When the British critic John Russell Taylor called the Hollywood musical “a city built to music,” he was thinking more of Fred Astaire’s work than of Woody Allen’s. But anyone who remembers how Allen swaddled that beautiful opening montage of Manhattan in “Rhapsody in Blue” knows that when it comes…
It may come as a surprise to some that leukemia, senility and bitterness between parent and child are the stuff of comedy. But therein lies the unlikely miracle of Marvin’s Room, a compelling drama about a shattered family trying to pick up the pieces that draws much of its strength…
Even the staunchest defenders of the First Amendment must reach pretty far down into their belief to come up with Larry Flynt as a poster boy. An unschooled Kentucky hillbilly with a big mouth and a gift for manipulation, he stuffed Hustler magazine, a phenomenon of the Seventies, full of…
In an ideal world, Ghosts of Mississippi would be about how the widow of Medgar Evers and the people of Mississippi finally got justice thirty years after the civil rights leader’s assassination. But Hollywood is not an ideal world–never has been–so Rob Reiner’s well-meaning, hand-wringing movie is really about the…
New Line’s release of Jackie Chan’s First Strike is salvo number three in Chan’s invasion of America. (Miramax’s version of the 1991 Operation Condor, the last film on which the star also took a director’s credit, is due out in May.) Like its predecessors, Rumble in the Bronx and Supercop,…
A famous movie composer once told me a joke: Two songwriters are sitting around, and one of them says to the other, “I just saw the most amazing thing. A man fell off the roof of a building, hit a ledge, fell to the street, got winged by a bus…
For people who grow up loving movies, returning to old favorites can be as jarring and illuminating as blowing the dust off a family photo album. Even if our judgments about the films are identical the second time around, our emotional reactions, if we’ve grown at all, change or deepen…
The schizophrenic concert pianist in Scott Hicks’s Shine combines all the qualities that makers of a “major motion picture” about a tormented artist are looking for. Young David is brilliant, of course, but his ruthless backstage father pounds him into a puddle of nerves. When his mind finally snaps and…
After playing a lovable gangster who becomes an instant Hollywood celebrity (in Get Shorty) and a lovable auto mechanic who becomes an instant genius (in Phenomenon), John Travolta has landed a gig as, well, the Archangel Michael–a visitor from the heavens who becomes instant salvation for three burned-out mortals stuck…
Hollywood routinely creates movies whose sole reason for existing is to provide a beloved celebrity a showcase to deliver a scenery-chewing star turn; occasionally, these films even win their lead performer an Oscar (example: Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman). But The Evening Star may be the first movie…
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…
