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…
Susan Sarandon’s advisors shook their heads. Once you play a mother, they said, you’re stuck with mothers. You can’t go back. You can never outwit Tommy Lee Jones in court again. You can’t romance Kevin Costner in the bush leagues. You can’t rob convenience stores with Geena Davis. “That’s what…
Now that Cap’n Newt is steering the ship of state, how long will it take First Mate Helms to toss Pulp Fiction overboard and throw The Simpsons in the brig? While we wait for a little neo-Puritan backlash, here’s a safe, literate and, in places, self-righteous movie about the endurance…
Ludwig van Beethoven’s sundry biographers, wherever they’re sitting, may feel like throwing their hands over their eyes upon being subjected to the crass speculations in Bernard Rose’s Immortal Beloved. But they won’t cover their ears. Musical fidelity has always been more vital to composer biopics than historical accuracy, and Britisher…
How’s this for high concept? Hip, dreamy black dude from the Pittsburgh ‘hood evades loan sharks by passing himself off as square suburban businessman’s long-lost childhood buddy. Despite cultural clashes and comic missteps at the country club, impostor and entire dysfunctional family of white folks wind up friends. Bingo. Ring…
BEST TEN OF 1994 1. Pulp Fiction. Boy wonder Tarantino scores again with wickedly clever crime triptych. Travolta comeback in full swing. 2. Blue, White and Red. Polish master Kieslowski hits the trifecta, then announces retirement. 3. Cobb. Denver must wait for Tommy Lee JonesÕs brilliant portrait of savage, embittered…
The last time I checked, Albert Einstein was better known as the most brilliant theoretical physicist in human history than as a cute old prankster with white hair whose corduroys were always slipping over his butt. But then, I could be wrong. My SAT scores were lukewarm, I went to…
Out there in the forest primeval of moviedom, the “wild child” has long lurked, rustling around in search of edible tree bark and good box office. First Tarzan swung through the underbrush. Then Francois Truffaut discovered uncivilized, unspoiled Homo sapiens in 1969’s L’Enfant Sauvage. Werner Herzog rounded him up again…
In the Age of Jackie Collins, Anton Chekhov is not the first name that springs to mind when the prof starts talking lit. The Schwarzenegger crowd hasn’t read Chekhov in years, and no one pays 65 bucks a ticket anymore to see his stuff on Broadway. Thank goodness, then, for…
For seventy years Dorothy Parker’s adherents have been calling her “the first modern American woman” or “the wittiest writer of her time” or something equally absolute. Valued for her sardonic commentaries on failed love, suicide, heavy drinking and the bad plays she was forced to review, she is held up…
“Don’t look at me in that tone of voice.” Yes, Dorothy Parker said that, too. She also said, “Let’s go wild–there’s plenty of time to do nothing once you’re dead.” And she summed up a Katharine Hepburn performance with this famous jape: “The whole range of emotion, from A to…
Before the cameras even started rolling on Ready to Wear (formerly Pret-a-Porter), Robert Altman’s mordant sendup of the fashion industry, the filmmaker had offended delicate sensibilities from New York to Paris and beyond. John Fairchild, editorial director of Women’s Wear Daily, has led a massive preemptive strike against Altman in…
The title says it all. The makers of Dumb and Dumber won’t win a genius grant anytime soon, but as long as you have a taste for the flipped-out antics of Jim Carrey and don’t mind juvenile bathroom humor, it ain’t a bad way to kill two hours. Especially if…
For some reason, beautiful wackos just can’t keep their hands off Michael Douglas. Glenn Close made him pay dearly for infidelity in Fatal Attraction, then scheming Sharon Stone did that police-station number on him in Basic Instinct. Now it’s Demi Moore’s turn at bat, and Kirk Douglas’s baby boy winds…
