Batman Loses 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…

Trick and Treat

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…

Psych Out

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,…

Legally Inane

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…

Rough Landing

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 Underbelly of Wales

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…

A Miner Treasure

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…

Reelin’ in the Summer

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…

Georgian Peach

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…

Another Spielberg Monster

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…

Tribal Warfare

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…

Law and Ordure

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…

Downer Under

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…

Hello, Fodder

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…

Red Star

The unlikely heroine of Peter Duncan’s Children of the Revolution is one Joan Fraser (Judy Davis), a red-haired, bug-eyed Australian Communist whose fervor doesn’t stop with belting out “The Internationale” in the corner pub or forcing leaflets on bemused passersby. Joan is so hot for Bolshevism that she sends a…

Star Whores

In The Fifth Element, the all-knowing, all-powerful Supreme Being of the Universe turns out to be Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), an orange-haired babe in a skimpy, Band-Aid-thin mod outfit who speaks in a kind of Slavic scat and cries a lot. It’s as if the filmmakers started out to make a…

South by Southwest

If you happen to be a highly civilized yuppie couple from Massachusetts and you’re driving a $30,000 sports/rec vehicle to California, don’t bother stopping off in cactus-and-enchilada country. After all, the black-clad varmint at the wheel of that sun-scorched pickup truck just ahead has a Dalton Brothers mustache and a…

Give It Up for Dead

It’s probably just a matter of time until Newsweek and the major networks start hailing necrophilia as North America’s hottest new lifestyle. For now, though, copulating with the dead remains largely the province of a few social visionaries like Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy. Face it: Most of us have…

Taming Leo

When Masterpiece Theatre aired a multi-part Anna Karenina to mark the novel’s centennial in 1977, series producer Joan Sullivan said, “I think that great stories are what the series is about.” Now Bernard Rose, the writer-director of the new movie version, talks about how lucky he was to discover “this…

Why Spy?

If you’re hankering to see a movie that sends up swinging ’60s London and Carnaby Street and vintage James Bond movies, don’t bother to check out Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. What the movie mostly sends up is its star and screenwriter, Michael Myers. That’s not all bad: Myers…

Looks Are Everything

Think you know gypsies? Dark, swarthy types with yard-long coils of blue-black hair set off by huge gold earrings, right? In the back room, Madame Salona will read your palm for fifty. Gypsies all speak an impenetrable language from another planet. Always staging personal-injury accidents in the produce department at…

Prisoners of Bore

No one has exploited the historical-epic form better than David Lean. At his peak, he used its spaciousness and breadth to develop characters with conflicting points of view so that audiences could feel viscerally swept away, emotionally engaged and mentally sharpened–all at once. With the help of inspired actors, he…