Documentarian Errol Morris is by far best known for his 1988 feature, The Thin Blue Line, which is often described as the only film that ever got an innocent man off death row. But he got his start with a very different sort of material: His first two films, Gates…

Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee has carved out a place for himself as our leading director of comedies of manners. His first three films–Pushing Hands (1991), The Wedding Banquet (1993), and Eat, Drink, Man, Woman (1994)–combined humor with touches of pathos, while shedding a light on modern Chinese and Chinese-American family…

The true-life incident of the Cottingley Fairies is so full of possibilities, so thought-provoking and hilarious at once, that it’s amazing it’s never been filmed before. Making up for lost time, the story has suddenly appeared (on its 80th anniversary) as the basis for two films simultaneously. Photographing Fairies, with…

Jennifer Jason Leigh follows up one of her smallest and weakest roles–in A Thousand Acres–with a far more challenging and formidable performance in Washington Square. This new film version of Henry James’ 1880 short novel chronicles the courtship of a wealthy girl who has no obvious attractive qualities. But the…

The ’70s were so awash in ’50s nostalgia that it’s surprising Dan Wakefield’s 1970 bestseller Going All the Way is only now turning up in big-screen form. Of course, not all ’50s coming-of-age stories are the same: Unlike The Last Picture Show and American Graffiti–which pretty much dominated the genre…

Every film adaptation of a preexisting work has its own unique set of problems; in the case of director Jocelyn Moorhouse’s A Thousand Acres, the problem is compounded. Not only was Jane Smiley’s 1991 novel a Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller with a large number of (presumably) devoted fans, but the book…

Welcome to one of the slowest film weekends of the year, second only to the first week in January, when all the classy holiday releases are clogging up the available screens. This is usually when distributors put out their saddest mistakes, looking for a few quick bucks on the way…

Time has a way of slipping by when you’re not looking, but don’t worry: While you’re distracted, studio executives are keeping their usual keen eyes on the calendar, tabulating the simple economic arithmetic of boomer nostalgia. Hmmm…1997 minus 1957 equals 40 years. Forty years of nostalgic forgetfulness multiplied by the…

It’s no secret that the “new” Jackie Chan releases in the U.S. aren’t really new at all. In fact, they’re not even showing up in chronological order: While New Line is issuing Jackie’s more current stuff in order, Miramax is putting out the star’s relatively recent back catalog out of…

At first glance, the new Japanese comedy Shall We Dance? appears to be an Asian remake of the Australian hit Strictly Ballroom–but, in fact, the similarities are only surface-deep (and just barely that). Part of the difference is rooted in the cultural gap between the two countries, but wider yet…

It’s late in the day on June 9, and I’m due to talk to John Woo about Face/Off, his new action film with John Travolta and Nicolas Cage. We are meeting at a sound facility in Los Angeles, where the director is only now finishing the final touches. Woo’s still…

First, the good news: Unlike most action film sequels, Speed 2: Cruise Control is not a mere retread of the original. Now the bad news: Better it had been. Director Jan De Bont made a dazzling debut with the 1994 Speed. His riveting direction of action triumphed over a hackneyed,…

It wouldn’t be completely fair to say that the hits produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer from 1983 through 1996 are stylistically interchangeable. But it wouldn’t be so awfully unfair either: A homogeneous, auteurial touch runs from Flashdance (1983) through Top Gun (1986), Beverly Hills Cop II (1987), and…

Sidney Lumet has had enough ups and downs in his long, prolific career that it’s never safe to count him out–even after two disappointing films in a row, A Stranger Among Us (1992) and Guilty as Sin (1993). Even the greatest directors frequently falter in their seventies, so it’s pleasant…

Over the past five years, action star Jean-Claude Van Damme has become one of America’s leading importers of foreign talent. In 1993, he hired Hong Kong action ace John Woo to direct Hard Target. For last year’s Maximum Risk, he brought over Ringo Lam. And now he has used a…

Although Russian director Sergei Bodrov has made half a dozen features and won a fistful of awards since the mid-’80s, he is virtually unknown in the United States–despite having lived in Los Angeles on and off for several years. Orion Classics is now distributing his 1996 film, Prisoner of the…

Nobody is going to seriously accuse writer-director Alexander Payne of being chickenshit. For his first feature, the hilarious Citizen Ruth, he has not only 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 made…

For his fourth feature, Boyz N the Hood director John Singleton has chosen to re-create the 1923 Rosewood massacre, during which the white population of Sumner, Florida, went on a three-day rampage and destroyed the neighboring black town of Rosewood, killing many of its inhabitants. Perhaps reimagine is a better…

In the two decades since Eraserhead, David Lynch has established himself as American cinema’s premier surrealist, our own Wizard of Weird. Although his first two Hollywood projects–The Elephant Man (1980) and Dune (1984)–had room only around the edges for the sort of spooky shit at which he excels, his personal…

You’d think that after more than a decade in this business, I’d have learned one simple, sanity-preserving rule: January and February are excellent times for a movie critic to take a vacation. Not because the airfares are low or the weather sucks, but because what a critic must endure professionally…

The narrative of Andre Techine’s Thieves opens moments shortly after the story’s climax. A gangster’s corpse is brought to his isolated home; his widow grieves; his 8-year-old son silently assimilates the news; a few mourners arrive. The climactic scene is the bungled caper during which the gangster has been shot…

Hamlet (Kenneth Branagh) is Prince of Denmark. After his father (Richard Briers) dies, his uncle Claudius (Derek Jacobi) takes the throne and marries Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude (Julie Christie). When the late king’s ghost reveals he was murdered by Claudius, Hamlet must decide which course of action to take. Meanwhile, he…