If you decide to catch only one of this summer’s zillion-dollar action movies, make it The Rock. The high-profile Simpson/Bruckheimer production team, Bad Boys director Michael Bay and a battalion of stunt people blow up even more stuff–Humvees, yellow Ferraris, cable cars, a Navy weapons depot, some big chunks of…
If you want to get all star-struck, it’s probably a good idea to aim a little higher than the assorted frauds, mannequins, paralyzed junkies and ten-cent philosophers who drifted into Andy Warhol’s orbit in downtown New York in the late Sixties. At Max’s Kansas City in those days, the signature…
For more than half a century, science-fiction movies have been asking if there’s intelligent life in outer space. The Arrival makes you wonder how much of it is left on Earth. Imagine Charlie Sheen as one Zane Zaminski, a goofy science nerd with a bad crewcut, fogged-up glasses and a…
The silly season is upon us, so the best you can hope for down at the local multiplex these days is silliness with a touch of style, a dash of sense and an absence of tornadoes. Enter Dragonheart, which combines the romance of huge, toothsome beasts with the classic movie…
Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell is being billed as Japan’s coming-out party in the world of big-time animation, as well as another visionary take on the future. But before cartoon freaks get too carried away, it might be useful to note that Oshii’s drawing style can be stiff, cold…
Good morning, Mr. Phelps…Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to play second fiddle to Tom Cruise, because he’s the star and the producer. And to inflate a pretty entertaining old TV series into a movie monster that cost more to make than all the broadcast episodes put…
Seen any good Icelandic movies lately? How about surreal Icelandic road movies that begin at a fish market in Tokyo and wind up with the principals eating roasted rams’ testicles in a raucous country-and-Western bar plunked down about nine yards from the North Pole? Fridrik Thor Fridriksson’s Cold Fever is…
If you’re in the market for your very own Doppler radar set or a pickup truck with real cojones, Twister is a pretty good place to go shopping. Ostensibly, Jan De Bont’s big, loud, expensive action movie is about the destructive power of tornadoes and the folks who chase stormy…
Jim Jarmusch’s Old West is no place for John Wayne. Inspired by Native American pantheism, the English mystic poet William Blake and the heretofore unnoticed connection between the two, America’s most unpredictable filmmaker has come up with a dark, dreamy Western called Dead Man in which the “frontier” is not…
Benjamin Ross’s black comedy The Young Poisoner’s Handbook is a relentlessly nasty piece of goods that never hesitates to make a kind of existential antihero out of its protagonist–a brilliant, psychopathic fourteen-year-old who poisons his stepmother with stuff from his chemistry set and the local drugstore, gets caught, cons the…
After a suspiciously long abstention, Hollywood has finally deemed the death penalty an Important Issue once again. But the two current movies on the subject reveal the huge gap between the best minds of the “entertainment industry” and its low-rent hucksters. The good news: While redneck double murderer Sean Penn…
The supposed intrigue in Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon is that it gives Western audiences a rare, sympathetic glimpse of contemporary Iran–a country and a society demonized here since the late ayatollah took those hostages and the evening news started showing demonstrators stomping on the American flag in the public…
That old growing-up-and-moving-out thing is the coldest of dead horses, and anyone who can actually shoot a little life into the carcass deserves a round of applause from kids of all ages in the balcony. Enter Matt Reeves, born on Long Island, raised in Santa Monica and a moviemaker since…
For those of us who didn’t grow up black in the segregated rural South, it’s hard to tell how much of Once Upon a Time…When We Were Colored is real-life inspiration and how much is nostalgia tinted by wishful thinking. In any event, this is the black feel-good movie of…
The unlikely heroes of our story are a human geek named Mike and two wisecracking robots, all condemned by a mad scientist, Dr. Clayton Forrester, to watching really awful Hollywood movies in outer space. Under the circumstances, you’d talk back to the screen, too–loudly and often. Still, that doesn’t quite…
The confirmed sentimentalist Franco Zeffirelli could probably tenderize a side of horse meat by pointing his camera at it–a gift the political advertisers might envy. But that makes him the wrong man for the job when it comes to a new version of Jane Eyre. Charlotte Bronte’s oft-filmed high school…
The assumption by conservatives that Hollywood is some kind of decadent liberal underworld has never been supported by the facts. On the contrary, this hidebound old institution has always been fueled by one thing only–sheer profit motive–and it has never hesitated to buckle under pressure from outside powers that be…
When the Republicans bellow for family films, they probably aren’t thinking of David O. Russell’s stuff. But moviegoers wondering if they’ll ever get to laugh again in the yuk-free zone of the Nineties need only catch Russell’s Flirting With Disaster to have their faith restored. Two years ago this bright…
The martyred teenager Anne Frank has been memorialized by playwrights, filmmakers and historians, and her famous diary, perhaps the most extraordinary single document of the Holocaust, has sold 25 million copies since 1947 and has been translated into 54 languages. But Jon Blair’s poignant Anne Frank Remembered, which just won…
At the beginning of Primal Fear, an alleged courtroom thriller, defense attorney Martin Vail, portrayed by Richard Gere, is unctuous, facile. In conversations with a journalist (Jack Connerman) whose sole purpose in the script is to serve as an excuse for a flood of exposition, Vail–a former Chicago state’s attorney,…
Girl 6 has slipped into the theaters without the fanfare that ordinarily accompanies a new Spike Lee movie. That may be just as well, because this tart little comedy about a struggling actress who makes ends meet by serving up phone sex has none of Lee’s usual in-your-face rhetoric or…
When Exorcist director William Friedkin remade Henri-Georges Clouzot’s great existential thriller The Wages of Fear in 1977, he dedicated Sorcerer to Clouzot, as a respectful student might. By contrast, the perpetrators of a new version of Diabolique, which is the late M. Clouzot’s most famous film, don’t even bother acknowledging…
