In the great scheme of evil–where the schemers always out-think the victims–the TV quiz-show scandals of the 1950s are minor infractions. In view of later events like Watergate, Iran-Contra or the O.J. Simpson case, we Americans can hardly be expected to get all worked up about a couple of TV…
Whenever moviegoers do time in prison–or the nuthouse–they almost always run across that one transcendent inmate who sets the others free with his soaring spirit. He may be called Cool Hand Luke or Randall Patrick McMurphy or Papillon, but he’s always the soul of liberty–and the bane of authority. He…
If you want to move up in the superhero pecking order, as Belgian hulk Jean-Claude Van Damme does, you’d better outslug Sly and outshoot Schwarzenegger. You must snap more necks than Steven Seagal, and just in case you hear Chuck Norris closing fast, it’s wise to keep your killer kicks…
Bruce Beresford, the Australian-born filmmaker who specializes in cultural collisions, has been very quiet since Driving Miss Daisy dominated Oscar night a couple of years back. Those who saw Rich in Love, the only movie he’s made since then, are in pretty select company. More likely you remember this director…
Transplant the classic Western Shane to a ranch in modern-day Argentina. Spice it up with local politics. Add horses. And sheep. And freight trains. There. You now have a pretty fair take on Adolfo Aristarain’s A Place in the World, an engaging coming-of-age story wherein the filmmaker also manages to…
Before last week’s Denver preview screening of A Simple Twist of Fate, theater employees handed out little packets of Kleenex to the audience. Cute studio promotion, no? Prepare yourself, the gesture said, for a real tearjerker, a rare opportunity to bawl your eyes out in the dark and go home…
It seems a bit early for hotshot director Quentin Tarantino to beget a school of imitators, but then, instant genius is a cheap commodity in the slam-bang world of pop culture. Roger Avary is Tarantino’s pal from his days as a video-store clerk in California, as well as his writing…
Raining Stones, a bittersweet comedy by Great Britain’s Ken Loach, is another bow to the tenacity of working-class people trying to keep their heads above water in hard times. Working in the same sort of grimy, northern city (Manchester, this time) where an earlier generation of British “kitchen sink” directors…
Those who have followed Oliver Stone’s bombastic career know that the reckless loudmouth in him usually gets the best of the deep thinker. Every intriguing conspiracy theory in JFK seemed to be inundated by a flood of bilge. Every pointed comment about the greed of the Eighties in Wall Street…
Bruce Willis, psychoanalyst. That’s the first hurdle audiences must clear at Color of Night, and it’s not easy. Imagine Sylvester Stallone in the role of, say, a golden-hearted half-wit from Alabama who stumbles into the lives of presidents and pop stars. Envision John Wayne as Billy the Kid. Now think…
When a moviemaker wants to dabble in American social issues–but avoid confronting them head-on–the common refuge is the 1950s. That decade, growing gauzier and less distinct by the moment, has been reduced to a neat set of cliches suitable to the purposes of almost any storyteller burning to make a…
When we first see old Chu, the bewildered father at the center of Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman, he’s doing what he knows best–steaming fresh fish in his sun-dappled garden, carefully roasting a just-plucked chicken, carving vegetables into exquisite rose-petal shapes. Lee observes these rituals in such concentrated, silent…
It has taken a couple of weeks to catch up with Andrew Bergman’s new comedy, but the rewards are still there. It Could Happen to You, a New York fairy tale about a sweet-tempered cop and a good-as-gold waitress who split a $4 million lottery jackpot, lightens up a bit…
If you liked Whit Stillman’s earlier comedy Metropolitan, in which a group of lamebrained debutantes and their sniffy dates sit around a Park Avenue living room drinking their parents’ whiskey and pondering the meaning of life, you’ll probably like Barcelona. The blue-blooded Stillman remains the only moviemaker in America who…
It’s not exactly news that Mom and Dad and all the things they stand for are completely lame. They were lame in the 1920s, when nice Presbyterian girls from Omaha turned to bathtub gin and the sin of the Charleston. They were lame in the 1950s, when James Dean took…
Jim Carrey, the double-jointed, rubber-faced dervish of In Living Color and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, seems like the last guy in the world who needs his act powered up by the special-effects department. But that’s what happens in The Mask. Industrial Light & Magic, the people who put the giddy-up…
Clear and Present Danger is only a movie. In real life, pundits of all political stripes are complaining that the Central Intelligence Agency has grown clumsy and mendacious, that it couldn’t find double-agent Aldrich Ames under its very nose, that it’s lazy and self-serving. But don’t tell that to Tom…
While most of the nation’s lawyers are defending O.J. Simpson, a precious dozen or so have slipped away to assist the Clintons in their various tribulations. Apparently all the others drive cabs or run around in the pages of John Grisham’s potboilers saying pithy things. At least there’s finally a…
The figure of the windburned, rawboned, self-sufficient loner has always stood at the heart of the frontier myth. If anything, he’s still getting taller. Witness Colorado Cowboy: The Bruce Ford Story. Arthur Elgort’s spare, straightforward documentary about the five-time world rodeo champion is cause for local pride–Ford operates a ranch…
Shopping for a superhero this summer? Give poor Arnold Schwarzenegger another chance. That spell of self-doubt that plagued him last year, exemplified by a bomb called The Last Action Hero, now appears to be over, and Arnold is up to his old tricks in True Lies. Most of them, anyway…
American moviemakers with their eye on the hot cultural-diversity issue or the quandaries of the melting pot would do well to see Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach. In a splendid balancing act, this able young director brings keen social observation and pungent, distinctly feminine humor to the everyday traumas…
Even good actors are entitled to load a dud once in a while–especially in July. Blown Away is the summer’s second action picture pitting a mad bomber against a cop, but the fireworks this time around are limited to the explosive charges that wacko Irish terrorist Tommy Lee Jones plants…
