Six Ways to Sunday is director Adam Bernstein’s second theatrical film, so it’s a little early to attempt a coherent analysis of his career. On the surface, this young mobster story couldn’t be more different from his earlier effort, the egregiously unfunny It’s Pat, which foolishly bloated Julia Sweeney’s one-gag…

Back in 1993, Disney released Swing Kids, a dead-earnest portrait of rebellious German jazz fans during the Third Reich. This bizarre hybrid–a blend of Footloose and Schindler’s List, of The Dead Poets Society and The Diary of Anne Frank–pitted big bands vs. armbands; it was a classic case of high-concept…

The last decade has been an extraordinary period for Iranian cinema: Restricted by minuscule budgets, filmmakers have been forced to fall back on exactly those qualities that Hollywood thinks it can afford to ignore–character insight, social analysis, and unadorned storytelling. The success of Abbas Kiarostami, Iran’s best-known moviemaker, at international…

“Honey,” Ellen Burstyn’s character in The Last Picture Show remarks to her daughter, “everything gets old if you do it often enough.” The specific activity she had in mind was sex, but the maxim applies at least as appropriately to genre conventions in movies, which even the casual moviegoer can…

For Cruel Intentions, his directorial debut, writer Roger Kumble has come up with the clever idea of updating Choderlos de Laclos’ durable 18th-century novel Dangerous Liaisons. With its focus on amoral protagonists who use sex as a tool to manipulate innocents, the book caused a scandal when it was first…

The independent production and distribution company The Shooting Gallery probably got a lot more attention when Monica Lewinsky showed up in Washington wearing a cap with its logo than it is likely to from the release of The 24-Hour Woman, a modest, deserving film from writer-director Nancy Savoca. Savoca has…

Plot is a central problem in both Jawbreaker and Office Space, two comedies opening this week: The first has too much, and the second (and far better of the two movies) has too little. Jawbreaker’s 26-year-old writer-director, Darren Stein, says he wanted to make an homage to the films he…

The new Mel Gibson movie, Payback, is arguably the first major-studio release this year to have even a modicum of aesthetic ambition. For his directorial debut, Brian Helgeland–who won an Oscar for his screenplay for 1997’s L.A. Confidential (cowritten with director Curtis Hanson)–has chosen to adapt The Hunter, the first…

Nearly everyone–certainly every film buff–who saw the last James Bond movie, Tomorrow Never Dies, came away excited, though the film was certainly no match for Goldfinger or From Russia With Love. Audiences were buzzing, not about the gadgets or about Pierce Brosnan, but about Michelle Yeoh–the Hong Kong actress who…

Writer-director Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, the filmmaker’s adaptation of James Jones’ 1962 bestseller about the World War II battle for Guadalcanal, arrives in theaters with an almost unbearable weight of expectation. After graduating in the first class at AFI’s Advanced Film Studies program and working briefly as a…

The past year has been filled with good films…interesting films…worthwhile films. In fact there were many that I think of as being wonderful or droll or whatever. But 1998 failed to produce a single film to which the term “great” might be applied. Most years have at least one great…

Old-fashioned romantic comedies are an endangered species, and in these generally unromantic days it’s always a pleasant surprise to find a decent one like Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail. Ephron, of course, made her bones five and a half years ago with the huge hit Sleepless in Seattle, but since…

According to the sparse information available in standard reference books, Chilean expatriate director Ral Ruiz, still only in his late 50s, has made more than 100 films since 1960; apparently only 50 or so are features, but that’s still an impressive number. He has been a staple on the festival…

Here we go again. Enemy of the State is Fascism in America 1998, Chapter Four…or Five…or whatever we’re up to. It readily invites comparison to The Siege, but for better or worse its goals are more mundane. While The Siege seems like an ideological agenda driving a film, Enemy of…

American History X, a hard-edged look at American neo-Nazis, arrives in theaters with a lot of behind-the-scenes baggage: First-time director Tony Kaye has engaged in a protracted, high-profile battle with distributor-producer New Line Cinema over the film’s final form. While Kaye may have a justified grievance, this is not as…

Postwar Italy’s most heralded contribution to world cinema may have been neorealism, but its most distinctive and beloved filmmaker was Federico Fellini (1920-1993), who found his true voice when he abandoned neorealism for its polar opposite. While the conventional wisdom has Fellini moving abruptly from his neorealist roots toward a…

First, a disclaimer: Having missed last year’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, I deliberately put off seeing it until after viewing its sequel, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. That way I could view part two without prejudice and be able to judge whether IKWYDLS virgins…

Fascism is in the air…well, at least it’s on movie screens. In a two-week stretch we’ve seen old Nazis (Life Is Beautiful), neo-Nazis (American History X, due next week), old Nazis training neo-Nazis (Apt Pupil), book-burning (Pleasantville), and now, with The Siege, a story of full-blown military rule on American…

It must be math season in the film world. Recently, Darren Aronofsky’s Pi hit Dallas’ screens, and now we get Vincenzo Natali’s Cube. The connection isn’t merely in the movies’ titles–if it were, I would have cited Sphere too–but in their stories. The plots of both films rely upon mathematical…

As a professional lamenter of how “they just don’t make ’em like they used to,” I am always thrilled on those rare occasions when someone even tries to make ’em that way. So I am doubly thrilled that, with The Impostors, writer-director Stanley Tucci has tried and richly succeeded. Those…

Back in the early ’70s, when John Waters made his first splash with such low-budget gross-outs as Pink Flamingos and Multiple Maniacs, who would have guessed that someday he’d be making a Hollywood film as benevolent as Pecker? In retrospect, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. If any director has ever…

Jackie Chan’s American fans–and I include myself among them–have suffered through a nervous 1998 so far. The momentum the star earned with the 1996 release of Rumble in the Bronx has seemed to dissipate steadily: An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, the first American production to employ Chan since…