The most astonishing actress in France might be one who goes to kindergarten. She is Victoire Thivisol, the traumatized little heroine of Jacques Doillon’s Ponette. Her performance–if that’s what you call it–as a four-year grieving the death of her mother revives thorny questions about the tricky old dance of life…
Because he often seemed less interested in studying the stars than becoming one himself, the late astronomer-author Carl Sagan had his detractors. Real scientists, they said, don’t have booking agents or worry about trading quips with Johnny Carson. Still, this tireless proponent of science for the masses exerted an influence…
Colm Meaney, the earthy Irish actor, has the puffy face of an ex-welterweight, the bulky grace of a steamroller and, beneath all his bluster, the blithe spirit of an imp. In the Nineties he’s been the heart and soul of two related art-house hits called The Commitments and The Snapper,…
The special effects in the sci-fi comedy Men in Black are an orgy of animatronics, mechanical effects, practical effects, miniatures, computer enhancements, makeup–the whole shebang. The film’s mishmash of tones, from goofball to horrific, is equally all over the map. The trailer for the movie promised a great big Ghostbusters-style…
So far, the only ingenious action movie of this mayhem-stuffed, crash-filled summer is Face/Off, directed by the peerless John Woo. It dispenses enough all-out ass-kicking to satisfy the most hormonal adolescent but manages to balance things up with–are you ready for this?–a bracing little essay on human identity. The high-priced,…
Slapstick decadence is the dominant style at the Disney studios this summer, reaching all the way from Touchstone Pictures’ action hit Con Air to the 35th Walt Disney animated feature, Hercules. It’s a moviemaking mode that weds anything-for-a-laugh to anything-for-a-jolt, leaving imagination and authenticity in the lurch. Instead of creating…
If Speed 2: Cruise Control were a frantic, zillion-dollar disaster movie in which the world’s most luxurious ocean liner hits an iceberg on its maiden voyage and sinks to the bottom of the North Atlantic, people might find it a little hard to believe. If it were a frantic, zillion-dollar…
It’s been a long road between landmarks for Peter Fonda. When last we saw him, it seems, he was a lean young rebel perched atop a Harley chopper, the winds of freedom whipping his hair, with a little-known running mate named Jack Nicholson in tow. For a member of one…
Bring earplugs to Batman & Robin. A pair of noseplugs wouldn’t hurt, either. The fourth installment in the Batman franchise is one long head-splitting exercise in clueless cacophony that makes you feel as though you’re being held hostage in some haywire Planet Hollywood while sonic booms pummel your auditory canal…
The germ of Clare Peploe’s complex fantasy of the heart, Rough Magic, is a sweet, obscure piece of pulp fiction called Miss Shumway Waves a Wand, written in 1944 by an all-but-forgotten novelist named James Hadley Chase. To say that Peploe, once an assistant to Bertolucci and Antonioni, has transformed…
The heroine of Susan Streitfeld’s solemn, psychiatry-stuffed first feature, Female Perversions, is a tense, humorless Los Angeles lawyer called Eve Stephens. She favors expensive tailored suits, two-inch spike heels and, if she can fit it into her busy schedule, mid-day office sex with her insufferable male lover or, failing that,…
John “The Scribbler” Grisham and those lawyer shows on TV should probably get three to five in the Big House for the attendant crime wave they’ve started–that is, for fomenting an epidemic of allegedly hilarious legal comedies that don’t withstand much audience grilling. Jonathan Lynn’s Trial and Error is clearly…
It wouldn’t be completely fair to say that the string of hits produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer from 1983 through 1996 are stylistically interchangeable. But it wouldn’t be so awfully unfair, either: A homogeneous, auteurial touch runs from Flashdance (1983) through Top Gun (1986), Beverly Hills Cop II…
The surreal concoction of farce, tragedy and go-to-hell defiance that put Trainspotting on the international movie map also permeates Kevin Allen’s Twin Town. If this is some kind of trend, like, say, Hollywood’s current bout of Tarantino Syndrome, it probably won’t be long before audiences of all ages start separating…
The fictional Yorkshire coal-mining town where English director Mark Herman’s Brassed Off! takes place is called, aptly enough, Grimley. You can feel the layer of soot that has settled into the lives of the beleaguered citizens, and you can sympathize with their struggle to remain human in the face of…
Here are the Joys of Summer…and the Oys of Summer, the nearly 100 movies scheduled to open between now and the end of August. Many of them may even make it to Denver. They’re listed in the order of their L.A. release: May 30 Drunks. Peter Cohn’s look at the…
Does this sound familiar? In Nana Djordjadze’s A Chef in Love, an uncompromising creator of high cuisine stubbornly opposes the philistines and fools who threaten his perfectionism, transforming his kitchen into a kind of metaphoric battleground. This is, of course, the premise of last year’s independent hit Big Night, with…
The appearance of The Lost World: Jurassic Park carries a double burden. Not only is it the sequel to the most popular movie ever made but it is also the first film Steven Spielberg has directed since 1993’s Schindler’s List. Now that he has finally won his Oscar and achieved…
Broken English, the first feature by New Zealand’s Gregor Nicholas, is a Romeo and Juliet tale that owes the usual huge debt to Shakespeare and the dozens of variations filmmakers have attempted over the decades. But it is beautiful and disturbing in new ways. Just to start with, Nicholas’s young…
The veteran director Sidney Lumet is one of the few guys on the planet who can make Woody Allen and Spike Lee look like tourists from Des Moines. Lumet has shot 29 of his 40 films on the streets of New York, and he still captures better than any other…
Here’s more good news for independent filmmakers living on macaroni and cheese in studio apartments everywhere. The 25-year-old Australian director Emma-Kate Croghan shot Love and Other Catastrophes in seventeen days on a budget of $30,000, and Fox Searchlight Pictures picked it up. Here’s the bad news: Croghan didn’t spring for…
Gummy with heartfelt folderol and overbearingly chummy, Fathers’ Day comes across like a feature-length expansion of its sniffle-and-giggle trailer. Prior to this teaming, Robin Williams and Billy Crystal had never been in a movie together–though, along with Whoopi Goldberg, they appear together annually on the televised Comic Relief fundraiser–so there…
