The sweet-tempered half-wit Tom Hanks portrays in Forrest Gump has dozens of antecedents in literature and films, so it’s a little tough to keep him in focus. For a start, imagine the eternal optimist Candide combined with Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin and Dustin Hoffman’s savant from Rain Man. Add a dash…
The Shadow is a shadow of the Thirties radio fantasy that inspired it, but not for the usual reasons. As early TV shows demonstrated, you can impose visual images on radio melodrama and get away with it. Especially when most of the original audience will never see the thing. What…
In its vain and glamorous heyday, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studiously avoided sending “messages” to the 90 million Americans who went to the movies each week. Instead, the biggest and richest of the Hollywood studios produced sophisticated escapism, polished to a gleam by the slickest directors and craftspeople and inhabited, as the company…
Now that Westerns are back, you can get a fresh, vivid look at the Wyatt Earp/Doc Holliday legend by renting Tombstone at the video store. Released in theaters six months ago, George P. Cosmatos’s swift, concise hayburner features the able Kurt Russell as vengeful lawman Earp and edgy Val Kilmer…
Nobody handed Jack Nicholson anything. He earned his place early on as one of Hollywood’s big dogs, and twenty-five years later, he’s not afraid to bare his fangs. For instance: A lesser force might not have gone anywhere near Wolf, recalling those campy werewolf flicks in which tormented Henry Hull…
You’ll find plenty of bombs on every summer’s movie schedule. But this year Hollywood is setting them off on purpose. A little later in the silly season, terrorist Tommy Lee Jones will torment Boston cop Jeff Bridges with his penchant for explosives in Blown Away. For now we must content…
Clearly Krzysztof Kieslowski has plenty to say. Maybe he’s even got the faintest touch of serial killer in him. In any case, the extraordinary Polish director now makes his movies in bunches. The Decalogue was a relatively obscure series of ten films exploring each of the Commandments, and his “Three…
In recent years, visiting moviemakers have recast Ireland as a kind of cultural theme park packed with nostalgic folk wisdom exhibits, ongoing political tragedy rides and postcard views of verdant countryside. In this fantasyland, picturesque locals loose torrents of reheated Yeats in lilting brogues. At night everyone settles in at…
Penny Marshall probably won’t win the Nobel Prize anytime soon, but the TV-star-turned-director has a minor gift for detective work. After discovering the little boy inside the man (Big) and the ballplayer within the woman (A League of Their Own), Marshall has now unearthed the deep thinker in the dumb…
Has Bernardo Bertolucci flipped out? The man who once explored the frontiers of carnal obsession (in Last Tango in Paris) and the fervid intrigues of Italian politics (The Conformist, 1900) began gazing eastward last decade, coming up with a gauzy Chinese head trip called The Last Emperor. That’s the one:…
Amid the clatter of summer blockbusters, Red Rock West is the kind of terrific sleeper that could get lost. That would be a shame. Here is a taut little thriller that depends on such classic virtues as the well-timed double-cross, clever plotting and vivid low-life characters, rather than on high-octane…
This is what things have come to. Hollywood has spent $60 million on a Western movie derived from an old TV show that borrowed heavily from earlier Westerns, which were in turn based on dime novels that glamorized beyond recognition what actually happened on the American frontier. Naturally, the star…
Like his earlier films, Pedro Almodovar’s Kika is the kind of outdated bedroom farce that could only come from post-Fascist Spain, where artistic freedom is still a novelty. As in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and High Heels, this tale of a garrulous Madrid makeup artist’s sexual misadventures flaunts…
Can a quarter-century really have passed since Ratso Rizzo first sneered “I’m walkin’ heaahh!” and Joe Buck grinned at himself in the mirror, straightening the Stetson on that golden Texas rube’s head? Midnight Cowboy returns to the big screen this Friday for a one-week run at the Mayan, and its…
Yuppies hit the bottle, too. That’s the lesson of When a Man Loves a Woman, in which pretty Meg Ryan falls through a glass shower door, sweats out detox and fights to reclaim alienated husband Andy Garcia–all without messing up her hair or smudging her makeup. This is another gooey…
In Spike Lee’s sunny re-creation of Bedford-Stuyvesant circa 1974, laughing kids jump rope and play stoopball on spotless sidewalks. There’s always a parking place for the family car in front of the tidy brownstone. The neighbors may beef at each other about a little misplaced trash, but there’s not a…
Ray Liotta does not bullshit, and he has zero tolerance for those who do. As a result, if you persist in asking him bullshit questions, you will be rattled. Not because of the 38-year-old’s spectacularly intense gaze (the dominant image of such diverse films as Something Wild and Dominick &…
It’s no surprise that Cyril Collard’s Savage Nights became an instant cult hit when it was released in France in October 1992. This blunt autobiographical portrait of youthful narcissism and recklessness in the age of sexual peril was the first European film to confront the AIDS epidemic head-on. Not only…
Glenn Gould, the eccentric Canadian pianist and celebrated hermit, would be a tough nut for any filmmaker to crack. As a child prodigy who could play Bach before he could read, Gould sat next to the radio, transfixed by Toscanini. But later he announced: “I just don’t like the sound…
Because of dazzling special effects and a funny, bloodcurdling villain called the Trickster (he looks like a Mohawk warrior freaked out on acid but talks like a Phi Beta Kappa), the witty techno-fantasy Brainscan could be the teen hit of the spring. But there’s something else here, too–a distinction between…
At first glimpse, Iain Softley’s Backbeat looks like a gritty trifle aimed at nostalgic Beatles buffs. It dusts off the old story of Stu Sutcliffe, John Lennon’s best friend in Liverpool, who played bass with the group from 1959 to 1961. A halfhearted musician, Sutcliffe found his head turned by…
John Waters may have grown up, but he hasn’t gone straight. In his days as an enfant terrible, the most notorious moviemaker in Baltimore served up raw sensation, black comedy and low camp to fringe audiences who prided themselves on all manner of deviance. Those raucous midnight screenings of Pink…
