Okay. Drop a billionaire know-it-all, a cocky fashion photographer and a slavering Kodiak bear into the Alaskan wilderness and tell ’em to fight it out. The smart money would be on the bear (he knows the territory), but because the perpetrators of The Edge profess to be more interested in…
The Peacemaker is the first feature from DreamWorks, the studio headed by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. It stars George Clooney and Nicole Kidman, and it’s about terrorists who steal Russian nukes. As an intelligence officer with the U.S. Army’s Special Forces, Clooney gets to model his jutting…
The 1950s-era Los Angeles of L.A. Confidential is Noir Central. Its denizens are tattooed in shadow; the play of light and dark in the streets, the police stations and the morgues, is fetishistic. The post-war L.A. touted in the travelogues and billboards is a boomtown, but what we actually see…
Every film adaptation of a pre-existing work has its own unique set of problems; in the case of Jocelyn Moorhouse’s A Thousand Acres, the problem is compounded. Not only was Jane Smiley’s 1991 novel a Pulitzer Prize-winning best-seller with a large number of (presumably) devoted fans, but the book was…
In Jonathan Nossiter’s brooding Sunday, the oft-maligned borough of Queens is seen as a snowy wasteland of crumbling warehouses and lonely subway stations through which the lame and the halt wander like zombies. Just the place, Nossiter reasons, to set a psychological mystery about loss of identity and the power…
This has been a rough year at the movies for British working stiffs, but a great year for feel-good stories of their redemption. In the art-house hit Brassed Off!, coal miners cut loose from their jobs by Thatcherite economics found solace and self-respect in the endurance of the company’s brass…
The Disappearance of Garcia Lorca aims to cover a great deal of ground. It renders, with picturesque splendor, Spain just before its civil war and the dramatic fate of impassioned, iconoclastic Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca during the rise of Spanish fascism. Still, no matter how earnestly it attempts to…
The Game is a puzzle picture, and beyond its premise, there isn’t much you can divulge without giving the show away. I’m not one of those critics who like to write Stop reading now if you plan to see this movie, so I’m tempted to wrap things up right now…
On the basis of having played a lovably meddlesome Beverly Hills teenager in Clueless and Batgirl in the latest McSequel of the dismal Batman series, young Alicia Silverstone hasn’t quite hit full stride. There may not be much time, but she’s trying. Excess Baggage looks very much like an attempt…
For a movie so enamored of its own peculiar charms (see also: Gump, Forrest), Alan Wade’s Julian Po can exert quite a tug on the audience. It’s self-consciously “literary” and shamelessly derivative, but the germ of mystery inside it pulls you along. It’s full of ersatz gravity and precious philosophizing,…
Director Bill Duke’s valentine to Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, the king of the Harlem numbers racket back in the 1930s, is called Hoodlum. But that hardly seems appropriate. If Duke and his backers at United Artists Pictures wanted to remain true to the spirit of the piece, they would have titled…
The low-budget phenom of the month is a 28-year-old Los Angeleno named Miguel Arteta, whose first feature, Star Maps, comes decorated with the usual indie-hero stories about borrowed cars, unauthorized location shots and crew lunches catered by Mom. It’s also encrusted with enough tortured metaphor to sink a sophomore lit…
If you’re nostalgic for the cockeyed let-it-all-out gabfests of the late John Cassavetes, She’s So Lovely will seem like dejà vu all over again. Cassavetes wrote the script more than a decade ago, and now his son Nick–whose first feature, Unhook the Stars, starred his mother, Gena Rowlands–has directed it…
Time has a way of slipping by when you’re not looking, but don’t worry. While you’re distracted, studio executives are keeping their usual keen eyes on the calendar, tabulating the simple economic arithmetic of boomer nostalgia. Hmmm…1997 minus 1957 equals 40 years. Forty years of nostalgic forgetfulness multiplied by the…
When the beautiful entomologist rips open the chest cavity of a huge, bloodthirsty insect in the sci-fi nightmare Mimic, it turns into Thoracic Park. This movie, like Spielberg’s, features evolution gone haywire and dramaturgy gone to hell. In the prologue, the heroine–the reckless and courageous (or foolhardy and stupid) Dr…
It’s as old as sin, the story of the hopeless square liberated by the freethinker. It’s also as new as several current movies–including Shall We Dance?, wherein a weary suburbanite is revived by the fox-trot, and Dream With the Fishes, in which a suicidal businessman hits the glory road with…
Think Meryl Streep handled the raging white water and the redneck villains pretty well in The River Wild? Come now. That was child’s play. Still like the way La Femme Nikita blew those four-star Euro-creeps away in the middle of their pate de foie gras? Forget about it–namby-pamby, art-movie philosophizing…
Out of the plain strivings of the British working and middle classes, Mike Leigh always manages to make art, even if his movies never announce themselves as such. His latest, Career Girls, is a more modest thing than last year’s superb Secrets & Lies, but he once more finds the…
The cops in Cop Land carry on like a bunch of goombahs. On the take from the Mob, they mimic the Mob. The fuzzy line dividing cops and crooks is the subject of many a strong police movie, but Cop Land goes a step further–it says there is no line…
As another indictment of the male animal and American business ethics, Neil Labute’s In the Company of Men pretty much has it all. The playwright/filmmaker claims–rather coyly, I think–that this pitch-black tragicomedy about a pair of self-absorbed yuppie buddies who hatch a plot to exploit a beautiful deaf woman for…
Jerry Fletcher, the hero of Conspiracy Theory, is a comic, glamorous variation on Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Like Travis, he’s a New York cabbie obsessed with protecting a woman from the world’s hidden malignancies. Unlike Travis, Jerry snaps when he achieves sanity. Mel Gibson has been almost too willing…
Admirers of director Tony Gatlif’s enchanting look at Romany life and music, Latcho Drom, are now in for a treat of another sort. With Mondo, the world’s leading (perhaps only) Algerian-Gypsy-French filmmaker has crafted a poetic fable about friendship, human displacement and belonging that strikes all kinds of chords in…
