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…
Apparently, Mr. Selznick’s search for Scarlett O’Hara had nothing on this affair. Robin Williams, James Spader, Stephen Dorff, John Cusack and Robert Sean Leonard were among the throngs answering the casting call for To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. But none of them landed a job. None of…
Just when we thought nothing else could go wrong on this beleaguered planet, environmentalists and medical researchers have unearthed something called “multiple chemical sensitivity.” Ten U.S. government agencies currently acknowledge the existence of this politically correct affliction, which is probably nine more than knew about it an hour and a…
British director John Boorman’s fondness for exotic locations and quasi-mystical quests give his best films, like the memorable Southern river trip Deliverance, an air of heightened reality, while his botched forays into Arthurian legend (Excalibur) or Amazonian splendor (The Emerald Forest) reveal the boisterous-tourist side of him, along with a…
A wise man–or was it a wise guy?–once cautioned that there are two things you should never watch being made: sausage and movies. (Consider the ingredients.) Nonetheless, directors have convinced themselves from time to time that the moviemaking process itself is suitable material for a movie. Most notable was the…
The most unnerving–and delectable–skill of film noir masters like Huston, Wilder and Dassin may have been the way they turned all of human relations into a slippery fiction, a pack of lies, an extended alibi. In the dangerous netherworld of these movies, no love was true, no emotion sound, no…
If you work mainly at home, get your mother to do the catering and play one of the lead roles yourself, you might be able to eke out a feature-length movie for $16,000. That’s what 27-year-old Edward Burns did. The surprise is not that Burns got The Brothers McMullen into…
With hearts full of hope, the people at 20th Century Fox are trumpeting A Walk in the Clouds as Keanu Reeves’s debut as a romantic leading man–despite a resume that lists party animal, acrobat cop and ersatz Buddha as his most notable movie accomplishments. Predictably, neither the clatter of press…
Like Keanu and company above, the restless young characters in French-Canadian director Denys Arcand’s Love and Human Remains are also searching for love and family. But most of them are initially so unlikable that we don’t care much if they succeed. Consider the gay actor-turned-waiter David (Thomas Gibson), a hard-shelled…
Discussing 1993’s year in movies, veteran Hollywood scriptwriter William Goldman–who wrote the screenplays for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men and Marathon Man and authored the classic how-to book Adventures in the Screen Trade– singled out Free Willy as a story he wished he’d written. He…
If American adults are still capable of being shocked by the behavior of teenagers–I’ll lay six to five that they’re not–then Larry Clark’s Kids is the movie that will shock them. The New York teens we meet here for one harrowing 24-hour period talk dirty. They pursue sex and drugs…
You don’t always get what you pay for. As everyone knows by now, Waterworld is the most expensive movie ever made. Fierce Pacific thunderstorms, logistical nightmares, a nasty feud between director and star, the star’s insistence that scenes be reshot because he didn’t like the way his hair looked–such were…
It has taken a week or two to catch up with an exceptional children’s movie called The Indian in the Cupboard, and the wait was worthwhile. The director is Muppet-meister Frank Oz, the screenplay is by Melissa Mathison, who wrote the family blockbusters E.T. the Extraterrestrial and The Black Stallion,…
For Westerners, at least, the events leading up to the Tiananmen Square massacre are symbolized by the image of a lone, nameless Chinese student standing in the path of a huge army tank on a street in Beijing. Played and replayed on the evening news, these few seconds of blurry…
For more than half a century, the Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel stood in splendid isolation from his peers. Social subversive, incessant joker and deep thinker, he took it upon himself to lambaste some of the world’s most cherished institutions–notably the Roman Catholic Church, middle-class morality and vintage political correctness–without regard…
James Gray, the 25-year-old writer/director of Little Odessa, seems to be aiming higher than most of his fellow film-school graduates. Gray’s dark and bloody family melodrama, which is set in the Rus-sian-American neighborhood of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, aspires to both Greek tragedy and Shakespearean weightiness, and while his efforts sometimes…
Clearly, the Art Cinematic has made great strides since the days when extraterrestrial invaders were all huge, featureless carcasses encased in blocks of ice, or spiders blown up to beach-umbrella size by atomic radiation. In the name of progress, the killer alien in Species is a gorgeous blonde (former model…
The absorbing drama Red Firecracker, Green Firecracker is set on a family estate and in a bustling northern Chinese river town at the end of the Ching Dynasty. These are the years leading up to the 1911 revolution, and director He Ping squeezes every bit of dialectic he can find…
