When I was growing up, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was the closest thing I had to a paternal mentor, the only authoritative voice I consistently trusted. Novel after freakish, scattershot, infinitely humane novel, the man provided tools to identify and cope with the daily horrors of America — this vast sea…
Jesus, Mary and Joseph! The repressed Irish-Catholic schoolgirl Molly Shannon plays on Saturday Night Live is certainly not everyone’s cup of glee. But there’s no denying the tug she exerts on anyone whose past is littered with the dry husks of Latin verbs and memories of nuns swinging big rulers…
Insomniacs, rejoice! During the first several decades of Sydney Pollack’s bloated, interminable Random Hearts, your eyelids will droop, your pulse and respiration will slow, and you’ll get that $8 nap you’ve been craving. Once the credits roll and the lights come up, you’ll awaken refreshed, undisturbed by vague dreams about…
Am I a traitor to my gender because I didn’t find this unabashed film about female sexuality erotic, brave, or even — dare I say it — interesting? The ironically titled Romance, directed by the audacious French filmmaker Catherine Breillat (36 Fillette), has become something of a cause célèbre wherever…
There’s a long tradition of stories about mysterious drifters who arrive in a small town and either create trouble or catalyze an explosion of long-simmering problems. Mark Twain used that hook, as did Dashiell Hammett (Red Harvest), Akira Kurosawa (Yojimbo) and Sergio Leone (A Fistful of Dollars). Now Hampton Fancher…
The premise is preposterous, the final score inevitable and the record reading on the feelgood-o-meter totally predictable. But Mystery, Alaska comes furnished with some winning quirks and charms — including a very funny bit concerning premature ejaculation at twenty degrees below zero. So even if you don’t really believe that…
In general, period films are not what you would call a commercial sure shot in the current marketplace — unless, of course, the period in question is the 22nd century or some “long, long ago” that resembles the 22nd century. In Plunkett and Macleane, director Jake Scott — son of…
There is nothing gratifying about watching a bullet blast through a woman’s skull. Exploding helicopters and splattered cattle are utterly indefensible. And few would smile at the image of a little boy being obliterated by a flashy missile. So why is David O. Russell’s Three Kings such rousing entertainment? This…
Grownups, take heart. Even if you misspent your summer at the movies pigging out on reheated space adventure, slob humor and stubborn old ballplayers who won’t hang up their spikes, all is not lost. A powerful and intelligent film called American Beauty has volumes to say about the way people…
Trust Allison Anders and her old running mate Kurt Voss to come up with a piquant, carefully observed movie about tarnished hope, overfed vanity and half-baked scheming on the treacherous L.A. music scene. They know the territory. In 1988, the ex-UCLA Film School classmates wrote and directed Border Radio, one…
Have you heard? The only tools a nice fellow needs to repair the damaged psyches of an entire town are a guilty conscience and a dash of insight. That, at least, is the premise of Lawrence Kasdan’s silly new social parable, Mumford, in which the eponymous hero poses as a…
As American film has increasingly dominated the world’s cinemas and once-healthy European film industries have grown unable to sustain themselves, the idea of multi-national co-productions, with funds supplied by producers from a variety of countries, has become the norm. This trend was well-established in the ’80s, making it tough to…
Since his TV show ended, Martin Lawrence has gotten more ink for his off-camera life than for his movie career. There’s nothing about Blue Streak that is likely to change that. And it’s a shame, because the basic plot — which sounds like something from one of Donald E. Westlake’s…
Joan Chen, director and co-writer of Xiu Xiu the Sent Down Girl, is best known as an actress: American audiences probably identify her most readily as the doomed wife in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor or as Josie Packard, the alternately evil and innocent character in David Lynch’s weird-o-rama Twin…
Whether it’s bad or good commercial luck that the thriller Stir of Echoes follows so closely on the heels of The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan’s wildly successful ghost-story sleeper, it’s bad critical luck. This film has some startling parallels with The Sixth Sense: Both concern psychic communication with the…
When last we encountered Peter and Bobby Farrelly, they were pelting moviehouses with industrial-strength jokes about retarded kids, lost semen, found excrement and exploding house pets. Good plan. There’s Something About Mary turned into last summer’s surprise hit and catapulted the brothers to the top of Hollywood’s A List –…
It seems like only yesterday that movies dealing with gay and lesbian life were synonymous with extravagant displays of gloom and doom. From the suicides of The Children’s Hour and Advise and Consent to the serial killers of Cruising and Basic Instinct, same-sex sexuality was no fun — in the…
What is it they say? That even a flea can reach Mount Olympus riding in Pegasus’s mane? Well, in the case of the new Albert Brooks comedy The Muse, Brooks is the flea and Pegasus is his delectable co-star, Sharon Stone. But I get ahead of myself. In The Muse,…
There is something fairy-tale-like, but also deeply human, about Twin Falls Idaho, a gentle, beautifully realized tale of love and intimacy that marks the feature-film debut of identical twins Mark and Michael Polish. Michael directed the film, and both brothers wrote the script and star in it. It is what…
If Kevin Williamson has anything to say about it, the good works of noble movie schoolteachers like Mr. Chips and Miss Dove and Mr. Holland will be wiped out in one fell swoop. In their place, the creator of TV’s hormonal Dawson’s Creek series proposes an unmitigated horror: a high…
As a filmmaker, actor John Turturro clearly believes in drawing from personal experience: His directorial debut, the 1992 Mac (which won the Camera D’Or at Cannes), was avowedly based on his father’s life. For his second feature, Illuminata, Turturro takes a look at the theater, showing us the ambitions, fears…
Lo and behold the plight of the American gangster. John Gotti, the Dapper Don, has been sent down the river. His big-time heavy, Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, is famous and face-lifted for being a no-good dirty-rat stool pigeon. And Robert De Niro, the reigning deity of hoodlum heavies in films…
