Best Ten of 1996 1. Big Night. Art vs. commerce, sibling rivalry and great Italian food at the Jersey shore in the Fifties. 2. Fargo. Yah, hon. Murder meets mirth in the frozen nort’ country, courtesy of the Coen brothers. 3. Secrets & Lies. Britain’s Mike Leigh examines a shattered…
Michael Hoffman’s One Fine Day is a fantasy about family values with an awful case of high blood pressure. Starring Michelle Pfeiffer as a man-weary single mom and E.R. idol George Clooney as a woman-weary single dad who have kids enrolled at the same school, it spends one frantic weekday…
In the 43 years since The Crucible first saw a footlight, Arthur Miller has steadfastly maintained that his dramatic condemnation of the Salem witch trials was really a veiled outcry against Senator Joseph McCarthy and the political terrorism of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Almost no one’s argued with him…
Some amusing stuff about sports agentry drowns in the emotional shallows of Jerry Maguire, which stars Tom Cruise as a hot-shot dealmaker whose first bout of conscience torpedoes his future at his firm, the monolithic Sports Management International. After visiting a hospitalized hockey player who skates hurt in order to…
Forget Independence Day. If you really want to see Earth get it, you can’t do any better than Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! It’s a destructo orgy orchestrated without any phony-baloney sanctimony about the fellowship of man–or spaceman. Burton isn’t interested in intergalactic amity; he’s not even interested in preserving the…
If it does nothing else, the election-year comedy My Fellow Americans will probably remind us that most citizens now regard their political leaders with the contempt usually reserved for serial killers, child molesters and news reporters. Hollywood always trails the social mood of the country by a year or two…
Yo, Adrian. Think the Italian Stallion was in tough when he duked it out with Apollo Creed, Mr. T and that huge Russian? Figure Rambo had his hands full on those fiery missions impossible to Cambodia and Afghanistan? Hey, the dialogue alone would have killed anybody else. Ever worry that…
Kurt Vonnegut’s strengths as a novelist are his rare, dark humor, which can be as bracing as cognac, and his gift for shifting gears from tragedy to absurdity, tenderness to stark horror. His main weakness is probably a taste for cartoon moralism–a kind of flimsy preachiness, drenched in postmodern ambiguity,…
Critics normally don’t spend a lot of time praising producers; in a medium that is both commerce and art, our job is to evaluate the art side of the equation. And the assumption is that while producers are raising, counting or raking in moolah, a movie’s aesthetics are in the…
Two centuries before zillionaire NBA players started talking trash, before Don Rickles ambushed his first tipsy Vegas ringsider, before Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley traded quips at the Algonquin, the decadent court of Louis XVI turned acid wit into coin of the realm. While the nobles blindly sniped at each…
The recession atmosphere of Alan Taylor’s Palookaville is littered with mongrel dogs, old junker cars and busted dreams. Stubborn layers of grime and palpable malaise have settled on worn-out Jersey City, the movie’s unlikely locale, and the downtrodden citizens squeeze scant pleasure from life drinking lousy coffee in the sap-colored…
Bad-boy director Abel Ferrara loves to shock the squares. In his notorious slice of New York street life, Bad Lieutenant, he had corrupt cop Harvey Keitel snort cocaine off his little daughter’s First Communion photo and extort sex from a pair of scared teenage girls from Jersey. Ferrara jived up…
In the post-Babe era, can you make a live-action movie about animals and not have them talk to each other? For me, this is the deep philosophical question raised by Disney’s new 101 Dalmatians, a live-action remake of the studio’s 1961 animated feature–in which, by the way, the animals did…
Any filmmaker bold enough to set a romantic epic in the middle of the Sahara with war guns booming in the distance runs a pretty big risk–aside from getting all that sand in the Panaflex. For real movie lovers who’ve seen a few things, Casablanca and Lawrence of Arabia loom…
Assorted ecologists, armchair philosophers and meddlers have been wringing their hands in recent years over the nature of nature documentaries. Are the lives of various species disturbed by the filmmaking process? Do camera and microphone falsify? Does Homo sapiens have any business peering into the lion’s den or the spider’s…
In The Mirror Has Two Faces, Barbra Streisand plays Rose Morgan, a Columbia University Romantic Literature professor who endures a drab, romanceless life. She lives with her imperious, fault-finding mother, Hannah (Lauren Bacall)–a beautician, no less–and wards off the attentions of a nebbishy suitor (Austin Pendleton) while pining for the…
San Francisco isn’t just the setting of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: It’s the movie’s muse. Along with composer Bernard Herrmann, who transforms convoluted psychology into resounding lyricism, and co-star Kim Novak, whose pheromones and otherworldliness give body and soul to tortured romance, San Francisco enables Hitchcock to conjure a netherworld of…
The fussiest Shakespeare buff should find little to fault in Trevor Nunn’s gorgeous and playful adaptation of Twelfth Night. The most popular and oft-performed of the Bard’s comedies has sailed along for four centuries on the glories of mistaken identity, confused passion and matchless poetry, and Nunn does them all…
Ron Howard, the child actor turned movie director, has grossed a billion dollars exalting firemen and astronauts. There’s no surprise in that: A guy who spent most of his youth on the make-believe sets of The Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days has a better excuse than most people for…
There are some pretty good reasons why it took 44 years for Truman Capote’s coming-of-age novel The Grass Harp to make its way to the movies. There are even better reasons why the movie’s on-again, off-again release schedule has meandered across most of the last nine months. First off, Capote’s…
Moviemakers are on one of their periodic Shakespeare binges, which is always good for the English language, if not necessarily for the advancement of the cinematic arts. Last year we got a radical Richard III, with powerful Ian McKellen reinterpreting the treacherous brute as a 1930s fascist, along with a…
In Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins, we learn nothing of the Irish revolutionary’s early life, and we get but scant patches of the long, tragic history that impelled him to invent urban guerrilla warfare. Instead, Jordan throws us immediately into battle. In this case, it’s the last moments of the Irish…
