To hear David Mamet tell it, his two-character play Oleanna is such a lightning rod that, all over the country, couples who come to it wind up shouting at each other in the lobby and often leave separately. Judging from the public-radio interview I heard recently, Mamet is quite taken…
The new-wave ghouls who inhabit Anne Rice’s vampire novels don’t back off from the traditional threats. Wave a crucifix in the face of one of these doomed, androgynous wanderers and he’ll coldly laugh it off. Drive a stake into his heart and he’ll come right back at you, bloody in…
A fine paradox has risen in the Mother Country: Some of the most expressive British films now portray characters who are notably inexpressive, buttoned up and repressed. Last year, Anthony Hopkins’s stoic butler in The Remains of the Day, paralyzed by his devotion to Stiff Upper Lip, won hearts and…
That rumble you hear down in the laboratory is mad Dr. Branagh putting a charge into the tragic creature De Niro. Whether we need it or not, there’s a new Frankenstein afoot, and it’s a freak of nature. Kenneth Branagh, the British boy wonder who’s given us a pair of…
Set a pack of Yankee filmmakers down amid the weeping willows and sultry heat of rural Mississippi and there’s no telling what they’ll come up with. In the case of The War, it’s a movie about poverty. And the relentless tug of family love. And coming of age. And post-traumatic…
Unrepentant beef eaters, contented non-joggers and connoisseurs of the dry martini will probably love it. So will earthly folk who don’t give a hoot about the alignment of the planets or the present whereabouts of Werner Erhard. In fact, virtually anyone who thinks that the humorless orthodoxies and freshly minted…
Every time you start hoping Dr. Kevorkian will pay a house call on Woody Allen, the filmmaker miraculously returns to form and gets everybody laughing again. Witness Bullets Over Broadway, the third movie Allen has completed since The Troubles started. It’s a Runyonesque farce combining Roaring Twenties theater folk, potato-nosed…
Radioland Murders is the kind of dippy, overheated show-biz fantasy that besmirches the good name of slapstick. It doesn’t do much for the long-cherished romance of radio, either. The operative cliche here–and it operates overtime–is the oldest one of all: The show must go on. The time is 1939. The…
The first (and maybe the last) thing anyone will want to know about The Specialist is that an hour and a half passes before Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone pretend to copulate in the shower. Until then, what they do is model expensive sunglasses down in Miami and talk on…
Bad scholarship, new-age fantasy and publishers’ avarice have collided to produce the current vogue for Nostradamus, the sixteenth-century French physician and astrologer who is said to have predicted everything from Nazi Germany to AIDS to the JFK assassination. What he didn’t predict is that a movie this awful would one…
The career (if you can call it that) of Edward G. Wood Jr. has become the stuff of cult legend because the man is widely acknowledged as the worst movie director of all time. In his 1950s heyday, such as it was, even Hollywood’s lowest shlockmeisters wouldn’t hire him. If…
For my money, the savage and savagely funny crime films of Quentin Tarantino are a welcome antidote not only to those witless action heroes who give off baby talk as they tear up the joint, but also to Hollywood’s current wave of sweetness, its creeping Gumpmania. Let the self-appointed morals…
This autumn, baseball fans are getting too little World Series and too much Ken Burns. In all likelihood, the last thing the strike-stricken multitudes need right now is another gooey baseball movie that fields the usual lineup of sentimental caricatures. But that’s what The Scout is. Apparently, Hollywood hasn’t figured…
Until now, no one has mistaken the fine-featured, sublimely gifted actress Meryl Streep for a regular on American Gladiators. But in The River Wild, there’s not only muscle in Streep’s performance, there’s plenty of it on her frame, too. In this rip-roaring adventure, the beefed-up star can shoot a set…
Boaz Yakin’s Fresh has its heart in the right place, but it takes a bewildering wrong turn. First, the acceptable news: Yakin again shows us the dangers and sorrows facing a good kid on the streets of the ghetto. Twelve-year-old Fresh (Sean Nelson) lives with his aunt and eleven cousins…
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…
