John Bailey, who makes his directorial debut with a sex thriller called China Moon, has been the cinematographer on such beautifully photographed movies as Ordinary People, Accidental Tourist and In the Line of Fire. It’s a good thing, too. The strength of this conventional Nineties film noir is its dark,…
You can romanticize the rodeo, as Cliff Robertson did 23 years ago in J.W. Coop, or you can use it to show how modern life has trivialized the mythic skills of cowboys, as Sam Peckinpah did in Junior Bonner and Sydney Pollack did in The Electric Horseman. But you can’t…
From the dark mirth of Mark Twain, to the domestic chaos of Kurt Vonnegut and Edward Albee, to the everyday dysfunction of The Simpsons, satirists have gotten under the placid surface of American life to find the demons lurking below–the idiot uncles and poisoners of pot roast, the third-generation addicts…
For thirty years Hollywood considered sports movies box-office poison–even after Rocky Balboa went the distance with Apollo Creed. The American sports mania didn’t hit the movie industry until the mid-Eighties–about the time Resume Speed, Texas, got wired for cable–but right now the white men who run the show can’t jump…
It’s ironic, isn’t it, that filmmakers keep trying to reinvent Don Siegel’s 1956 horror classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Philip Kaufman did it in 1978, and Abel Ferrara is taking his shot this year. Let’s hope that each of them grasps the implications of cloning a movie about the…
The late Sam Peckinpah’s lively chase movie The Getaway is unlikely to catch The Wild Bunch or Major Dundee on the all-time Peckinpah hit parade. For one thing, the acting skills of ex-model Ali McGraw, who co-starred with Steve McQueen 22 years ago, will never be the stuff of cult…
Johnny, the sardonic young drifter at the center of Mike Leigh’s startling new film Naked, is a kind of serial killer, but he carries no gun, rope or knife. A street-tough British bloke from Manchester, he can be physically brutal with women, but he specializes in maiming his victims emotionally–by…
In Peter Medak’s Romeo Is Bleeding, Sergeant Jack Grimaldi is a crooked New York cop firmly in the pocket of a Mafia don. He’s also cheating on his wife with a cocktail waitress, and when he’s assigned to hole up with a beautiful killer who’s turned state’s evidence, she seduces…
Given the gruesome effects of German mysticism on the twentieth century, it’s wise to regard any new form of it with suspicion. That includes the films of Wim Wenders, a thoroughly postwar German who seems to embrace both pacifist Euro-modernism and traditional Catholic theology. To be a German filmmaker in…
The limousine liberals John Guare satirized in his Broadway hit Six Degrees of Separation are the same kind of New Yorkers Woody Allen seems so genuinely fond of…and so profoundly incapable of understanding. Installed in lavish Park Avenue apartments, these posers have a passing acquaintance with both intellectual fashions and…
John Madden’s Golden Gate, a romantic soap opera badly disguised as a fable of McCarthyite bigotry and good-guy guilt, features Matt Dillon as an eager-beaver FBI agent assigned to root out supposed communists in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1952, and Joan Chen as the beautiful daughter of an innocent Chinese…
The messages you get from the presidential campaign documentary The War Room are multiplying at an alarming rate. Clearly, the husband and wife team of D.A. Pennebaker (Don’t Look Back, Monterey Pop) and Chris Hegedus meant it as a valentine to the efforts of candidate Bill Clinton’s smart-mouthed chief handler,…
Director Michael Apted has range. He’s made two dozen films for British television, the political documentary Incident at Oglala and five installments of his continuing 7 Up series, which has followed a group of disparate children, at seven-year intervals, to adulthood. Apted has also ventured into Hollywood features–notably the 1980…
Civil liberties remain in short supply for the beleaguered Catholics of Northern Ireland, but filmmaker Jim Sheridan has taken the liberty of vividly dramatizing one of the most notorious instances of recent British tyranny. Let’s hope Prime Minister John Major and Parliament are watching–red-faced and thoughtful. With a passion reminiscent…
In the seniors division of the Buddy Movie Sweepstakes, you could scarcely ask for a classier pair of contenders than Robert Duvall and Richard Harris. Their resumes would daunt Moses, their pride in craft has never been more evident and in Wrestling Ernest Hemingway they both look like they’ve been…
They sport red ribbons from the costume department and pass the hat at parties, but Hollywood’s glitterati know where their bread is buttered, and otherwise avoid the explosive AIDS issue. Even the studio advertising campaign for Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia is discreet and noncommital: You must read between the lines to…
Despite a director with a case of the shouts and a hopelessly miscast leading lady, that prince of players, Anthony Hopkins, can still make magic. Richard Attenborough’s Shadowlands, a well-mannered tearjerker set at well-mannered Oxford in 1952, aspires to romantic tragedy and to the kind of Merchant/Ivory polish that keeps…
The intense love triangle at the heart of Chen Kaige’s sumptuous epic Farewell My Concubine could be the least of its concerns, but it’s not. As Rick Blaine told us, “the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world,” and it’s difficult…
Ever ready with a new theory, the social psychologists are saying that Western movies are making their current comeback because beleaguered Americans have a revived desire for law and order. Pin a star on an upright, fearless sheriff, let him clean the bad guys out of the local saloons, and…
Ethan Hunt complains to his boss about his new assignment: “It’s going to be difficult.” “It’s not mission difficult, Mr. Hunt,” the boss icily replies, “It’s mission impossible. ‘Difficult’ should be a walk…”
