and startling violence they brought to their tale of kidnapping-gone-wrong in icy Minnesota…
The science-fiction works of the late, great Philip K. Dick haven’t been served particularly well on screen. The most recent adaptation, Screamers, was junk; Total Recall had its moments but was less ingenious by half than the short story it was based upon. Blade Runner, of course, was brilliant, but…
In his 1993 book Sarajevo: A War Journal, the Bosnian journalist Zlatko Dizdarevic reported on an eleven-year-old who was waiting in line for water when snipers killed his mother and father: “After the shooting, this boy started to fetch and pour water over the bodies of his dead parents. He…
The youngest member of the ubiquitous Wayans clan, 25-year-old Marlon, is emerging on the big screen as an eye- and soul-pleasing amalgam of Jim Carrey’s lunatic elasticity and Eddie Murphy’s faultless comic timing. We can probably expect great things of him. As evidenced by The Sixth Man, a lukewarm basketball…
One of the necessities of screwball comedy–an endangered, if not extinct, species–is that the practitioner be more sophisticated and aware than the batty socialites, pompous academics and blustering snobs he means to deflate. In the golden age of this fragile form, master satirists like Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges certainly…
The odd Spaniard may choose to transplant film noir to Madrid (see review above), and the French came up with the name in the first place. But it’s essentially a Hollywood invention that has stood the test of time and darkness. Witness Palmetto, a pretty satisfying example of the genre,…
He doesn’t need much. Give the renowned Spanish black-humorist Pedro Almodovar the ex-junkie daughter of an Italian diplomat, a bitter ex-con who served six years for a crime he didn’t commit, a beautiful former dancer, a good cop and a bad cop, and he’ll come up with the most intriguing…
With Zero Effect–an apt title if ever there was one–writer-director Jake Kasdan presumes to turn the hard-boiled detective movie on its head with Gen-X hipness. He winds up looking pretty empty-headed himself. Kasdan, the 22-year-old son of Big Chill/ Accidental Tourist director Lawrence Kasdan, would likely never have gotten his…
In these paradox-ridden times, producers on the hunt for cutting-edge fantasies look back: They visit their boyhood or girlhood rooms and ransack their old books and videos or peruse their studio’s property list for works that scored well in other media. In the mid-’90s, the English company Working Title made…
Despite the tides of government repression and suspected U.S. chicanery that have afflicted his country for the last 35 years, the Brazilian filmmaker Bruno Barreto claims he’s not much of a political animal. As if to underscore that, his only global success was 1978’s spirited erotic farce Dona Flor and…
Set in nineteenth-century Australia, this tale of two gamblers–Oscar, a failed minister, and Lucinda, a glass-works owner–is too wispy to be an art thing and too heavy to be a toy. Its key symbol is a tiny glass teardrop. The “Prince Rupert drop” cannot be smashed with a sledgehammer but…
For better or worse, Barbet Schroeder is another one of those French directors who spent his youth watching Hollywood genre movies, over and over, in the smoky confines of the Paris Cinematheque. By the time he was big enough to find Jerry Lewis a genius, he had also absorbed everything…
For little Ludovic Fabre, the dreamy second-grader at the center of Ma Vie en Rose (My Life in Pink), everything would be fine if his childhood fantasies followed society’s orders. But nature has thrown him a curve. Ludovic doesn’t want to grow up to be a fireman, or a rough-and-tumble…
John Woo has generated plenty of American disciples in the decade since his Hong Kong action films began playing film festivals in the West. Even before he began his Hollywood career with 1993’s Hard Target, bits of his action shtick started showing up in the work of savvy young filmmakers,…
In the new Great Expectations, directed by Alfonso Cuaron and scripted by Mitch Glazer, the teeming world of Charles Dickens’s 1861 novel is very loosely updated and transposed to Florida’s Gulf Coast and Manhattan. It wouldn’t be accurate to call this film an adaptation–at its best, it’s more like a…
There’s something curiously inanimate about Alan Rudolph’s Afterglow, but it’s certainly not the luminous and thoroughly engaging Julie Christie. Here’s a film that means to meditate on the pitfalls of marriage in the Nineties using slyness and dark wit, but it comes off as bloodless as a blueprint. Only the…
The driven, drawling Texas preacher Robert Duvall portrays in The Apostle is the latest in his long line of true believers, good and evil. Often taken for granted, this extraordinary actor has, on TV and in movies, played Nazi mass murderer Adolph Eichmann, Communist mass murderer Joseph Stalin, savior of…
In the paranoid cosmology of Gregory Hoblit’s Fallen, satanic evil is transmitted from person to person by casual touching, like typhoid or some rampant strain of the flu. Almost no one is immune in this deadly game of tag. Not fry cooks on their cigarette breaks, not award-winning teachers walking…
The superb British actor Alan Rickman, star of Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Sense and Sensibility, makes his directorial debut with The Winter Guest, a meditation on life, death and human relations that is as elusive as it is fascinating. It’s the kind of film that turns over in the mind,…
Does Robert De Niro presume to play free safety for the Jets? Can Denzel Washington slam dunk over Dikembe Mutombo? Well, no. But if Dennis Rodman gets a notion to do King Lear, better break out the swords. Because ever since Sonja Henie and her skates signed with Darryl F…
Martin Scorsese’s Kundun is a deeply ceremonial experience: It’s like watching a serene pageant of colors, rituals and costumes. The film is about the Dalai Lama–recognized as the fourteenth reincarnation of the Buddha of Compassion and the spiritual and political leader of Tibet–from his childhood in 1937 through the Chinese…
After watching Hard Rain, all but the most intrepid humans and whatever ducks are in the audience will probably feel like changing into dry clothes and curling up in front of the fire with a cup of hot bouillon. This has got to be the wettest movie in memory–wetter than…
