It’s not exactly news that Mom and Dad and all the things they stand for are completely lame. They were lame in the 1920s, when nice Presbyterian girls from Omaha turned to bathtub gin and the sin of the Charleston. They were lame in the 1950s, when James Dean took…
Jim Carrey, the double-jointed, rubber-faced dervish of In Living Color and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, seems like the last guy in the world who needs his act powered up by the special-effects department. But that’s what happens in The Mask. Industrial Light & Magic, the people who put the giddy-up…
Clear and Present Danger is only a movie. In real life, pundits of all political stripes are complaining that the Central Intelligence Agency has grown clumsy and mendacious, that it couldn’t find double-agent Aldrich Ames under its very nose, that it’s lazy and self-serving. But don’t tell that to Tom…
While most of the nation’s lawyers are defending O.J. Simpson, a precious dozen or so have slipped away to assist the Clintons in their various tribulations. Apparently all the others drive cabs or run around in the pages of John Grisham’s potboilers saying pithy things. At least there’s finally a…
The figure of the windburned, rawboned, self-sufficient loner has always stood at the heart of the frontier myth. If anything, he’s still getting taller. Witness Colorado Cowboy: The Bruce Ford Story. Arthur Elgort’s spare, straightforward documentary about the five-time world rodeo champion is cause for local pride–Ford operates a ranch…
Shopping for a superhero this summer? Give poor Arnold Schwarzenegger another chance. That spell of self-doubt that plagued him last year, exemplified by a bomb called The Last Action Hero, now appears to be over, and Arnold is up to his old tricks in True Lies. Most of them, anyway…
American moviemakers with their eye on the hot cultural-diversity issue or the quandaries of the melting pot would do well to see Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach. In a splendid balancing act, this able young director brings keen social observation and pungent, distinctly feminine humor to the everyday traumas…
Even good actors are entitled to load a dud once in a while–especially in July. Blown Away is the summer’s second action picture pitting a mad bomber against a cop, but the fireworks this time around are limited to the explosive charges that wacko Irish terrorist Tommy Lee Jones plants…
The sweet-tempered half-wit Tom Hanks portrays in Forrest Gump has dozens of antecedents in literature and films, so it’s a little tough to keep him in focus. For a start, imagine the eternal optimist Candide combined with Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin and Dustin Hoffman’s savant from Rain Man. Add a dash…
The Shadow is a shadow of the Thirties radio fantasy that inspired it, but not for the usual reasons. As early TV shows demonstrated, you can impose visual images on radio melodrama and get away with it. Especially when most of the original audience will never see the thing. What…
In its vain and glamorous heyday, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studiously avoided sending “messages” to the 90 million Americans who went to the movies each week. Instead, the biggest and richest of the Hollywood studios produced sophisticated escapism, polished to a gleam by the slickest directors and craftspeople and inhabited, as the company…
Now that Westerns are back, you can get a fresh, vivid look at the Wyatt Earp/Doc Holliday legend by renting Tombstone at the video store. Released in theaters six months ago, George P. Cosmatos’s swift, concise hayburner features the able Kurt Russell as vengeful lawman Earp and edgy Val Kilmer…
Nobody handed Jack Nicholson anything. He earned his place early on as one of Hollywood’s big dogs, and twenty-five years later, he’s not afraid to bare his fangs. For instance: A lesser force might not have gone anywhere near Wolf, recalling those campy werewolf flicks in which tormented Henry Hull…
You’ll find plenty of bombs on every summer’s movie schedule. But this year Hollywood is setting them off on purpose. A little later in the silly season, terrorist Tommy Lee Jones will torment Boston cop Jeff Bridges with his penchant for explosives in Blown Away. For now we must content…
Clearly Krzysztof Kieslowski has plenty to say. Maybe he’s even got the faintest touch of serial killer in him. In any case, the extraordinary Polish director now makes his movies in bunches. The Decalogue was a relatively obscure series of ten films exploring each of the Commandments, and his “Three…
In recent years, visiting moviemakers have recast Ireland as a kind of cultural theme park packed with nostalgic folk wisdom exhibits, ongoing political tragedy rides and postcard views of verdant countryside. In this fantasyland, picturesque locals loose torrents of reheated Yeats in lilting brogues. At night everyone settles in at…
Penny Marshall probably won’t win the Nobel Prize anytime soon, but the TV-star-turned-director has a minor gift for detective work. After discovering the little boy inside the man (Big) and the ballplayer within the woman (A League of Their Own), Marshall has now unearthed the deep thinker in the dumb…
Has Bernardo Bertolucci flipped out? The man who once explored the frontiers of carnal obsession (in Last Tango in Paris) and the fervid intrigues of Italian politics (The Conformist, 1900) began gazing eastward last decade, coming up with a gauzy Chinese head trip called The Last Emperor. That’s the one:…
Amid the clatter of summer blockbusters, Red Rock West is the kind of terrific sleeper that could get lost. That would be a shame. Here is a taut little thriller that depends on such classic virtues as the well-timed double-cross, clever plotting and vivid low-life characters, rather than on high-octane…
This is what things have come to. Hollywood has spent $60 million on a Western movie derived from an old TV show that borrowed heavily from earlier Westerns, which were in turn based on dime novels that glamorized beyond recognition what actually happened on the American frontier. Naturally, the star…
Like his earlier films, Pedro Almodovar’s Kika is the kind of outdated bedroom farce that could only come from post-Fascist Spain, where artistic freedom is still a novelty. As in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and High Heels, this tale of a garrulous Madrid makeup artist’s sexual misadventures flaunts…
Can a quarter-century really have passed since Ratso Rizzo first sneered “I’m walkin’ heaahh!” and Joe Buck grinned at himself in the mirror, straightening the Stetson on that golden Texas rube’s head? Midnight Cowboy returns to the big screen this Friday for a one-week run at the Mayan, and its…
