Arts & Culture

JFK used the White House as his brothel. In the end, Nixon reduced it to a one-man loony bin. And the current occupant, by all accounts, has converted the place into the priciest bed-and-breakfast on the planet. How can Hollywood fantasists hope to compete with the extremities of actual presidential…

Nobody is going to seriously accuse writer-director Alexander Payne of being chicken. For his first feature, the hilarious Citizen Ruth, not only has he chosen the number-one issue a filmmaker is likely to get killed over–abortion and a woman’s right to make a personal decision on the subject–but he’s made…

Return we must with brash Kevin Smith to the place that inspires him: suburban New Jersey. Chasing Amy is Smith’s third feature in as many years, and neither his use of color film stock nor–surprise!–his breakout from shooting in one room much distinguishes his latest outing from its predecessors, the…

Ever since the semi-mystical Swedish writer Selma Lagerlsf won the 1909 Nobel Prize for Literature, a rumor’s been going around that the fix was in. The Swedish Academy, detractors say, had favored a native daughter who made her only real contribution to world culture in 1924–when she inadvertently launched Greta…

Have you heard? In the 1950s, much of America–particularly the typical small town in the Midwest–was sexually repressed and stupidly class-conscious. Many marriages were long-suffering disasters, and goods were often more important than feelings. But the emergence of Elvis, college enrollment for women and the simmering rebellion of youth signaled…

There are way too many movies about hit men, but that shouldn’t dissuade you from seeing Grosse Pointe Blank. It’s not quite like any other movie–let alone one about a hit man. That may be because it’s a hit-man movie crossed with a high-school-reunion comedy, and the two genres mesh…

Over the past five years, action star Jean-Claude Van Damme has become one of America’s leading importers of foreign talent. In 1993 he hired Hong Kong action ace John Woo to direct Hard Target. For last year’s Maximum Risk, he brought over Ringo Lam. And now he has used a…

Could the release of a three-and-a-half-hour director’s cut of the 1982 nautical spectacular Das Boot reflect some mass Oedipal desire to get closer to Mother Earth’s core as the millennium approaches? Perhaps. But there’s nothing vaguely feminine about Das Boot, the kind of man’s-man World War II adventure in which…

On its surface, The Daytrippers probably seems like your generic ’90s American independent let’s-get-our-friends-together-and-make-a-movie movie. Shot in Long Island and Manhattan in sixteen days for about a half-million dollars, with a cast including the inevitable Parker Posey and the almost equally inevitable Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott–where was Eric Stoltz?–it…

When Val Kilmer walked away from the Batman franchise, it was only a matter of time before he offered up his own competing brand. The Saint isn’t just his answer to Batman–it’s a full-length commercial for all the Saint movies to come. There’s a breezy effrontery in the ploy; Kilmer…