The ingredients are familiar: Donnie Brasco stars Al Pacino as a Mafia soldier and Johnny Depp as an FBI undercover agent who infiltrates the mob. But there’s a twist. Based on a true story, the film is a grunt’s-eye view of the Mafia, and it’s not remotely “operatic” or Scorsese-ish…
January and February are good times for taking a vacation–very good times. Not because the airfares are low or because the weather sucks, but because what a movie critic must endure at the beginning of the year is so grim. It is almost impossible to maintain any semblance of optimism…
The second most important room in their houses is the boudoir, so the sophisticated French are good at sex farce. If anything, the warm-blooded Italians are even better. The occasional American moviemaker–Billy Wilder, Mike Nichols, Woody Allen–can turn the trick, too, wedding absurdity to desire and coming up with dark…
Billy Bob Thornton isn’t going to snatch the matinee-idol title away from Tom Cruise, Kevin Costner or Denzel Washington anytime soon. At the age of 41, the former Hearts Afire regular is also a grizzled acting veteran of low-rent slasher flicks like Chopper Chicks in Zombietown and modest critical successes…
Irvin Kershner’s The Empire Strikes Back, the continuation of George Lucas’s Star Wars, is a classic fantasy in its own right. I vastly prefer it to the first film. Its textures are richer, its emotions deeper, and it’s an honest-to-Jedi movie–not a dozen jammed-together entries of a serial. On its…
Elmore Leonard’s Touch is identified on the paperback as a mystery and carried in stores next to Leonard’s celebrated crime novels (like Get Shorty). But this wan little book is actually the problem child of Leonard’s oeuvre–the only crime it involves is lack of truth in advertising, and that’s on…
For generations, the heftier works of Leo Tolstoy have challenged undergraduate lifting power and speed-reading skills as much as they have confounded the world’s moviemakers. That dark tribute to nineteenth-century adultery, Anna Karenina, was filmed in America three times, beginning with Garbo in 1935 and ending with Jacqueline Bisset in…
Since Baby LeRoy first put the screws to W.C. Fields back in the 1930s, the intractable child who torments the cranky old man has rampaged through movie history like a wild force of nature. The most celebrated recent example, of course, saw little Macaulay Culkin befouling the burglary schemes of…
In Absolute Power, Clint Eastwood plays Luther Whitney, a master thief who burgles on little cat feet. He’s as stealthy as the Pink Panther pilferer, though not nearly as amusing. Luther, you see, is presented to us as an artist. We first see him at the National Gallery dutifully copying…
Robert E. Howard, the subject of Dan Ireland’s wonderful debut film The Whole Wide World, created the sword-and-sorcery genre with his Conan stories. Howard had a grand yet coarse-grained consciousness. His Conan stories, set in a fictitious primordial age full of demons and killers, boasted swift, cartoon-flavored action (“He moved…
Andre Techine’s Les Voleurs (Thieves) is stuffed with sex, blood and grand-theft auto, and at its heart lurks a homicide detective who’s deeply compromised himself in the investigation of a big case. But before anyone gets the wrong idea, please note that neither Clint Eastwood nor Arnold Schwarzenegger got within…
The spookiness that has seeped into first-time director Vondie Curtis Hall’s surreal action comedy Gridlock’d is the kind of dramatic bonus no moviemaker hopes for. It derives from the gang murder last September of the film’s 25-year-old co-star, Tupac Shakur, and it colors the entire length of this dark farce…
“In the constant struggle of man against nature,” the press notes inform us, “it is the most devastating adversary of all–a force… which suddenly explodes to wreak havoc and destruction on an unsuspecting population.” The notes are, of course, referring to a volcano. But…wait! Didn’t I read the same thing…
If the brutal miscarriage of British justice that drove In the Name of the Father didn’t send you running to the nearest Sinn Fein recruiter and the fiery romanticism of Michael Collins didn’t have you putting together a tidy shipment of machine guns for the Provisionals in Belfast, maybe Some…
At a twenty-year remove, Star Wars comes off less as the work of a wizard than as the weird obsessive outgrowth of an eccentric American primitive. George Lucas is a tycoon version of those self-taught craftsmen who fill backyards, storage rooms and cramped city apartments with paintings, gewgaws or wire-hanger…
Eight years after A Fish Called Wanda rang up $200 million at the box office and won an Oscar for its manic villain, Kevin Kline, the cast has reunited in hopes of putting another dark charge into movie comedy. Fierce Creatures is not a sequel but a major departure, and…
When an incredulous Jane Campion fan asked what I hated about Campion’s version of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, I immediately responded, “Everything.” Actually, I thought Barbara Hershey, as the subtle villainess, Madame Merle, made a good first impression: I laughed appreciatively when the heroine, Isabel Archer (Nicole…
In Mother, Albert Brooks plays John Henderson, a science-fiction novelist recently divorced from his second wife who decides he can’t risk another relationship until he comes to terms with his mother. So he does the logical thing: He moves in with her. He hauls out of her garage all his…
Just when you think Eddie Murphy has pulled off a glorious comeback, he slips up on the banana peel of ego. To wit: Not six months ago, Murphy burst back to the top with his energetic takes on seven different characters–fat, skinny and uniformly hilarious–in the sleeper of 1996, The…
Let’s give Kenneth Branagh credit, shall we, for the breadth of his good sense. At 35, this Irish prodigy is the foremost cinematic interpreter of Shakespeare in a time when everyone just short of Jackie Chan and Jim Carrey seems to be cooking up a new movie version of Macbeth…
When the British critic John Russell Taylor called the Hollywood musical “a city built to music,” he was thinking more of Fred Astaire’s work than of Woody Allen’s. But anyone who remembers how Allen swaddled that beautiful opening montage of Manhattan in “Rhapsody in Blue” knows that when it comes…
It may come as a surprise to some that leukemia, senility and bitterness between parent and child are the stuff of comedy. But therein lies the unlikely miracle of Marvin’s Room, a compelling drama about a shattered family trying to pick up the pieces that draws much of its strength…
