The period of Honore de Balzac’s Colonel Chabert is the second decade of the nineteenth century, when the French bourgeoisie was rising on tides of post-revolutionary democracy, material desire and disillusionment with war. Against this background, the great novelist wrote the tale of a slain hero of the Napoleonic Wars…
I once spent a morning in Los Angeles with Sam Peckinpah, watching him breathe fire. On the table in his hotel suite lay a stack of dirty dishes, an unkempt pile of movie scripts and a huge, unsheathed knife. There was also a .45 automatic the size of a toaster…
For decades social psychologists, campus film historians and other pests have been cooking up elaborate theories about how the Z-grade giant insect flicks of the 1950s were really reflections of our deepest Cold War fears, or that the disaster-movie cycle of the 1970s, with its swarms of killer bees and…
There are plenty of good reasons Once Were Warriors has become the most successful film in New Zealand’s history, outgrossing The Piano and the Spielberg blockbuster Jurassic Park. Shock value is only one of them. Lee Tamahori’s searing examination of a contemporary Maori family facing extinction in the brutal urban…
How’s this for a comic premise? A Jewish American princess finally gets engaged to her longtime boyfriend. While everyone pushes to set the date, her nagging questions about marriage in the Nineties all come to a head with the discovery that every member of her family is having an extramarital…
The pleasures of Shallow Grave, a stylish black comedy disguised as a bloody thriller, are strewn so playfully about that they feel effortless. The characters, a trio of twentysomethings sharing a roomy flat in Edinburgh, Scotland, are so snotty and amoral that we’re never burdened by any pretense of liking…
That Irish charm school the movies have been conducting of late is still in session. The Secret of Roan Inish, an innocuous bit of Hibernian whimsy featuring a little girl’s vivid imagination, a kindly fisherman/grandfather who likes to pass on the family myths and a boy who’s mysteriously floated out…
At the movies, it’s open season on literary figures. In Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, we got an earful of cult heroine Dorothy Parker’s mordant one-liners, which was to be expected, and an eyeful of her alcoholic self-pity, which was not. Tom & Viv is an even rougher piece…
Want to foul up your next crime thriller? It’s easy. First, go down to the Florida Everglades at midnight and find some alligators. Next, reheat a big, dangerous slab of Cape Fear, add a humid chunk of In the Heat of the Night and a racially motivated miscarriage of justice…
Trying to revive the Western may be a fool’s errand. As revisionist historians will be happy to tell you, Manifest Destiny is as dead as John Wayne, and any hombre crazy enough to say otherwise will get the bellyful of hot lead he deserves. The real problem is that while…
That major-league enigma lying ninety miles off the Florida coast doesn’t often come into clear focus–not for North Americans. Aside from our occasional whiffs of its embargoed cigars and its stubborn, last-ditch socialism, Cuba remains terra incognita almost four decades after Fidel Castro and his band of revolutionaries shook the…
The pioneer trail blazed by Thelma & Louise several winters back is developing into a superhighway. Boys on the Side is Hollywood’s latest plunge into female bonding, and it confronts every meaningful women’s issue you can think of with such single-minded fervor that you start to wonder if the whole…
As soon as Cochran and Shapiro get done with this thing in L.A., they could get a call from Catherine de Medicis. Patrice Chereau’s noisy costume drama, Queen Margot, casts Catherine as the heavy in the bloody wars between Catholics and emergent Protestants in sixteenth-century France and in the palace…
There are worse places to be exiled than Paris, but Roman Polanski longs for sunny, featureless Los Angeles. It is, of course, a place haunted by the ghosts of Sharon Tate and the couple’s unborn child. But 25 years later, it is still the Emerald City. There, he remembers, deals…
Roman Polanski’s obsession with obsession itself may be the reason he’s stayed away from overtly political filmmaking: When you’re rooting around in the dungeon of the individual soul, there isn’t much time to talk about oppressive regimes. Seen in that light, Death and the Maiden is something of a departure…
There are few pleasures greater in moviedom than watching Albert Finney disappear into a character. In Suri Krishnamma’s A Man of No Importance, he does it again with such apparent ease that we forget his rollicking Tom Jones, the boozy diplomat of Under the Volcano, even the devastated classics professor…
We need only glance at the supermarket tabloids to find the current follies of the British monarchy. But long before the Prince of Wales wished he were a tampon and Lady Di got those riding lessons, there was George III, the fellow who dispatched the Redcoats to the colonies, wound…
Warner Brothers has been making tough, compelling prison melodramas on and off since 1932. This is hardly the golden age of identifiable studio style, of course, but you can bet your last nickel that the stingy coots who once ran the family business like a work farm would approve of…
The record book tells us that Ty Cobb was one of the greatest players in baseball history, and he was. His .367 lifetime batting average will never be approached. His record of 4,191 hits was finally broken by Pete Rose in 1985, but he still holds the mark for runs…
As usual, filmmaker Zhang Yimou is in hot water with the Chinese authorities–the kind of people who think freedom of expression means picking your own appetizer off the lunch menu. Zhang’s latest film, To Live, is a family epic that just happens to trace the agonies and ironies of the…
Believe it or not, Paul Newman will be seventy this year. That serves to remind us how long it’s been since the crass young cowboy called Hud and the Christlike rebel Cool Hand Luke passed into the realm of movie legend. It also tells us that the heroes of Newman’s…
The eagerness and all-out urgency driving John Singleton’s movies often overwhelm his common sense, but no one can fault the young filmmaker for lack of feeling or purpose. In Boyz N the Hood, Singleton threw himself into the streets of Los Angeles with both philosophical barrels blazing, and by the…
