Barely Breathing

If the goofballs in Hollywood want to pay Demi Moore 12 million bucks to waggle her butt and flash her chest at a movie camera, so be it. That doesn’t mean we have to reimburse them. Striptease contains two or three minutes of softcore T and A, and that is…

Close Encounter of the Special-Effects Kind

Want to hear a recipe for competing in the summer movie marketplace? First, dig up $80 or $90 million. Add 3,000 (yes, 3,000) special-effects shots depicting stuff like the fiery destruction of the Empire State Building, the U.S. Capitol and the White House, a couple of major air battles between…

Preteen Terror

The young filmmaker Todd Solondz insists that the unsettling picture of preteen trauma he gives us in his astonishing Welcome to the Dollhouse is not autobiographical–even though Heather Matarazzo, the eleven-year-old actress he cast in the part of a lonely, terrorized seventh-grader, bears a striking physical resemblance to him, and…

Advice to the Lovelorn

The Germans are not exactly the kings of comedy–not in this century–so it’s always a little startling to come across a German film speckled with yuks, even when those yuks are largely about dissolution and death. Case in point: Doris Dorrie’s Nobody Loves Me is a kind of bedroom farce…

Grin Reaper

Europe’s favorite movie comedian, Roberto Benigni, carries the Buster Keaton chromosome and the Jim Carrey chromosome–joined together in bedroom farce. American audiences know him best as Tom Waits’s talkative cellmate in Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law, as Johnny Stecchino, or as Inspector Clouseau Jr. in the ill-considered Son of the…

Bursting With Good Actors

If you decide to catch only one of this summer’s zillion-dollar action movies, make it The Rock. The high-profile Simpson/Bruckheimer production team, Bad Boys director Michael Bay and a battalion of stunt people blow up even more stuff–Humvees, yellow Ferraris, cable cars, a Navy weapons depot, some big chunks of…

Famous and Andy

If you want to get all star-struck, it’s probably a good idea to aim a little higher than the assorted frauds, mannequins, paralyzed junkies and ten-cent philosophers who drifted into Andy Warhol’s orbit in downtown New York in the late Sixties. At Max’s Kansas City in those days, the signature…

E.T., Go Home

For more than half a century, science-fiction movies have been asking if there’s intelligent life in outer space. The Arrival makes you wonder how much of it is left on Earth. Imagine Charlie Sheen as one Zane Zaminski, a goofy science nerd with a bad crewcut, fogged-up glasses and a…

Thy Humble Serpent

The silly season is upon us, so the best you can hope for down at the local multiplex these days is silliness with a touch of style, a dash of sense and an absence of tornadoes. Enter Dragonheart, which combines the romance of huge, toothsome beasts with the classic movie…

Toys Are Us

Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell is being billed as Japan’s coming-out party in the world of big-time animation, as well as another visionary take on the future. But before cartoon freaks get too carried away, it might be useful to note that Oshii’s drawing style can be stiff, cold…

Mission Insufferable

Good morning, Mr. Phelps…Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to play second fiddle to Tom Cruise, because he’s the star and the producer. And to inflate a pretty entertaining old TV series into a movie monster that cost more to make than all the broadcast episodes put…

Go With the Floe

Seen any good Icelandic movies lately? How about surreal Icelandic road movies that begin at a fish market in Tokyo and wind up with the principals eating roasted rams’ testicles in a raucous country-and-Western bar plunked down about nine yards from the North Pole? Fridrik Thor Fridriksson’s Cold Fever is…

Funnel Vision

If you’re in the market for your very own Doppler radar set or a pickup truck with real cojones, Twister is a pretty good place to go shopping. Ostensibly, Jan De Bont’s big, loud, expensive action movie is about the destructive power of tornadoes and the folks who chase stormy…

Dead and Alive

Jim Jarmusch’s Old West is no place for John Wayne. Inspired by Native American pantheism, the English mystic poet William Blake and the heretofore unnoticed connection between the two, America’s most unpredictable filmmaker has come up with a dark, dreamy Western called Dead Man in which the “frontier” is not…

Junior Achievement

Benjamin Ross’s black comedy The Young Poisoner’s Handbook is a relentlessly nasty piece of goods that never hesitates to make a kind of existential antihero out of its protagonist–a brilliant, psychopathic fourteen-year-old who poisons his stepmother with stuff from his chemistry set and the local drugstore, gets caught, cons the…

The Executionee’s Song … and Dance

After a suspiciously long abstention, Hollywood has finally deemed the death penalty an Important Issue once again. But the two current movies on the subject reveal the huge gap between the best minds of the “entertainment industry” and its low-rent hucksters. The good news: While redneck double murderer Sean Penn…

Popped Culture

The supposed intrigue in Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon is that it gives Western audiences a rare, sympathetic glimpse of contemporary Iran–a country and a society demonized here since the late ayatollah took those hostages and the evening news started showing demonstrators stomping on the American flag in the public…

Growing Up in Public

That old growing-up-and-moving-out thing is the coldest of dead horses, and anyone who can actually shoot a little life into the carcass deserves a round of applause from kids of all ages in the balcony. Enter Matt Reeves, born on Long Island, raised in Santa Monica and a moviemaker since…

Raisin’ in the South

For those of us who didn’t grow up black in the segregated rural South, it’s hard to tell how much of Once Upon a Time…When We Were Colored is real-life inspiration and how much is nostalgia tinted by wishful thinking. In any event, this is the black feel-good movie of…

Play MSTie for Me

The unlikely heroes of our story are a human geek named Mike and two wisecracking robots, all condemned by a mad scientist, Dr. Clayton Forrester, to watching really awful Hollywood movies in outer space. Under the circumstances, you’d talk back to the screen, too–loudly and often. Still, that doesn’t quite…

Jane Err

The confirmed sentimentalist Franco Zeffirelli could probably tenderize a side of horse meat by pointing his camera at it–a gift the political advertisers might envy. But that makes him the wrong man for the job when it comes to a new version of Jane Eyre. Charlotte Bronte’s oft-filmed high school…

Funny Girls

The assumption by conservatives that Hollywood is some kind of decadent liberal underworld has never been supported by the facts. On the contrary, this hidebound old institution has always been fueled by one thing only–sheer profit motive–and it has never hesitated to buckle under pressure from outside powers that be…