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M.V. Moorhead

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In and Out

Gallic wackiness is the thing in The Closet, Francis Veber's gay farce.

By M.V. Moorhead
Jul 12, 2001

There's plenty of French star power in The Closet (Le Placard), a comedy written and directed by the prolific director Francis Veber. The movie stars Daniel Auteuil, Gérard Depardieu and Thierry Lhermitte, which is roughly equivalent to a U.S. movie featuring Robin Williams, Nick Nolte and Tom Hanks, directed by...well,...
Driven Away

Want a(nother) romanticized speed racer? Go see The Fast and the Furious

By M.V. Moorhead
Jun 21, 2001

If internal combustion ever becomes obsolete -- that is, if the auto industry ever allows internal combustion to become obsolete -- whatever will movies do for heart-stopping drama? Hoofbeats are dramatic, and the chug of a steam engine is suspenseful, but the roar of a gasoline-powered vehicle stirs the blood...
Love and Death in a Month

Keanu manages to make Sweet November watchable.

By M.V. Moorhead
Feb 15, 2001

Sara is quirky and free-spirited. That, at least, is the premise of the hilariously wretched new weeper Sweet November, of which Sara, embodied by the breathtaking Charlize Theron, is the heroine. But if you're usually smart enough to run in terror at the threat of a movie character who's quirky...
Mexican Jumping Scenes

The bucks stop here for the mythic cowboy life.

By M.V. Moorhead
Dec 28, 2000

It's where Walter Huston found paradise at the end of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, where the murdering lovers Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw rode into the sunset at the end of The Getaway, and where Thelma and Louise were headed when they ended up at the Grand Canyon...
For the Love of Mike

Six actors make beautiful music together in Duets.

By M.V. Moorhead
Sep 14, 2000

There's a trio of duets in Duets. The film is set in the world of karaoke singing, but the title really refers to three sets of paired-off actors performing pas de deux to the tune of John Byrum's Golden-Age-of-Television-ish dialogue. Only one of the three duos shakes fully to life,...
Mutha's Day

De-sexed Shaft update still delivers action, Jackson.

By M.V. Moorhead
Jun 15, 2000

The title of the 1971 Gordon Parks detective movie Shaft worked as a double entendre; when it presented Richard Roundtree's "black private dick," John Shaft, as a superstud at whom women of every race threw themselves, it wasn't hard to believe. The joke changes when the name is given to...
Deranged in the Mesozoic

The Disney formula goes disturbingly awry in the off-putting Dinosaur.

By M.V. Moorhead
May 18, 2000

Dinosaurs used to be cool. In 1969, if you had asked me what was the best movie ever made, my answer would likely have been The Valley of Gwangi, in which a group of cowboys in the Mexican desert find a gully full of leftover dinosaurs animated by Ray Harryhausen...
Sarong Number

Denzel Washington huffs and bluffs his way through The Hurricane.

By M.V. Moorhead
Jan 6, 2000

You hope for Dorothy Lamour, reclining against a palm tree in her sarong, when you hear the title The Hurricane. Instead, you get well over two hours of Denzel Washington huddled in a cell. In the poster art, Washington glowers, one bandaged fist cocked for a right to our jaw...
Marriage Most Foul

With an uninspired script and all-too-familiar plot, you'll feel like you already know The Story of Us.

By M.V. Moorhead
Oct 14, 1999

According to The Story of Us, men and women have different responses to life, love and sex, and this can sometimes result in conflicts and tension in a marriage. And you thought American Beauty was daring. The "us" of the title are Ben (Bruce Willis) and Katie (Michelle Pfeiffer). He's...
Save the Last Trance for Me

The Stir of Echos has a familiar ring.

By M.V. Moorhead
Sep 9, 1999

Whether it's bad or good commercial luck that the thriller Stir of Echoes follows so closely on the heels of The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan's wildly successful ghost-story sleeper, it's bad critical luck. This film has some startling parallels with The Sixth Sense: Both concern psychic communication with the...
The Squeaky Wheel

By M.V. Moorhead
Aug 5, 1999

First published under the title The Iron Man in Great Britain in 1968, The Iron Giant is a minor classic of twentieth-century children's literature. The slim volume by the English poet laureate Ted Hughes is a pacifist parable in the guise of a sci-fi hero fantasy. Hughes spun his yarn...
Into the Woods

By M.V. Moorhead
Jul 15, 1999

The Blair Witch Project, the bone-chilling indie by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, is easily the scariest horror picture of the Nineties--a movie that can take its place among the most potent and inexorable of modern shockers, like Night of the Living Dead or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Three...
A Vine Time

By M.V. Moorhead
Jun 17, 1999

Disney departed from its usual practice of basing big, animated features on classic literature or myth when it made what has proved to be one of the studio's most popular films ever, The Lion King. Yet just barely beneath its surface, that film had a streak of xenophobia carried almost...
Some Enchanted Evening

By M.V. Moorhead
May 13, 1999

A Midsummer Night's Dream came early in Shakespeare's career. He had written it by at least 1598, in roughly the same period as another lyric-romantic masterpiece, Romeo and Juliet. Despite Samuel Pepys's famous dismissal of Dream as "the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life," it...
All About Eve

By M.V. Moorhead
Feb 25, 1999

Under the opening titles of 200 Cigarettes, we hear Bow Wow Wow's near-peerless bubblegum anthem "I Want Candy." The movie that follows seems designed to satisfy that craving: It's sweet, tart, brightly colored, insubstantial and utterly lacking in nutritional value. It's also fun to consume and harmless enough, as long...
Time to Punt

By M.V. Moorhead
Jan 14, 1999

Somewhere under the glossy imbecility of Varsity Blues lurks an idea that could make a great American movie: a coming-of-age story in a setting where no one else has come of age, a place where the hero must find his way to maturity without a mentor. The setting, in this...
As We Like It

By M.V. Moorhead
Dec 31, 1998

Geniuses often come across unimpressively in the movies. Amadeus presented Mozart as a giggling fop. Both Kirk Douglas and Tim Roth gave us Van Gogh as a pathetic head case. I.Q.'s Albert Einstein was a cupid-playing old duffer. Ken Russell's freaky depictions of Liszt and Mahler speak for themselves. When...
Meet Joe Young (Again)

By M.V. Moorhead
Dec 31, 1998

In 1933, producer Merian C. Cooper, director Ernest B. Schoedsack, and pioneering animator Willis O'Brien created one of this century's most indelible and powerful archetypes: King Kong. Then they did a peculiar thing: As if appalled at what they had wrought--but also delighted at the money it made them--they spent...
The Great Pretender

By M.V. Moorhead
Nov 12, 1998

In 1994's The Monster (Il Mostro), his most recent film to gain wide American release, the Italian writer/director/star Roberto Benigni put himself at the center of a mistaken-identity farce about a serial killer. In Life Is Beautiful (La Vita e Bella), Benigni plays a wacky, high-spirited man who convinces his...
Stake Tartare

By M.V. Moorhead
Oct 29, 1998

When Montoya, one of the fearless vampire killers in John Carpenter's Vampires, tells another character that nobody believes in the title creatures because nobody wants to, there's no mistaking the ancestry of the line. It comes down, through two generations of horror films, from the moment in the original Dracula...
Grim Fairy Tale

By M.V. Moorhead
Oct 15, 1998

The hero of The Mighty--the title character, in fact--is an eighth-grader known by the nickname Freak. His might isn't physical--he's a small, frail boy who suffers from a degenerative birth defect. His spine curves painfully, and he's able to walk only with crutches and leg braces. But he has a...
Simon Says to Feel Good

By M.V. Moorhead
Sep 10, 1998

The opening credits of Simon Birch assert that it was "suggested" by John Irving's 1989 novel A Prayer for Owen Meany. Actually, it's a thin but relatively faithful adaptation of the first few chapters of Irving's comic ramble through the nature of religious faith, predestination and heroism. Screenwriter Mark Steven...