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…
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…
