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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Volcano is set in Los Angeles, and audiences get high watching the city crash and burn. For L.A. haters, Volcano could prove a peak experience. You don’t even have to hate L.A. to enjoy it–love/hate will do. That’s why the film closes with Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.,” a facetious…
The eight heads in 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag don’t look much like heads. They look like what they are–big, squarish rubber things from the studio makeup department, each with a goofy expression and a crummy wig glued on top. That’s because the makers of this raucous black comedy…
Jon Robin Baitz’s The Substance of Fire, produced on stage in New York and L.A. and now making its appearance as a movie distributed by the tastemakers at Miramax, is about another traumatized family struggling to work out its problems. In that, it sustains a dramatic tradition stretching from the…
JFK used the White House as his brothel. In the end, Nixon reduced it to a one-man loony bin. And the current occupant, by all accounts, has converted the place into the priciest bed-and-breakfast on the planet. How can Hollywood fantasists hope to compete with the extremities of actual presidential…
Nobody is going to seriously accuse writer-director Alexander Payne of being chicken. For his first feature, the hilarious Citizen Ruth, not only has he chosen the number-one issue a filmmaker is likely to get killed over–abortion and a woman’s right to make a personal decision on the subject–but he’s made…
Return we must with brash Kevin Smith to the place that inspires him: suburban New Jersey. Chasing Amy is Smith’s third feature in as many years, and neither his use of color film stock nor–surprise!–his breakout from shooting in one room much distinguishes his latest outing from its predecessors, the…
Ever since the semi-mystical Swedish writer Selma Lagerlsf won the 1909 Nobel Prize for Literature, a rumor’s been going around that the fix was in. The Swedish Academy, detractors say, had favored a native daughter who made her only real contribution to world culture in 1924–when she inadvertently launched Greta…
Have you heard? In the 1950s, much of America–particularly the typical small town in the Midwest–was sexually repressed and stupidly class-conscious. Many marriages were long-suffering disasters, and goods were often more important than feelings. But the emergence of Elvis, college enrollment for women and the simmering rebellion of youth signaled…
There are way too many movies about hit men, but that shouldn’t dissuade you from seeing Grosse Pointe Blank. It’s not quite like any other movie–let alone one about a hit man. That may be because it’s a hit-man movie crossed with a high-school-reunion comedy, and the two genres mesh…
Over the past five years, action star Jean-Claude Van Damme has become one of America’s leading importers of foreign talent. In 1993 he hired Hong Kong action ace John Woo to direct Hard Target. For last year’s Maximum Risk, he brought over Ringo Lam. And now he has used a…
Could the release of a three-and-a-half-hour director’s cut of the 1982 nautical spectacular Das Boot reflect some mass Oedipal desire to get closer to Mother Earth’s core as the millennium approaches? Perhaps. But there’s nothing vaguely feminine about Das Boot, the kind of man’s-man World War II adventure in which…
On its surface, The Daytrippers probably seems like your generic ’90s American independent let’s-get-our-friends-together-and-make-a-movie movie. Shot in Long Island and Manhattan in sixteen days for about a half-million dollars, with a cast including the inevitable Parker Posey and the almost equally inevitable Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott–where was Eric Stoltz?–it…
When Val Kilmer walked away from the Batman franchise, it was only a matter of time before he offered up his own competing brand. The Saint isn’t just his answer to Batman–it’s a full-length commercial for all the Saint movies to come. There’s a breezy effrontery in the ploy; Kilmer…
Smilla’s Sense of Snow feels like two movies. The first of them addresses the animating drama of the original Peter Hoeg novel–the quest of its young scientist/heroine, who is Greenlandic Inuit on her mother’s side and Danish on her father’s, to break out of cultural exile in Copenhagen and reclaim…
