This must be the year for nonsensical movies involving automobiles, violence, confused identities and sex, directed by guys named Dave. No sooner has David Lynch led his disciples off on a wild-goose chase called Lost Highway, in which the main character morphs into somebody else, than David Cronenberg pops up…
In The Devil’s Own, Brad Pitt plays Frankie McGuire, an Irish Republican Army gunman with 24 kills to his credit–13 British soldiers and 11 police officers. After a bloody firefight in Belfast, he escapes to New York, where, helped by a pro-IRA judge (George Hearn), he is placed in the…
The new Richard Linklater film, subUrbia, adapted by Eric Bogosian from his 1994 play, opens with a long, unbroken tracking shot through a ticky-tacky Texas suburb, backed on the soundtrack by Gene Pitney wailing “Town Without Pity.” This logy, Jim Jarmusch-y opening hints at even greater anomie to come–and boy,…
I spent the 68th anniversary of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre watching The Godfather with the new soundtrack prepared for its 25th anniversary. The scene was a mixing room in the Saul Zaentz Film Center in Berkeley, California, and the master of ceremonies was much-honored editor and sound expert Walter…
The young black Chicagoans in Theodore Witcher’s love jones are busy finding themselves–in writing or photography, on the winding paths of friendship, in the mysteries of life and career that loom ahead. Most of all, they’re trying to figure out the real deal on romantic love, but the ambiguities of…
You know you’re in neo-noir country when the first images on the screen turn out to be empty freeway ramps bathed in cold moonlight and oil-cracking towers looming in the fog. It’s as though Michelangelo Antonioni and Nicholas Ray had both been let loose again in Los Angeles to spread…
The backwaters of our great republic are probably no more infested than the cities with photographers whose pictures are pure accident, novelists in need of remedial English or actors chugging along on grand illusions of adequacy. Indeed, every busboy and skateboarder in Los Angeles is waiting for a callback from…
The Indian-born director Mira Nair has never hesitated to cross borders–cultural, geographical or temporal. Some of her previous films have examined aging dancers in a Bombay strip club, an expatriate newspaper vendor in New York who’s been separated from his pregnant wife in India, the Romeo-and-Juliet romance of a black…
In Return of the Jedi, the last chapter of the Star Wars trilogy, an intergalactic window display of creepy and cuddly critters upstages the human characters. All the conflicts are resolved between the virtuous rebels–Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), Han Solo (Harrison Ford), and Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher)–and the wicked Imperials,…
Moviegoers who believe that David “Who killed Laura Palmer?” Lynch is the greatest genius to hit the big screen since Dali and Bunuel slit that poor donkey’s eyeball in Un Chien Andalou are going to get a serious kick out of Lost Highway–and probably spend a couple of hours afterward…
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Hard Eight aspires to be gritty and tough and tender all at once, but its tones keep getting in one another’s way. In his feature-film debut, Anderson has conjured up the tale of a courtly old gambler, Sydney (Philip Baker Hall), who inexplicably takes under his wing…
During the first few minutes of Howard Stern’s romp through his inexplicable life, he spells out his mission: Private Parts will both convert the nonbelievers and entertain the cult. Stern wants to give you plenty of hot lesbian action (and freed from FCC restrictions, he takes real pleasure in saying…
The vision of race war that Boyz N the Hood director John Singleton conjures up in Rosewood comes at a precarious moment in our national history. Polarized reactions to the O.J. Simpson verdicts have demonstrated how deep the rift between black and white remains–forty years after the civil-rights movement hit…
It has taken 22 years to release When We Were Kings, Leon Gast’s documentary about the tumultuous October 1974 Muhammad Ali-George Foreman fight in Kinshasa, Zaire, because the filmmaker’s original backers kept running into bad luck. One of them died in a plane crash; another was shot by a Liberian…
The ingredients are familiar: Donnie Brasco stars Al Pacino as a Mafia soldier and Johnny Depp as an FBI undercover agent who infiltrates the mob. But there’s a twist. Based on a true story, the film is a grunt’s-eye view of the Mafia, and it’s not remotely “operatic” or Scorsese-ish…
January and February are good times for taking a vacation–very good times. Not because the airfares are low or because the weather sucks, but because what a movie critic must endure at the beginning of the year is so grim. It is almost impossible to maintain any semblance of optimism…
The second most important room in their houses is the boudoir, so the sophisticated French are good at sex farce. If anything, the warm-blooded Italians are even better. The occasional American moviemaker–Billy Wilder, Mike Nichols, Woody Allen–can turn the trick, too, wedding absurdity to desire and coming up with dark…
Billy Bob Thornton isn’t going to snatch the matinee-idol title away from Tom Cruise, Kevin Costner or Denzel Washington anytime soon. At the age of 41, the former Hearts Afire regular is also a grizzled acting veteran of low-rent slasher flicks like Chopper Chicks in Zombietown and modest critical successes…
Irvin Kershner’s The Empire Strikes Back, the continuation of George Lucas’s Star Wars, is a classic fantasy in its own right. I vastly prefer it to the first film. Its textures are richer, its emotions deeper, and it’s an honest-to-Jedi movie–not a dozen jammed-together entries of a serial. On its…
Elmore Leonard’s Touch is identified on the paperback as a mystery and carried in stores next to Leonard’s celebrated crime novels (like Get Shorty). But this wan little book is actually the problem child of Leonard’s oeuvre–the only crime it involves is lack of truth in advertising, and that’s on…
For generations, the heftier works of Leo Tolstoy have challenged undergraduate lifting power and speed-reading skills as much as they have confounded the world’s moviemakers. That dark tribute to nineteenth-century adultery, Anna Karenina, was filmed in America three times, beginning with Garbo in 1935 and ending with Jacqueline Bisset in…
Since Baby LeRoy first put the screws to W.C. Fields back in the 1930s, the intractable child who torments the cranky old man has rampaged through movie history like a wild force of nature. The most celebrated recent example, of course, saw little Macaulay Culkin befouling the burglary schemes of…
