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…
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…
