Mike, the lovesick protagonist of Swingers, has the slab-jawed, slightly baffled appeal of a young William Bendix–and only about half the savoir-faire. A struggling comedian with no gig and not many jokes, obsessed with a girlfriend who’s left him and gone back to New York, poor Mike is stranded high…
The emotion in a Mike Leigh film is as plain as dirt and as valuable as gold. This most gifted of all British moviemakers may, in fact, be a kind of miracle worker: He takes the stuff of ordinary working- and middle-class life–trying and failing, the terrors of aging, small…
For those who don’t already know that Pablo Picasso was a great artist and a cruel son of a bitch, filmdom’s beacons of good taste, Merchant, Ivory and Jhabvala, now step forward, shoes all shined, to oh-so-gently kick him in the derriere. In Surviving Picasso, they have once again chosen…
In a land most Americans associate with single-malt whiskey, four-putt greens and the lyrics of Robert Burns, a major literary and cinematic revival continues apace–and the Scottish tourist office is probably still hiding its head. No sooner has the dark and brilliant Trainspotting painted Edinburgh as a nest of roving…
Lovely Geena Davis doesn’t look much like Arnold Schwarzenegger. But once the prop department for The Long Kiss Goodnight outfits her with enough high-tech assault rifles, .45 automatics and shark-fin hunting knives to take out a fair-sized army, it’s pretty hard to tell the difference. Like Big Arnie on a…
With six straight hit movies in the bank and a pair of Oscars on the mantel, Tom Hanks has inflated into a major Hollywood power. So when he tells the guys in suits he wants to write and direct a film all his own, the suits start nodding vigorously into…
In Larry and Andy Wachowski’s Bound, film noir gets one helluva gender-bending. But when the scamming and shooting stop, the genre looks healthier than ever. Envision Double Indemnity with two Barbara Stanwycks, no Fred MacMurray and a couple of enflamed lesbian love scenes. Throw in a briefcase stuffed with 2…
The best movie of the year has nothing to do with space aliens blowing up the White House. Or the durability of the Klan in Mississippi. Or shooting heroin in Scotland. The best movie of the year is about a couple of Italian immigrant brothers struggling to keep a restaurant…
Imagine a Quentin Tarantino movie made by a grownup. A movie fueled by Tarantino’s brand of daredevil adrenaline but with none of his schoolboy nihilism. A movie drenched in blood that also understands loss. A swaggering black comedy stuffed with betrayals that still takes time to glimpse the soul of…
All right, buffs, let’s see if we can get this straight. In 1961 the great director Akira Kurosawa made a lightly veiled homage to American Westerns called Yojimbo, starring Toshiro Mifune as a cold-eyed samurai-for-hire who teaches an overdue lesson to both warring factions in a lawless town–now located in…
In the final scene of The First Wives Club, a comic fantasy in which three middle-aged women take revenge on the husbands who have traded them in for newer models, the triumphant heroines, all dressed in stylish, sinless white, link arms in the glistening dawn streets of lower Manhattan and…
If Cameron Diaz knows what’s good for her, she’ll settle down with a nice, stable insurance salesman in rural South Dakota, have five kids and vote Republican forevermore. Hey, it could happen. For now, though, the spectacular blonde who helped transform Jim Carrey from geeky bank clerk to strutting superstud…
Look out below. Here’s another movie about a child’s grief, a hard-shelled grownup’s loneliness, and the healing power of imagination. It unfolds in Las Vegas (the city of illusions) and Newark, New Jersey (Harsh Reality, U.S.A.), and features Gerard Depardieu in, roughly speaking, the role of Harvey the invisible rabbit…
When movie actors talk in reverent tones about David Mamet, Team Hollywood’s designated thinker, it’s probably not because they regard him as the nation’s leading playwright. Or because of his famous insights into the emptiness of the American Dream and the casual cruelties of the business world. Or even because…
While Republicans and Democrats spend the summer wrangling over custody of the American family, our most thoughtful filmmakers continue to address the burning issue with less bombast, but in far greater depth. Case in point: Lisa Krueger’s Manny & Lo. In a swift hour and a half, this promising new…
If you’re going to spoof a movie genre, it’s probably best to reproduce the old plots and characters and cliches to near-perfection, then give the mannerisms a hard, deviant twist. The keenest humor, after all, always lies close to the truth. In The Big Squeeze–a mutant take on Forties film…
At the midpoint of Escape From L.A., a futuristic action yarn from director John Carpenter, protagonist Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) walks along a crumbling street with Taslima (Valerie Golina), a shell-shocked but spunky resident whose shag haircut seems to have been created by DuPont Stainmaster. It’s a nothing bit, really–a…
Is it a trend or just an accident? In any event, the old Andy Warhol crowd has inspired two films this year, and you can envision a time when they’ll wind up on a double bill in what’s left of the revival houses. For now, the more interesting of the…
If you’re wondering what Travis Bickle has been up to for the last twenty years, here’s the answer. He’s changed his name to Gil Renard, taken a job selling big hunting knives out in San Francisco and become the baseball fan to end all killer baseball fans. Or so it…
In Tin Cup, Kevin Costner swaps his swim fins for a three-wood and hits one down the middle of the fairway. Costner has, I think, always come off better playing ordinary guys–the aging bush-leaguer of Bull Durham, the farmer who reconciles with his father’s ghost in Field of Dreams–than stainless-steel…
Kansas City, Robert Altman’s moody valentine to his hometown, unfolds on the eve of an election in 1934, when Boss Tom Pendergast was setting new standards for public corruption in the Midwest, the fleshpots were thriving, and the wide-open city’s famous jazz life was in full swing in the smoky…
By all accounts, Francis Ford Coppola is putting some pretty good wine into the bottle at his vineyard in Napa. Let’s hope so. Because the filmmaking career of one of America’s great directors has now hit the bottom of the barrel, and his future may lie entirely in viniculture. In…
