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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
When the Republicans bellow for family films, they probably aren’t thinking of David O. Russell’s stuff. But moviegoers wondering if they’ll ever get to laugh again in the yuk-free zone of the Nineties need only catch Russell’s Flirting With Disaster to have their faith restored. Two years ago this bright…
The martyred teenager Anne Frank has been memorialized by playwrights, filmmakers and historians, and her famous diary, perhaps the most extraordinary single document of the Holocaust, has sold 25 million copies since 1947 and has been translated into 54 languages. But Jon Blair’s poignant Anne Frank Remembered, which just won…
At the beginning of Primal Fear, an alleged courtroom thriller, defense attorney Martin Vail, portrayed by Richard Gere, is unctuous, facile. In conversations with a journalist (Jack Connerman) whose sole purpose in the script is to serve as an excuse for a flood of exposition, Vail–a former Chicago state’s attorney,…
Girl 6 has slipped into the theaters without the fanfare that ordinarily accompanies a new Spike Lee movie. That may be just as well, because this tart little comedy about a struggling actress who makes ends meet by serving up phone sex has none of Lee’s usual in-your-face rhetoric or…
When Exorcist director William Friedkin remade Henri-Georges Clouzot’s great existential thriller The Wages of Fear in 1977, he dedicated Sorcerer to Clouzot, as a respectful student might. By contrast, the perpetrators of a new version of Diabolique, which is the late M. Clouzot’s most famous film, don’t even bother acknowledging…
Giuseppe Tornatore’s reputation on this side of the Atlantic rests on the 1989 Academy Award winner Cinema Paradiso, his engaging but sticky-sweet valentine to movie memory. That nostalgic box-office success sought to recapture a bygone filmmaking style, and it endorsed the prevailing American view of Italians as mushy sentimentalists who…
Anyone who saw Marleen Gorris’s militant fantasy A Question of Silence in the mid-1980s immediately understood the Dutch filmmaker’s no-holds-barred feminism. In a clever twist on Death Wish and four decades of male-dominated revenge Westerns, Gorris had three ordinary women–a housewife, a waitress and a secretary–heap their pent-up resentment and…
In these days of mindless Hollywood conformity and obscene movie budgets set aside for the destruction of cars and helicopters, the career of the magisterial Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray should be a lesson to us. In 1952, when the former economist and advertising man was working on Pather Panchali, the…
To hear Ethan and Joel Coen talk these days, they’re a couple of plain-spoken, rock-ribbed Midwesterners whose simple hearts remain in their home state of Minnesota. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course: The dominant qualities of the brothers’ work–from Raising Arizona to Barton Fink to The Hudsucker…
When it comes to portraying the TV news biz, Hollywood is naturally drawn more to the glitz than the grit. Why make a big deal out of a fatal prison riot when you can have Robert Redford massage Michelle Pfeiffer’s foot? Who gives a damn about Latin American politics when…
Kenneth Branagh’s A Midwinter’s Tale is another sweet comic valentine to those batty but lovable show folk. So if you’re less than enthralled by the vanities and insecurities of actors, you may as well stop reading this and start shopping for another movie. Now that half the house has departed,…
French director Barbet Schroeder’s fifth American film, Before and After, strains to say something important about families–what binds them together, what tears them apart–in an age of moral ambiguity. In a more oblique way, this was also the subject of Martin Scorsese’s harrowing remake of the classic thriller Cape Fear,…
Have Messrs. Ivory and Merchant shown you into one too many drawing rooms? Just about had it with the Jane Austen craze? Up to here with Victorian-class warfare? How about the eternal feud between manners and desire? That’s okay. A lot of people feel the same way. But before you…
