The crux of Patricia Rozema’s When Night Is Falling is a woman’s sexual awakening, which in itself has all the cinematic originality of a San Francisco car chase or a cowboy riding into the sunset. But Rozema is no commonplace filmmaker, as anyone who saw her cult hit I’ve Heard…
Following a high-toned promenade through Edwardian New York, The Age of Innocence, Martin Scor-sese is back doing what he does best–wallowing in the Age of Corruption. Casino, Scorsese’s three-hour journey through the back rooms, bedrooms and killing grounds of Las Vegas, is tinged with hip satire and studded with scenes…
The peculiar love affair joining the biographer/ essayist Lytton Strachey and the painter Dora Carrington was played out, early in our century, on the periphery of London’s celebrated Bloomsbury Group. But for intensity and vision, this bohemian union may have surpassed even Virginia Woolf’s novelistic experiments or John Maynard Keynes’s…
Norman Rene’s Reckless is not for everyone, and Mia Farrow with her neurotic whine turned up full blast is for almost no one. But this quirky black comedy, which is in part another take on Candide, has the kind of daring you don’t find in more commercial projects. For one…
Mount the charm of Kennedy, the wisdom of Lincoln and the eloquence of FDR on the sleek chassis of Michael Douglas and you’ve got a pretty nice piece of Democratic Party wish fulfillment. Forget the facts of real life–the ascendancy of the Gingrichians and the decline of Bill Clinton. This…
Agnieszka Holland’s overwrought Total Eclipse tries to exalt Arthur Rimbaud, the bad boy of French poetry, as the soul of raging creativity, a revolutionary so fierce and pure that no act of drunken self-destruction or wanton cruelty could bank his artistic fire or soil his reputation. Fine. The reports about…
The whore with a heart of gold and the punchy fighter with a rosin bag for a brain are not exactly new movie types–not even for that high Manhattan intellect Woody Allen. So when we meet them again in Allen’s new movie, Mighty Aphrodite, we’re tempted to apply the same…
Mainstream producers revile young auteurs. Sure, a certain prestige is conferred upon those who work with a Gus Van Sant or a Steven Soderbergh, and these associations tend to guarantee respectful treatment from both sweater-clad TV “critics” and minor-league Andrew Sarris wannabes. But they also force money men to contend…
As the story goes, Wayne Wang’s Smoke, that fascinating loaf of life set in and around a Brooklyn cigar store, got such a grip on its authors and actors amid last year’s shooting that no one wanted to let go. So they didn’t. With just six more days of filming…
It has been half a century since the star-struck gangster Bugsy Siegel arranged a screen test for himself (alas, his gifts lay elsewhere), and more than two decades since assorted soldiers from the Lucchese and Gambino crime families stood around the Godfather set giving Mafia style tips to Marlon Brando…
The reading public–O, endangered species–grows understandably wary every time screenwriter, director and cast get their collective hooks into a bona fide literary classic. It doesn’t happen every time, but some of the world’s most dreadful movies have dropped stillborn from some of the greatest books. Who can imagine Tolstoy’s reaction…
Gus Van Sant, best known for the junkie street fantasy Drugstore Cowboy and the quasi-poetic road movie My Own Private Idaho, is a hipster first and last–a contemporary Jack Kerouac with a Panaflex pointed at the Nineties. So the swipes Van Sant takes in To Die For at celebrity worship…
The eighteenth Denver International Film Festival gets under way October 11 at the Auditorium Theatre with the local premiere of Woody Allen’s new film, Mighty Aphrodite–in which Allen and Helena Bonham Carter play a married couple with plenty of, well, marital problems. The festival closes nine days later at the…
Cushioned by money and blunted by convention, Dead Presidents lacks the raw thrill that catapulted the Hughes brothers’ first film, Menace II Society, onto critics’ Best Ten lists and into the consciousness of an America obsessed with race and violence. Like many filmmakers on their second outing, Allen and Albert…
Easy Rollins, the smooth private eye at the heart of four Walter Mosley novels, occupies the same city (Los Angeles) and the same period (the fertile 1940s) as his celebrated counterpart in the detective trade, Philip Marlowe. Both of them are stained by the violence of their antagonists and, quite…
The versatile British director Peter Yates once made American tough-guy movies like Bullitt and The Friends of Eddie Coyle, as well as such quirky little comedies as Breaking Away. Now he’s joined the Irish charm cult. The Run of the Country is a coming-of-age story set in an Irish village…
Jerry Garcia had been at the undertaker’s about five minutes when a filmed valentine to his true believers hit the street. Your enthusiasm for Tie-Died: Rock ‘n Roll’s Most Deadicated Fans will likely depend on your tolerance for cult argot in general and Deadhead blather in particular, but make no…
In the cold, gray, unnamed city where David Fincher’s bloody thriller Seven takes place, it’s always raining. There’s a coating of grime on every door lock and lampshade, the coffee cups are all chipped and smudged, and every dark staircase in every tenement is collapsing. So is the tenement. All…
Once your acne starts to clear up, there’s not much reason to see an Allan Moyle movie. Or so it first seems. The Montreal-born director specializes in high-test teenage fantasy, so it’s unlikely that anyone with less than a compelling interest in picking out a prom dress or getting a…
Actress Diane Keaton has declared herself a film director, and she hasn’t taken long to set a style. In Unstrung Heroes, a bittersweet tearjerker combining a twelve-year-old boy, his dying mother, his geeky father and two crackpot uncles, Keaton leans toward solemn silences and worried faces reflected in windowpanes. She…
Earlier this year Andre Techine’s Wild Reeds won four major Cesar Awards–France’s version of the Oscars–and the movie has attracted big audiences in that country. But not all French delicacies travel well. The four interwoven coming-of-age stories at the heart of the film are interesting enough because raging teen hormones…
Spike Lee’s in-your-face moviemaking style–the pounding insistence that we get it–is familiar by now. So there’s little surprise when Clockers, which explores the complex, uneasy relationship between cops and bottom-rung drug dealers around a decaying Brooklyn housing project, opens with a grim montage of bloody police crime-scene photos interspersed with…
