Given the manipulative tendencies of many mainstream pictures, Stepmom could easily have slipped into a sticky morass of sentimentality and melodrama. Instead, it proves a genuinely affecting movie that approaches its adult themes with intelligence, maturity and rare authenticity. The film stars Susan Sarandon as Jackie, a divorced mother of…
Old-fashioned romantic comedies are an endangered species, and in these generally unromantic days, it’s always a pleasant surprise to find a decent one like Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail. Ephron, of course, made her bones five and a half years ago with the huge hit Sleepless in Seattle, but since…
The worst thing about French director Manuel Poirier’s Western–which was nominated for multiple Cesar Awards (the French equivalent of the Oscars) and won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival–is its title. Despite the strained attempts of the movie’s production notes to convince us of some sort…
On May 30, 1957, the Los Angeles Times reported that the body of “distinguished film producer and director James Whale” had been found floating in the swimming pool at his home in Pacific Palisades. Fully clothed, Whale’s corpse exhibited a head wound. “Whale,” the Times went on to point out,…
The relentless charm of Kirk Jones’s Waking Ned Devine lies in its embrace of two lovable Irish geezers who manage to work beautiful mischief on the world, in the raw beauty of their sun-splashed coastal village, and in the general notion that Ireland is the land of poetic conversations, enduring…
Ultra-tough-guy Jesse “The Body” Ventura says he means business as the new governor of Minnesota. But for now the nasty crime wave in that state continues unchecked–at the movies, anyway. Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan, a psychological thriller that shows us how dangerous life can get after three ordinary men…
According to the sparse information available in standard reference books, Chilean expatriate director Ral Ruiz, still in his late fifties, has made more than a hundred films since 1960; apparently only fifty or so are features, but that’s still an impressive stat. He’s been a staple on the festival circuit…
In the rancid nightmare farce called Very Bad Things, Peter Berg, in his movie writing-directing debut, creates characters that you immediately want to see killed off. From the title to the ads to the Web site (which features a Vegas stripper who will dance just for you), Very Bad Things…
A third of the way through Home Fries, you may begin wondering if the filmmakers haven’t outsmarted themselves. Overloaded with oddities but a bit short on horse sense, this is one of those stubbornly defiant, attitude-driven movies that’s so busy scrambling genres, breaking rules and dashing expectations on the road…
Surprise and pleasure come wrapped together in A Bug’s Life. This big adventure about tiny critters is the latest piece of robust whimsy from Pixar, the computer-animation studio that broke into features with the 1995 smash Toy Story. Toy Story opened up the secret lives of toys in suburban bedrooms;…
Here we go again. Enemy of the State is Fascism in America 1998, Chapter Four…or Five…or whatever we’re up to. It readily invites comparison to The Siege, but for better or worse, its goals are more mundane. While The Siege seems like an ideological agenda driving a film, Enemy of…
Even students of English history may have trouble sorting out the palace intrigues and intra-governmental conspiracies that fill Elizabeth, the handsome new production about Queen Elizabeth I’s ascension to the British throne in 1558. With the bewitching Australian actress Cate Blanchett (last year’s Oscar and Lucinda) in the title role,…
Holed up with his Sidney Bechet records, old flannel shirts and dog-eared copy of War and Peace, Woody Allen has made a second career of shunning fad, fashion and fame–and of ostensibly keeping to himself in the most populous city in the United States. No nouveau-grooveau glitz or designer drugs…
In 1994’s The Monster (Il Mostro), his most recent film to gain wide American release, the Italian writer/director/star Roberto Benigni put himself at the center of a mistaken-identity farce about a serial killer. In Life Is Beautiful (La Vita e Bella), Benigni plays a wacky, high-spirited man who convinces his…
First, a disclaimer: Having missed last year’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, I deliberately put off seeing it until after viewing its sequel, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. That way I could view Part Two without prejudice as well as be able to judge whether…
Well, now we know why the term “bored to death” was invented. Meet Joe Black, a new film produced and directed by Martin Brest (Scent of a Woman, Midnight Run), takes an interesting idea–Death assumes human form and comes to earth to learn about human existence–and reduces it to a…
The hero of Evan Dunsky’s The Alarmist is a dopey innocent named Tommy Hudler (Scream’s David Arquette) whose only sin seems to be falling in with the wrong crowd. A rookie salesman with all the aggression of a baby chick, Tommy sells residential burglar alarms door-to-door in Los Angeles for…
Fascism is in the air…well, at least it’s on movie screens. In a two-week stretch, we’ve seen old Nazis (Life Is Beautiful), neo-Nazis (American History X), old Nazis training neo-Nazis (Apt Pupil), book-burning (Pleasantville), and now, with The Siege, full-blown military rule on American soil. Still in the wings: Enemy…
Fifteen minutes into Velvet Goldmine, director Todd Haynes’s love letter to England’s glam-rock scene of the late Sixties/early Seventies, the film has already promised to be many things: a missing-person mystery, a meticulous period piece, an essay on sexually liberated dandyism, a quasi-musical, a portrait of the Machiavellian as an…
As a requiem for the Sixties, The Big Chill didn’t quite hit the mark the first time around, in 1983. Its greatest-hits soundtrack was soul-stirring, all right; it’s hard to top the Stones, Marvin Gaye or Aretha Franklin in any decade. But the shameless way in which director Lawrence Kasdan…
American History X, a hard-edged look at American neo-Nazis, arrives in theaters with a lot of behind-the-scenes baggage. First-time director Tony Kaye has engaged in a protracted, high-profile battle with distributor-producer New Line Cinema over the film’s final form. While Kaye may have a justified grievance, this is not as…
When Montoya, one of the fearless vampire killers in John Carpenter’s Vampires, tells another character that nobody believes in the title creatures because nobody wants to, there’s no mistaking the ancestry of the line. It comes down, through two generations of horror films, from the moment in the original Dracula…
