The John Grisham industry has claimed another heavyweight. A few months back, Francis Ford Coppola delivered up John Grisham’s The Rainmaker, and now Robert Altman sails into view with The Gingerbread Man, based on an original Grisham screen story–although it’s basically a recycling of other Grisham recyclings. Who would have…
The American reissues of Jackie Chan films have met with declining box-office success since Chan burst onto the scene in 1996 with Rumble in the Bronx. With any luck, the latest Chan opus to be recut and redubbed for Americans, the year-old Mr. Nice Guy, should reverse the trend. No…
In the course of an extraordinary acting career, Gary Oldman has portrayed, among other outcasts, the drug-addled punk rocker Sid Vicious, the possible presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and the notorious bloodsucker Count Dracula. They’re all choirboys compared to the barbarous South London blokes Oldman gives us in Nil by…
Still have your doubts that Western civilization has been conquered by sixth-grade dropouts snorting meth? No longer. Hollywood has just now released the first film noir for teenagers–a boiling stew of greed, betrayal, murder and three-way sex in which the female characters have not yet graduated from high school and…
If ever there was an “op-ed” movie–a movie destined to be written about in an “elevated” realm beyond just the movie pages–it’s Primary Colors. Thanks to Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones, the Hollywood/Washington nexus has lifted this new Mike Nichols picture, based on the 1996 bestseller by Joe Klein, into…
Takeshi Kitano, the reigning Renaissance man of Japanese pop culture, is a scriptwriter, movie actor and director, as well as the star of seven TV shows. He produces six different columns for national magazines and, it says here, has written 55 books. In his spare time, he makes outrageous public…
We should be thankful, I suppose, for the headlong assault by assorted filmmakers upon the dark castle of Great Literature. For one thing, it reduces the need for college students to squander their hard-earned beer money on Cliffs Notes. It also reminds patrons in the sports bars that iambic pentameter…
While Kate Winslet was having her diaper changed and Keanu Reeves was sneaking a joint into the prom, an extraordinary thing happened. A cast of actors who have nineteen Academy Award nominations (and five Oscars) to their credit and one of the most accomplished directors in America were making a…
How do you make a sequel to a film whose plot simply will not yield a logical successor? You can bet your bottom dollar that somewhere in Hollywood right now–hopefully not in the office of James Cameron–someone connected with Titanic is working on that question right now. Some things are…
Richard Kwietniowski’s first feature, Love and Death on Long Island, won’t be every surfer babe’s idea of a good time. But if you’ve got a taste for mordant wit, sharp observation and a whiff of personal liberation, step up and grab a ticket for this quirky, wonderfully surreal tale about…
At first glance, Jonathan Darby’s Hush appears to have a couple of things going for it. There’s some high-wattage star power in the persons of Jessica Lange and Emma’s Gwyneth Paltrow. There’s a possibly lethal power struggle between a possessive mother and the pretty daughter-in-law who’s snatched her sonny boy…
The new film Dangerous Beauty presents a sixteenth-century Venice filled with statesmen who hop from bed to bed without fear of “bimbo eruptions.” That’s because the courtesans aren’t bimbos and they aren’t hidden: Everyone from the admiralty to the bishopric patronizes them. Having developed their minds along with their erotic…
It won’t be easy for Joel and Ethan Coen to top Fargo anytime soon, because it was the culmination and pinnacle of a personal style they had been refining for years. The small-time greed, hilariously bungled deceptions and startling violence they brought to their tale of kidnapping-gone-wrong in icy Minnesota…
The science-fiction works of the late, great Philip K. Dick haven’t been served particularly well on screen. The most recent adaptation, Screamers, was junk; Total Recall had its moments but was less ingenious by half than the short story it was based upon. Blade Runner, of course, was brilliant, but…
In his 1993 book Sarajevo: A War Journal, the Bosnian journalist Zlatko Dizdarevic reported on an eleven-year-old who was waiting in line for water when snipers killed his mother and father: “After the shooting, this boy started to fetch and pour water over the bodies of his dead parents. He…
The youngest member of the ubiquitous Wayans clan, 25-year-old Marlon, is emerging on the big screen as an eye- and soul-pleasing amalgam of Jim Carrey’s lunatic elasticity and Eddie Murphy’s faultless comic timing. We can probably expect great things of him. As evidenced by The Sixth Man, a lukewarm basketball…
One of the necessities of screwball comedy–an endangered, if not extinct, species–is that the practitioner be more sophisticated and aware than the batty socialites, pompous academics and blustering snobs he means to deflate. In the golden age of this fragile form, master satirists like Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges certainly…
The odd Spaniard may choose to transplant film noir to Madrid (see review above), and the French came up with the name in the first place. But it’s essentially a Hollywood invention that has stood the test of time and darkness. Witness Palmetto, a pretty satisfying example of the genre,…
He doesn’t need much. Give the renowned Spanish black-humorist Pedro Almodovar the ex-junkie daughter of an Italian diplomat, a bitter ex-con who served six years for a crime he didn’t commit, a beautiful former dancer, a good cop and a bad cop, and he’ll come up with the most intriguing…
With Zero Effect–an apt title if ever there was one–writer-director Jake Kasdan presumes to turn the hard-boiled detective movie on its head with Gen-X hipness. He winds up looking pretty empty-headed himself. Kasdan, the 22-year-old son of Big Chill/ Accidental Tourist director Lawrence Kasdan, would likely never have gotten his…
In these paradox-ridden times, producers on the hunt for cutting-edge fantasies look back: They visit their boyhood or girlhood rooms and ransack their old books and videos or peruse their studio’s property list for works that scored well in other media. In the mid-’90s, the English company Working Title made…
Despite the tides of government repression and suspected U.S. chicanery that have afflicted his country for the last 35 years, the Brazilian filmmaker Bruno Barreto claims he’s not much of a political animal. As if to underscore that, his only global success was 1978’s spirited erotic farce Dona Flor and…
