At the movies, it’s open season on literary figures. In Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, we got an earful of cult heroine Dorothy Parker’s mordant one-liners, which was to be expected, and an eyeful of her alcoholic self-pity, which was not. Tom & Viv is an even rougher piece…
Want to foul up your next crime thriller? It’s easy. First, go down to the Florida Everglades at midnight and find some alligators. Next, reheat a big, dangerous slab of Cape Fear, add a humid chunk of In the Heat of the Night and a racially motivated miscarriage of justice…
Trying to revive the Western may be a fool’s errand. As revisionist historians will be happy to tell you, Manifest Destiny is as dead as John Wayne, and any hombre crazy enough to say otherwise will get the bellyful of hot lead he deserves. The real problem is that while…
That major-league enigma lying ninety miles off the Florida coast doesn’t often come into clear focus–not for North Americans. Aside from our occasional whiffs of its embargoed cigars and its stubborn, last-ditch socialism, Cuba remains terra incognita almost four decades after Fidel Castro and his band of revolutionaries shook the…
The pioneer trail blazed by Thelma & Louise several winters back is developing into a superhighway. Boys on the Side is Hollywood’s latest plunge into female bonding, and it confronts every meaningful women’s issue you can think of with such single-minded fervor that you start to wonder if the whole…
As soon as Cochran and Shapiro get done with this thing in L.A., they could get a call from Catherine de Medicis. Patrice Chereau’s noisy costume drama, Queen Margot, casts Catherine as the heavy in the bloody wars between Catholics and emergent Protestants in sixteenth-century France and in the palace…
There are worse places to be exiled than Paris, but Roman Polanski longs for sunny, featureless Los Angeles. It is, of course, a place haunted by the ghosts of Sharon Tate and the couple’s unborn child. But 25 years later, it is still the Emerald City. There, he remembers, deals…
Roman Polanski’s obsession with obsession itself may be the reason he’s stayed away from overtly political filmmaking: When you’re rooting around in the dungeon of the individual soul, there isn’t much time to talk about oppressive regimes. Seen in that light, Death and the Maiden is something of a departure…
There are few pleasures greater in moviedom than watching Albert Finney disappear into a character. In Suri Krishnamma’s A Man of No Importance, he does it again with such apparent ease that we forget his rollicking Tom Jones, the boozy diplomat of Under the Volcano, even the devastated classics professor…
We need only glance at the supermarket tabloids to find the current follies of the British monarchy. But long before the Prince of Wales wished he were a tampon and Lady Di got those riding lessons, there was George III, the fellow who dispatched the Redcoats to the colonies, wound…
Warner Brothers has been making tough, compelling prison melodramas on and off since 1932. This is hardly the golden age of identifiable studio style, of course, but you can bet your last nickel that the stingy coots who once ran the family business like a work farm would approve of…
The record book tells us that Ty Cobb was one of the greatest players in baseball history, and he was. His .367 lifetime batting average will never be approached. His record of 4,191 hits was finally broken by Pete Rose in 1985, but he still holds the mark for runs…
As usual, filmmaker Zhang Yimou is in hot water with the Chinese authorities–the kind of people who think freedom of expression means picking your own appetizer off the lunch menu. Zhang’s latest film, To Live, is a family epic that just happens to trace the agonies and ironies of the…
Believe it or not, Paul Newman will be seventy this year. That serves to remind us how long it’s been since the crass young cowboy called Hud and the Christlike rebel Cool Hand Luke passed into the realm of movie legend. It also tells us that the heroes of Newman’s…
The eagerness and all-out urgency driving John Singleton’s movies often overwhelm his common sense, but no one can fault the young filmmaker for lack of feeling or purpose. In Boyz N the Hood, Singleton threw himself into the streets of Los Angeles with both philosophical barrels blazing, and by the…
Susan Sarandon’s advisors shook their heads. Once you play a mother, they said, you’re stuck with mothers. You can’t go back. You can never outwit Tommy Lee Jones in court again. You can’t romance Kevin Costner in the bush leagues. You can’t rob convenience stores with Geena Davis. “That’s what…
Now that Cap’n Newt is steering the ship of state, how long will it take First Mate Helms to toss Pulp Fiction overboard and throw The Simpsons in the brig? While we wait for a little neo-Puritan backlash, here’s a safe, literate and, in places, self-righteous movie about the endurance…
Ludwig van Beethoven’s sundry biographers, wherever they’re sitting, may feel like throwing their hands over their eyes upon being subjected to the crass speculations in Bernard Rose’s Immortal Beloved. But they won’t cover their ears. Musical fidelity has always been more vital to composer biopics than historical accuracy, and Britisher…
How’s this for high concept? Hip, dreamy black dude from the Pittsburgh ‘hood evades loan sharks by passing himself off as square suburban businessman’s long-lost childhood buddy. Despite cultural clashes and comic missteps at the country club, impostor and entire dysfunctional family of white folks wind up friends. Bingo. Ring…
BEST TEN OF 1994 1. Pulp Fiction. Boy wonder Tarantino scores again with wickedly clever crime triptych. Travolta comeback in full swing. 2. Blue, White and Red. Polish master Kieslowski hits the trifecta, then announces retirement. 3. Cobb. Denver must wait for Tommy Lee JonesÕs brilliant portrait of savage, embittered…
The last time I checked, Albert Einstein was better known as the most brilliant theoretical physicist in human history than as a cute old prankster with white hair whose corduroys were always slipping over his butt. But then, I could be wrong. My SAT scores were lukewarm, I went to…
Out there in the forest primeval of moviedom, the “wild child” has long lurked, rustling around in search of edible tree bark and good box office. First Tarzan swung through the underbrush. Then Francois Truffaut discovered uncivilized, unspoiled Homo sapiens in 1969’s L’Enfant Sauvage. Werner Herzog rounded him up again…
