Radioland Murders is the kind of dippy, overheated show-biz fantasy that besmirches the good name of slapstick. It doesn’t do much for the long-cherished romance of radio, either. The operative cliche here–and it operates overtime–is the oldest one of all: The show must go on. The time is 1939. The…
The first (and maybe the last) thing anyone will want to know about The Specialist is that an hour and a half passes before Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone pretend to copulate in the shower. Until then, what they do is model expensive sunglasses down in Miami and talk on…
Bad scholarship, new-age fantasy and publishers’ avarice have collided to produce the current vogue for Nostradamus, the sixteenth-century French physician and astrologer who is said to have predicted everything from Nazi Germany to AIDS to the JFK assassination. What he didn’t predict is that a movie this awful would one…
The career (if you can call it that) of Edward G. Wood Jr. has become the stuff of cult legend because the man is widely acknowledged as the worst movie director of all time. In his 1950s heyday, such as it was, even Hollywood’s lowest shlockmeisters wouldn’t hire him. If…
For my money, the savage and savagely funny crime films of Quentin Tarantino are a welcome antidote not only to those witless action heroes who give off baby talk as they tear up the joint, but also to Hollywood’s current wave of sweetness, its creeping Gumpmania. Let the self-appointed morals…
This autumn, baseball fans are getting too little World Series and too much Ken Burns. In all likelihood, the last thing the strike-stricken multitudes need right now is another gooey baseball movie that fields the usual lineup of sentimental caricatures. But that’s what The Scout is. Apparently, Hollywood hasn’t figured…
Until now, no one has mistaken the fine-featured, sublimely gifted actress Meryl Streep for a regular on American Gladiators. But in The River Wild, there’s not only muscle in Streep’s performance, there’s plenty of it on her frame, too. In this rip-roaring adventure, the beefed-up star can shoot a set…
Boaz Yakin’s Fresh has its heart in the right place, but it takes a bewildering wrong turn. First, the acceptable news: Yakin again shows us the dangers and sorrows facing a good kid on the streets of the ghetto. Twelve-year-old Fresh (Sean Nelson) lives with his aunt and eleven cousins…
In the great scheme of evil–where the schemers always out-think the victims–the TV quiz-show scandals of the 1950s are minor infractions. In view of later events like Watergate, Iran-Contra or the O.J. Simpson case, we Americans can hardly be expected to get all worked up about a couple of TV…
Whenever moviegoers do time in prison–or the nuthouse–they almost always run across that one transcendent inmate who sets the others free with his soaring spirit. He may be called Cool Hand Luke or Randall Patrick McMurphy or Papillon, but he’s always the soul of liberty–and the bane of authority. He…
If you want to move up in the superhero pecking order, as Belgian hulk Jean-Claude Van Damme does, you’d better outslug Sly and outshoot Schwarzenegger. You must snap more necks than Steven Seagal, and just in case you hear Chuck Norris closing fast, it’s wise to keep your killer kicks…
Bruce Beresford, the Australian-born filmmaker who specializes in cultural collisions, has been very quiet since Driving Miss Daisy dominated Oscar night a couple of years back. Those who saw Rich in Love, the only movie he’s made since then, are in pretty select company. More likely you remember this director…
Transplant the classic Western Shane to a ranch in modern-day Argentina. Spice it up with local politics. Add horses. And sheep. And freight trains. There. You now have a pretty fair take on Adolfo Aristarain’s A Place in the World, an engaging coming-of-age story wherein the filmmaker also manages to…
Before last week’s Denver preview screening of A Simple Twist of Fate, theater employees handed out little packets of Kleenex to the audience. Cute studio promotion, no? Prepare yourself, the gesture said, for a real tearjerker, a rare opportunity to bawl your eyes out in the dark and go home…
It seems a bit early for hotshot director Quentin Tarantino to beget a school of imitators, but then, instant genius is a cheap commodity in the slam-bang world of pop culture. Roger Avary is Tarantino’s pal from his days as a video-store clerk in California, as well as his writing…
Raining Stones, a bittersweet comedy by Great Britain’s Ken Loach, is another bow to the tenacity of working-class people trying to keep their heads above water in hard times. Working in the same sort of grimy, northern city (Manchester, this time) where an earlier generation of British “kitchen sink” directors…
Those who have followed Oliver Stone’s bombastic career know that the reckless loudmouth in him usually gets the best of the deep thinker. Every intriguing conspiracy theory in JFK seemed to be inundated by a flood of bilge. Every pointed comment about the greed of the Eighties in Wall Street…
Bruce Willis, psychoanalyst. That’s the first hurdle audiences must clear at Color of Night, and it’s not easy. Imagine Sylvester Stallone in the role of, say, a golden-hearted half-wit from Alabama who stumbles into the lives of presidents and pop stars. Envision John Wayne as Billy the Kid. Now think…
When a moviemaker wants to dabble in American social issues–but avoid confronting them head-on–the common refuge is the 1950s. That decade, growing gauzier and less distinct by the moment, has been reduced to a neat set of cliches suitable to the purposes of almost any storyteller burning to make a…
When we first see old Chu, the bewildered father at the center of Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman, he’s doing what he knows best–steaming fresh fish in his sun-dappled garden, carefully roasting a just-plucked chicken, carving vegetables into exquisite rose-petal shapes. Lee observes these rituals in such concentrated, silent…
It has taken a couple of weeks to catch up with Andrew Bergman’s new comedy, but the rewards are still there. It Could Happen to You, a New York fairy tale about a sweet-tempered cop and a good-as-gold waitress who split a $4 million lottery jackpot, lightens up a bit…
If you liked Whit Stillman’s earlier comedy Metropolitan, in which a group of lamebrained debutantes and their sniffy dates sit around a Park Avenue living room drinking their parents’ whiskey and pondering the meaning of life, you’ll probably like Barcelona. The blue-blooded Stillman remains the only moviemaker in America who…
