Yuppies hit the bottle, too. That’s the lesson of When a Man Loves a Woman, in which pretty Meg Ryan falls through a glass shower door, sweats out detox and fights to reclaim alienated husband Andy Garcia–all without messing up her hair or smudging her makeup. This is another gooey…
In Spike Lee’s sunny re-creation of Bedford-Stuyvesant circa 1974, laughing kids jump rope and play stoopball on spotless sidewalks. There’s always a parking place for the family car in front of the tidy brownstone. The neighbors may beef at each other about a little misplaced trash, but there’s not a…
Ray Liotta does not bullshit, and he has zero tolerance for those who do. As a result, if you persist in asking him bullshit questions, you will be rattled. Not because of the 38-year-old’s spectacularly intense gaze (the dominant image of such diverse films as Something Wild and Dominick &…
It’s no surprise that Cyril Collard’s Savage Nights became an instant cult hit when it was released in France in October 1992. This blunt autobiographical portrait of youthful narcissism and recklessness in the age of sexual peril was the first European film to confront the AIDS epidemic head-on. Not only…
Glenn Gould, the eccentric Canadian pianist and celebrated hermit, would be a tough nut for any filmmaker to crack. As a child prodigy who could play Bach before he could read, Gould sat next to the radio, transfixed by Toscanini. But later he announced: “I just don’t like the sound…
Because of dazzling special effects and a funny, bloodcurdling villain called the Trickster (he looks like a Mohawk warrior freaked out on acid but talks like a Phi Beta Kappa), the witty techno-fantasy Brainscan could be the teen hit of the spring. But there’s something else here, too–a distinction between…
At first glimpse, Iain Softley’s Backbeat looks like a gritty trifle aimed at nostalgic Beatles buffs. It dusts off the old story of Stu Sutcliffe, John Lennon’s best friend in Liverpool, who played bass with the group from 1959 to 1961. A halfhearted musician, Sutcliffe found his head turned by…
John Waters may have grown up, but he hasn’t gone straight. In his days as an enfant terrible, the most notorious moviemaker in Baltimore served up raw sensation, black comedy and low camp to fringe audiences who prided themselves on all manner of deviance. Those raucous midnight screenings of Pink…
If the Manson Family hadn’t stumbled across Sharon Tate, maybe Roman Polanski would be making movies for the Disney Channel. As it is, this once-fascinating artiste of the cinema has turned his personal life into a trashy novel and his mercifully infrequent movies into guided tours of his own sour…
The ironically titled Belle Epoque (“Beautiful Age”), winner of the most recent Oscar for Best Foreign Film, is a playful Spanish sex farce that unfolds during the brief honeymoon between the bloodless overthrow of the Spanish monarchy in 1931 and the rise of the Fascists five years later in the…
The first installment of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Three Colors Trilogy” is called Blue, and the Polish filmmaker says it represents the French ideal of liberty. But before we get to any kind of liberty, we get a powerful dose of imprisonment–the self-imposed, emotional imprisonment of a young woman who has seen…
This is a strange time for Hollywood to revive newspaper movies. Despite their obvious saintliness, reporters rank just north of lawyers and child molesters on the nation’s current list of heroes–and I’m not talking here only of the “Elvis Shot JFK” brand of journalism. These days, the public–and the White…
Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, the Italian brothers who co-directed flinty, passionate films like Padre Padrone and The Night of Shooting Stars in the late Seventies and early Eighties, probably haven’t gone soft in the head. But Fiorile, which traces the legend of a family curse through two centuries of domestic…
The idea for Twenty Bucks probably came from Max Ophuls’s sparkling 1950 comedy La Ronde, but its prickly sensibility is pure 1990s. Rather than chase the flame of love, as Ophuls did, first-time director Keva Rosenfeld follows a pivotal twenty-dollar bill from person to person to person, with amusing results…
The youngish filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen might do well to come out into the light once in a while. As it is, their parochial, stubbornly adolescent view of life seems thrown together entirely from the bits and pieces of the old movies floating around in their heads, cemented by…
In Barry Levinson’s Jimmy Hollywood, an unemployed actor finally gets his shot at five minutes of TV fame by casting himself as a real-life anticrime vigilante. Sound familiar? Hero at Large, a lukewarm 1980 comedy with John Ritter, played the same hand. The feisty protagonist this time around is Joe…
Like most soap operas, Claude Miller’s The Accompanist covers familiar ground. It is the winter of 1942-1943. The Nazis occupy Paris. And the ethical tug-of-war between the French Resistance fighters and the Vichy collaborationists is taking on ever darker tones. Still, director Miller wants us to believe that the problems…
You’ll never take Lieutenant Frank Drebin, the bumbling flatfoot of the Naked Gun movies, for one of the major thinkers of the twentieth century. Combining the cold solemnity of Joe Friday with the ineptitude of Inspector Clouseau, he scatters dumb non sequiturs like confetti in the streets of Los Angeles,…
For the oglers in the crowd, the attraction of John Duigan’s Sirens will be the movie debut of statuesque swimsuit model Elle MacPherson–sans swimsuit. For everyone else, there is no attraction, unless it comes as news to you that a straitlaced Anglican priest of the 1930s and his prim wife…
Well-heeled suburbia on Christmas Eve is not the most dangerous venue on the planet, but in The Ref it becomes “the fifth circle of hell” for a brainy burglar on the lam. Ted Demme’s bawdy domestic comedy fairly shouts “high concept,” and there’s no point in arguing with witty writers…
Shirley MacLaine may believe she was Dolly Madison or Mary Todd Lincoln in a previous life, but right now her only shot at First Ladyhood comes in a hot-and-cold comedy called Guarding Tess. The widow of a beloved president, Tess Carlisle is regarded by all America as a living monument…
Vietnam’s nascent film industry does not yet command the world’s attention, but in this country an amazing first feature by 32-year-old Tran Anh Hung may catch the eye of Oliver North as well as that of Oliver Stone. The Scent of Green Papaya has already won the Camera d’Or prize…
