Most disaster movies would be a lot better with more disaster and less “human drama.” In Deep Impact, the impending obliteration of much of Earth by a pair of comets is merely the sideshow. The main event is all that goopy human-interest stuff–the daughter who reunites with her estranged father,…
It’s the tail end of the 1996 California primary election, and incumbent Democratic senator Jay Bulworth (Warren Beatty) is having a nervous breakdown. Sleepless for days, famished, he channel-surfs aimlessly in the darkness of his office, where in a rare moment of lucidity he has an inspiration: He arranges to…
Not since the death of Diana has there been a pop phenomenon as cataclysmic as the demise of Seinfeld. The surrounding hoopla has reached such proportions that it has turned the series’ saturnine co-creator–balding, bespectacled Larry David–into a cult celebrity. The press has presented David as a mysterious demigod who…
Chinese Box arrives with one of the weirdest hybrid pedigrees in living memory. The writing credits include–in addition to the film’s director Wayne Wang–Jean-Claude Carriere, who worked on most of the best films of Luis Bunuel’s late period (Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Phantom of Liberty, Belle de Jour); classy…
One of the few seemingly spontaneous bursts of energy at the recent Oscars ceremony was provided by motor-mouthing Dutch director Mike van Diem, who seemed genuinely surprised to have won the award for best foreign film for his debut feature, Character. If the commercial popularity and Oscar sweep for Titanic…
Moviemakers have been making themselves miserable wrestling with Les Miserables for almost ninety years. The very first American feature film was a 1909 silent adaptation of Victor Hugo’s dark masterpiece, and it’s been reprised on the screen at least half a dozen times since then. Most memorable? The 1935 version,…
The focus of documentarian Barbara Kopple’s Wild Man Blues is Woody Allen the clarinet player. Not Woody Allen the comedian and filmmaker, not the cradle-robber, not even Woody the world-class worrywart. Kopple’s subject, plain and simple, is the Woody Allen who can knock out a passable version of “Down by…
From its very first frame, Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy whooshes us inside the rollicking, deranged world of twelve-year-old Francie Brady (Eamonn Owens). Francie is a redheaded roustabout who lives with his alcoholic “Da” (Stephen Rea) and screw-loose mother (Aisling O’Sullivan) in a small town in northern Ireland in the…
The single joke that has to power The Big Hit from start to finish is that the nice, polite suburban boy who wants everybody to like him and who meekly takes guff from the nerdy clerk at the video store is also a cold-blooded hitman who has whacked a hundred…
It was just a matter of time until hoops junkie and courtside loudmouth Spike Lee got around to making a basketball picture. It’s called He Got Game, and it means to be, in part, Lee’s antidote to his bluntly stated claim that “most sports movies suck.” It takes a talent…
Give all the folks who finally got The Object of My Affection to the multiplex credit for perseverance. In the course of its decade-long journey from page to screen, this much-troubled tale about the unrequited love affair of a heterosexual social worker and a gay first-grade teacher has gone through…
In writer-director James Toback’s quicksilver sex comedy Two Girls and a Guy, Robert Downey Jr. plays Blake Allen, a struggling New York actor who lives in a spacious loft in SoHo he probably can’t afford. He’s a pampered prince who has worked out for himself a cozy romantic subterfuge: He…
Peter Howitt’s Sliding Doors is a romantic fantasy blessed with such intelligence, charm and lethal wit that most viewers probably won’t notice that its hip and plucky heroine, an embattled London publicist named Helen, is played by an American actress affecting a clipped British accent. What they will notice is…
Moviegoers who’ve grown immune to Christopher Walken’s dark charms won’t be breaking the doors down to buy a ticket for Suicide Kings. Its centerpiece is an all-out, full-throttle dose of the Walken weirdness as he portrays a semi-retired New York mafioso who’s kidnapped by a quartet of privileged but street-stupid…
When it comes to gamesmanship and the testosterone wars, no writer in America is more obsessed than David Mamet. Whether his combatants are duking it out in a seedy Chicago real estate office (Glengarry Glen Ross) or fighting for survival in the Arctic wastes (The Edge), the story remains the…
If nothing else, the current edition of Michael Moore’s continuing self-love fest does have a great subject: the desperation hidden inside a “thriving” U.S. economy. While politicians and financial wizards point to unemployment on the wane and profits on the rise, Moore notes that the largest employer in the country…
It has been thirty years since compulsive fussbudget Felix Unger began clearing away the moldy bread crusts, stale cigar butts and melted candy bars from the New York apartment of dedicated slob Oscar Madison, thirty years since Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau joined a battle of wills and a farce…
If American movie moguls really thought like Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, they’d probably spend more time blowing up Federal Reserve banks than calculating first-weekend grosses. As it is, instead of buying inflammable fertilizer and fuel oil, the moguls are selling it–in the form of satires about presidential misconduct and…
You are likely to take to The Real Blonde, a bittersweet farce about romantic yearning and delusional ambition in Manhattan, in direct proportion to your tolerance for self-absorbed 25-year-olds and the value you put on the advertising and theatrical trades. If, for instance, you can stomach the waiter who believes…
Lovers of American movies used to joke that foreign films wouldn’t look so good if you saw them without subtitles. John Sayles’s latest movie, Men With Guns, plays better than his other films because it has subtitles: Bald dialogue always sounds better in Spanish and Indian dialects. Set in an…
The great charm of Richard Linklater’s The Newton Boys derives from its quartet of matinee idols–Matthew McConaughey, Skeet Ulrich, Ethan Hawke and Vincent D’Onofrio–and its unbridled affection for the high-spirited gang of Texas country boys they portray, adventurers who rob banks with such sunny enthusiasm and impeccable yes-ma’am manners that…
When Denver’s own Donna Dewey won an Academy Award last week for her short documentary A Story of Healing, moviegoers here were reminded that not every example of the art cinematic springs full-grown from the city of Los Angeles. The notion arose again on Sunday night, when the Creative Film…
