When was the last time the audience applauded a trailer and the movie lived up to it? Independence Day enticed millions with its preview shot of the White House blown to smithereens, but that film was a dumb, elephantine sci-fi pastiche. The trailer for Wag the Dog, a far more…
When first we see Melvin Udall, middle-aged misanthrope, he’s stuffing his neighbor’s pesky little dog into the garbage chute of their Manhattan apartment building. That’s perfection. Melvin, we soon learn, is nasty by reflex–a selfish, acid-tongued homophobe who has no use for Jews, blacks, children, women or anybody else who…
Imagine Macaulay Culkin as a three-inch rodent with no personality, and you’ve pretty much nailed the thing. Mouse Hunt, the third movie to be released by DreamWorks Pictures, is Home Alone boiled down to grim, humorless destruction, with a nameless mouse as the tormentor. Seen another way, it’s Tom and…
1. L.A. Confidential. Directed Curtis Hanson revives Fifties noir in high style. Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe and Kim Bassinger wallow in the mire and betrayals. 2. Mrs. Brown. Was Queen Victoria hot for her manservant? Dame Judi Dench convinces in a model of film literacy. 3. Boogie Nights. Rootless Seventies…
The new Gus Van Sant film Good Will Hunting is like an adolescent’s fantasy of being tougher and smarter and more misunderstood than anybody else. It’s also touchy-feely with a vengeance. Is this the same director who made Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy? Those films had a fresh way of…
For a high-school dropout with a bad temper, Quentin Tarantino has done pretty well for himself. Let’s see. In five years he’s grown into an ultra-hip icon with the fanatical following of a rock star and an entire school of imitators. He’s simultaneously brought Hollywood moguls to their knees and…
Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter is about grief and the search for grace and the frail relationships between parents and children. It’s a profound and beautiful work, and if we had any doubts about the skill of this gifted filmmaker in the wake of Speaking Parts or Exotica, they vanish…
When the Titanic, the grandest ocean liner of her day, struck an iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912, and sank to the bottom of the dead-calm, starlit North Atlantic, she launched a rich tangle of legends and lessons that endure to this day. You’ll find very few of…
It’s a tough act to follow, sweeping the Oscars with a hallowed epic about a redeemed Nazi who saves doomed Jews from the ovens. But Steven Spielberg, all grown up now and moving steadily forward, doesn’t disappoint. With Amistad, Hollywood’s master of narrative boldly plumbs some other heavyweight issues–the enduring…
Now that the Japanese Tora-san series–with fifty-some entries in thirty years–has presumably drawn to a close following the death of star Kiyoshi Atsumi last year, the James Bond films constitute the longest-running continuous series around. They’ve had their ups and downs, but something about the Bond formula has proved enduring…
It’s been forty years since the New Wave came crashing down on the placid shore of traditional French filmmaking, but to the faithful, it was only yesterday. Students of the art cinematic and devotees of all things francais are heralding the rerelease of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 milestone Contempt as a…
The religious and philosophical underpinnings of Tim Blake Nelson’s Eye of God get pretty weighty and mighty dense in places–especially for an 84-minute movie set in the decaying little town of Kingfisher, Oklahoma. Unlike most of the 4,042 residents, Nelson is a graduate of Brown in classical studies and an…
Wes Craven’s Scream, which opened almost exactly a year ago, was the surprise hit of an overcrowded Christmas season. In part, the success was a triumph of counter-programming: In the midst of a glut of classy Oscar contenders, Scream was the only teen horror film. And it was helped by…
The bizarre documentary Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist asks us to believe that the late Mr. Flanagan, who regularly nailed his penis to a block of wood, hung himself upside down for untold hours and gladly submitted while his sex partner force-fed him scoops of Alpo,…
In Kiss or Kill, the migration of Hollywood’s old drama of lovers on the lam to the Australian countryside seems to be a mixed blessing. Nikki and Al, the fatalistic young couple in Bill Bennett’s rambunctious new effort, descend from famous runaways like Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney in You…
Disney Studios has had a near-monopoly on feature animation for almost sixty years now, and near-monopolies are almost as destructive as full-on monopolies. Twentieth Century Fox is to be applauded for going up against the giant mouse; one only wishes that its first effort were itself more to crow about…
You can’t exactly call Alien Resurrection a pleasurable experience, but, then again, you wouldn’t say that about its predecessors, either. Directed by the Frenchman Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who previously co-directed Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children with Marc Caro, this fourth installment in the Alien onslaught is once again designed…
In Flubber, Disney’s new and improved version of The Absent Minded Professor, that famously bouncy green goop is still powering cars through the clouds and transforming lab nerds into high-flying basketball stars. But now the stuff also has personality–in gobs. It splits into a hundred little green dancers and does…
Clint Eastwood has reached the stage of life when he can sit down at the piano and doodle jazzy riffs whenever he feels like it. Without fear of failure or banishment, he can direct fair-to-middling movies from crappy bestsellers like The Bridges of Madison County. He can exercise the broadest…
John Grisham’s The Rainmaker lulls you into the mindset you get while reading a bestseller at the beach. What a sad thing to say about a Francis Ford Coppola movie! Rather than heighten your awareness the way The Conversation or The Godfather did, The Rainmaker makes you feel lazy and…
A glance at the cast list for the new Sidney Lumet hospital drama Critical Care might lead you to expect an embarrassment of riches. Instead, the results are often just plain embarrassing. How could a film starring James Spader, Helen Mirren, Albert Brooks, Kyra Sedgwick, Anne Bancroft, Jeffrey Wright, Wallace…
In 1756, Voltaire wittily observed that “this agglomeration which…calls itself the Holy Roman Empire is neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” Likewise, of Nick and Jane it might well be said that this abomination which calls itself a charming romantic comedy is neither charming, nor romantic, nor a comedy…
