Imagine, if you will, one of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s classic road movies that never leaves the terminal and you have pretty much described Life, the strikingly uneventful new comedy starring Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence. It’s their own Road to Nowhere. Life, which was directed by Ted Demme…
The love affair at the heart of Benoit Jacquot’s The School of Flesh has to be the longest shot on the board. Pairing a woman of the world with a boy of the streets, it is fueled by sexual obsession and casual cruelty, by the same huge contrasts in temperament…
Courage comes in an infinite variety of forms and faces, but who among us would be brave enough to go back and relive our high school years, face the horrors of homeroom and confront hallways so fraught with danger that the most treacherous battlefield would look as placid as a…
Has any major American director had quite so many career swings as Robert Altman? Maybe not, but if there’s one thing the last thirty years have made clear, it is that it’s never safe to count Altman out. The mid- and late-’90s have been particularly unfriendly to him. After his…
Steve Martin says he doesn’t want audiences to expect the same old Steve Martin whenever he stars in a comedy. But that means one thing when he’s referring to Roxanne and L.A. Story, two inspired flights of romantic farce (based on his own scripts), and another when he’s talking about…
Local admirers of Franco Piavoli’s Blue Planet, a poetic evocation of earthly harmony, will be heartened to learn that the Italian painter/filmmaker’s latest visual ballad, Voices Through Time (Voci Nel Tempo), opens an indefinite run Friday at the UA Flatirons Theater in Boulder. It was previously shown in Colorado at…
Stuffed full of fantasy comics, addicted to action and steeped in digital technology, the frenetic moviemakers Andy and Larry Wachowski have done what they must–create an eye-popping, morph-mad, quasi-mythical sci-fi flick that will thrill computer nerds as it kicks serious ass. The Matrix also presumes to (ahem!) think deeply–although this…
Jimmy Cagney brought the same electric physicality to gangsters that he did to song-and-dance men. He gave a bright-eyed mug like his character in Public Enemy extraordinary powers of attraction and repulsion. In The General, Brendan Gleeson enacts a real-life criminal chieftain–Dublin’s notorious Martin Cahill–with a belly-hanging-out buffoonery that is…
There’s an old adage that says by the age of forty, a man gets the face he deserves. If that’s true, then Clint Eastwood, the producer, director and star of the death-row thriller True Crime, must have committed a capital offense or two of his own. To call it “lived…
“I hope it’s better than The Truman Show,” said the woman in line behind me at the publicized “sneak preview” of EDtv. Afterward, a man in my row declared, “That was a lot better than The Truman Show.” Pretentious high-concept films like The Truman Show often garner accolades and let…
The last decade has been an extraordinary period for Iranian cinema. Restricted by minuscule budgets, filmmakers have been forced to fall back on exactly the qualities that Hollywood thinks it can afford to ignore: character insight, social analysis and unadorned storytelling. The success of Abbas Kiarostami, Iran’s best-known moviemaker, at…
At the movies, the fun-loving temptress has been liberating the buttoned-up clod ever since Katharine Hepburn’s leopard made off with Cary Grant’s dinosaur bone in Bringing Up Baby 61 years ago. Maybe even longer, if you count pioneer vamp Theda Bara’s effect on a long succession of speechless men. In…
The Corruptor should come as something of a relief to fans of Hong Kong superstar Chow Yun-Fat, who were mostly disappointed with his American screen debut, last year’s The Replacement Killers. Among the producers of that action thriller was John Woo, who in the Eighties and early Nineties directed five…
Immodesty becomes Guy Ritchie, the British writer-director who makes a jovial debut on a Jovian scale in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. In this wayward gangster comedy set in London’s East End, Ritchie cooks up a gleefully improbable tale out of mismatched ingredients: a rigged card game, a hydroponics…
The hot splendors of Carlos Saura’s Tango are supported by a scrap of plot, and that’s all it needs. The soul-searching Spanish director of Peppermint Frappe and Taxi, who previously showed us his passion for dance with 1995’s Flamenco, leaps into tangomania like a man falling hopelessly in love–with no…
The Deep End of the Ocean starts out as a maternal horror movie and ends up as a family therapy session. Michelle Pfeiffer plays the photographer wife of a restaurateur (Treat Williams) and mother of two sons and an infant daughter. While checking into a jammed hotel for her fifteenth…
When hit men wore hats and Cadillacs had running boards, the average Mafia don could knock off the Tattaglia brothers in mid-afternoon and sit down to a nice plate of chicken cacciatore that evening, content that he’d seen to the family business and blazed a path for his first-born son’s…
In James Moll’s documentary The Last Days, the third film the young producer/director has created for Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, five Hungarian Jews who lived through the horrors of the Nazi death camps and eventually immigrated to the United States describe their experiences before, during…
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…
In the three decades that director Ken Loach has been a steadfast champion of the British working class, his films have lost none of their sting. Whether examining a brutal Belfast police incident in Hidden Agenda (1990) or the plight of an unemployed man struggling to buy his daughter a…
What’s entertaining about October Sky is the unlikely but true spectacle of backwater West Virginia teens teaching themselves rocket science in the Eisenhower Fifties. They progress from a glorified cherry bomb to sophisticated missiles through trial and error and error. Their inner rocket fuel is the desire to avoid getting…
Stalking the crucial puberty-to-prom-night demographic can be a hazardous business, leading studio bankers and unwary moviemakers into some gruesomely familiar dead ends. That’s just what’s happened in the case of a sleep-inducing teen melodrama called Jawbreaker. Billed as the inevitable result of all the suburban slasher flicks and high-school comedies…
