The fictional Yorkshire coal-mining town where English director Mark Herman’s Brassed Off! takes place is called, aptly enough, Grimley. You can feel the layer of soot that has settled into the lives of the beleaguered citizens, and you can sympathize with their struggle to remain human in the face of…
Here are the Joys of Summer…and the Oys of Summer, the nearly 100 movies scheduled to open between now and the end of August. Many of them may even make it to Denver. They’re listed in the order of their L.A. release: May 30 Drunks. Peter Cohn’s look at the…
Does this sound familiar? In Nana Djordjadze’s A Chef in Love, an uncompromising creator of high cuisine stubbornly opposes the philistines and fools who threaten his perfectionism, transforming his kitchen into a kind of metaphoric battleground. This is, of course, the premise of last year’s independent hit Big Night, with…
The appearance of The Lost World: Jurassic Park carries a double burden. Not only is it the sequel to the most popular movie ever made but it is also the first film Steven Spielberg has directed since 1993’s Schindler’s List. Now that he has finally won his Oscar and achieved…
Broken English, the first feature by New Zealand’s Gregor Nicholas, is a Romeo and Juliet tale that owes the usual huge debt to Shakespeare and the dozens of variations filmmakers have attempted over the decades. But it is beautiful and disturbing in new ways. Just to start with, Nicholas’s young…
The veteran director Sidney Lumet is one of the few guys on the planet who can make Woody Allen and Spike Lee look like tourists from Des Moines. Lumet has shot 29 of his 40 films on the streets of New York, and he still captures better than any other…
Here’s more good news for independent filmmakers living on macaroni and cheese in studio apartments everywhere. The 25-year-old Australian director Emma-Kate Croghan shot Love and Other Catastrophes in seventeen days on a budget of $30,000, and Fox Searchlight Pictures picked it up. Here’s the bad news: Croghan didn’t spring for…
Gummy with heartfelt folderol and overbearingly chummy, Fathers’ Day comes across like a feature-length expansion of its sniffle-and-giggle trailer. Prior to this teaming, Robin Williams and Billy Crystal had never been in a movie together–though, along with Whoopi Goldberg, they appear together annually on the televised Comic Relief fundraiser–so there…
The unlikely heroine of Peter Duncan’s Children of the Revolution is one Joan Fraser (Judy Davis), a red-haired, bug-eyed Australian Communist whose fervor doesn’t stop with belting out “The Internationale” in the corner pub or forcing leaflets on bemused passersby. Joan is so hot for Bolshevism that she sends a…
In The Fifth Element, the all-knowing, all-powerful Supreme Being of the Universe turns out to be Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), an orange-haired babe in a skimpy, Band-Aid-thin mod outfit who speaks in a kind of Slavic scat and cries a lot. It’s as if the filmmakers started out to make a…
If you happen to be a highly civilized yuppie couple from Massachusetts and you’re driving a $30,000 sports/rec vehicle to California, don’t bother stopping off in cactus-and-enchilada country. After all, the black-clad varmint at the wheel of that sun-scorched pickup truck just ahead has a Dalton Brothers mustache and a…
It’s probably just a matter of time until Newsweek and the major networks start hailing necrophilia as North America’s hottest new lifestyle. For now, though, copulating with the dead remains largely the province of a few social visionaries like Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy. Face it: Most of us have…
When Masterpiece Theatre aired a multi-part Anna Karenina to mark the novel’s centennial in 1977, series producer Joan Sullivan said, “I think that great stories are what the series is about.” Now Bernard Rose, the writer-director of the new movie version, talks about how lucky he was to discover “this…
If you’re hankering to see a movie that sends up swinging ’60s London and Carnaby Street and vintage James Bond movies, don’t bother to check out Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. What the movie mostly sends up is its star and screenwriter, Michael Myers. That’s not all bad: Myers…
Think you know gypsies? Dark, swarthy types with yard-long coils of blue-black hair set off by huge gold earrings, right? In the back room, Madame Salona will read your palm for fifty. Gypsies all speak an impenetrable language from another planet. Always staging personal-injury accidents in the produce department at…
No one has exploited the historical-epic form better than David Lean. At his peak, he used its spaciousness and breadth to develop characters with conflicting points of view so that audiences could feel viscerally swept away, emotionally engaged and mentally sharpened–all at once. With the help of inspired actors, he…
Volcano is set in Los Angeles, and audiences get high watching the city crash and burn. For L.A. haters, Volcano could prove a peak experience. You don’t even have to hate L.A. to enjoy it–love/hate will do. That’s why the film closes with Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.,” a facetious…
The eight heads in 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag don’t look much like heads. They look like what they are–big, squarish rubber things from the studio makeup department, each with a goofy expression and a crummy wig glued on top. That’s because the makers of this raucous black comedy…
Jon Robin Baitz’s The Substance of Fire, produced on stage in New York and L.A. and now making its appearance as a movie distributed by the tastemakers at Miramax, is about another traumatized family struggling to work out its problems. In that, it sustains a dramatic tradition stretching from the…
JFK used the White House as his brothel. In the end, Nixon reduced it to a one-man loony bin. And the current occupant, by all accounts, has converted the place into the priciest bed-and-breakfast on the planet. How can Hollywood fantasists hope to compete with the extremities of actual presidential…
Nobody is going to seriously accuse writer-director Alexander Payne of being chicken. For his first feature, the hilarious Citizen Ruth, not only has he chosen the number-one issue a filmmaker is likely to get killed over–abortion and a woman’s right to make a personal decision on the subject–but he’s made…
Return we must with brash Kevin Smith to the place that inspires him: suburban New Jersey. Chasing Amy is Smith’s third feature in as many years, and neither his use of color film stock nor–surprise!–his breakout from shooting in one room much distinguishes his latest outing from its predecessors, the…
