Whenever food acts as a central component in a movie, it occupies a peculiar role–probably because, since eating is something everyone can relate to, it’s a reliable way to establish common ground with the audience even though everyone’s experience with it differs. Movie food delivers gratification without calories, even when…

American Buffalo, with Dustin Hoffman and Dennis Franz parrying with playwright David Mamet’s razor-sharp dialogue, promised to be the sleeper tour de force of the season. The opportunity to see Mamet’s sharply honed lines bandied about by actors with an innate understanding of the rhythm of words should have been…

Bill Watterston, the cartoonist who created Calvin & Hobbes, was so devoted to the concept of his strip–that a little boy’s toy tiger might actually come to life, but only he could see it–that he refused to merchandise the characters. It was as if making Hobbes a real stuffed animal…

The Brady Bunch Movie was a sleeper success last year, but the film itself wasn’t quite as good as the screenplay’s primary idea: setting the film in the ’90s, yet keeping the Bradys forever in the ’70s. (The Bradys aren’t too out of it; they have their own home page.)…

There were several reasons I had not anticipated reviewing The Island of Dr. Moreau. Not the least of these was that early word on the film wasn’t exactly brimming with enthusiasm. Val Kilmer reportedly was so difficult to work with that he had the first director fired, and Marlon Brando,…

Jean-Michel Basquiat was a middle-class kid from the suburbs when he first started living in a cardboard box in a New York City park in 1979. Jean wasn’t homeless as a result of financial necessity, nor was he mentally unstable. He was, instead, an artist. Using the signature “Samo,” he…

As you watch The Spitfire Grill flicker by on the screen, it’s difficult not to ask yourself whether the writer-director, Lee David Zlotoff, honestly thought the movie he was making was a grand tragedy rather than a mere melodrama. Sure enough, as Zlotoff cautiously unfolds his sentimental tale–about a dreamy…

Although my father has hidden it well, his greatest parenting disappointment probably has been that a jock like him produced an offspring as indifferent to sports as his only son. Sure, the Olympics are great, rah-rah-rah for the college team and all that, but I must be missing something more…

John Carpenter had big-studio backing after the sleeper success of his independent thriller, Halloween, yet his follow-up film, Escape from New York, had the same cheap, low-budget look of some cheesy B-movie made by a film-school geek–which, essentially, it was. The movie was pure silliness: Could any audience in 1981…

The season began unspectacularly, with no sign of questionable new trends. Then slowly but surely, this summer’s insidious onslaught made itself known. First, Eddie Murphy’s Nutty Professor, an obese research scientist, discovers a “secret formula” through which he can re-create himself by transforming his own DNA. Next, in Multiplicity, Michael…

The era of the mom-and-pop video store has pretty much died in Dallas, with the thrilling exception of four stalwart independents: Tapelenders on Cedar Springs; Premiere Video at Mockingbird and Central; and Forbidden Books and Alternative Videos in Exposition Park. Genre is the operative word at each of these valuable…

The Scottish accents are so thick in Trainspotting that for the first few minutes you’re not sure the characters are really saying what you’re hearing. Could it be–in the politically correct ’90s–that the central characters of a film are extolling the virtues of heroin addiction? Can these smart, interesting, vigorous…

A Time to Kill, like just about everything seeping from John Grisham’s popular pen, points up the author’s two weaknesses as storyteller: plotting, and everything else. In this fairly routine courtroom drama, a cocky young Mississippi attorney named Jake Brigance (Matthew McConaughey), craving success and adulation, agrees to represent Carl…

Peter Jackson’s brief resume as a writer-director is about as impressive as any independent filmmaker. Three genre films–Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles, and Dead-Alive–preceded his art-house breakthrough Heavenly Creatures, but they all bespoke a peculiar, highly individualized voice. Whether you like his movies or not, you have to acknowledge how…

For me, there is no movie moment that has ever approximated the satisfaction I felt when, on my 12th birthday, I saw Death Star blown apart for the first time. In my mind, I was witnessing something that could only be called cataclysmic–tempered by the pure-adrenaline joy of seeing the…

For the past five years, Eddie Murphy’s career has been one of the lingering reminders of how the hollow successes of the ’80s didn’t quite translate into the ’90s. His two biggest hits financially–the first two Beverly Hills Cop movies–were part of the slick, shallow style of movie-making pioneered by…

Because some of my friends have gotten married, I’ve had–on rare occasion–the opportunity to attend a few bachelor parties. Mostly, that means cheap beer and even cheaper nude dancers. I’ve seen a variety of sexual come-ons at these events, designed to titillate the hoi polloi: pole-licking, role-playing, hip-grinding of all…

A shooting, a base closing, a school controversy, an interracial romance, a 40-year-old murder. These are among the numerous prosaic events that, when taken alone, don’t amount to much, but put together constitute the elements of life in a dying border town. Yet these dull, dreary distractions that seem to…

It must be liberating for an actor to work with directors who routinely say, “You can ham it up all you want–there’s no way you can overact this role.” It must be equally comforting for a director to work with an actor willing to heed that advice. When you add…

The Phantom opens with a scene that contains a device I refer to as “The Axiom of the Rickety Bridge.” The rule is this: In any movie where there’s a creaky, handmade bridge–usually strung together with what appear to be vines and scraps of discarded lumber, swinging precariously hundreds of…

Zane (Charlie Sheen), the hero of the new sci-fi film The Arrival, is a geeky, quasi-paranoid radio astronomer. Zane works at the Jet Propulsion Lab for the SETI project (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), and spends most of his time aiming a large parabolic satellite dish to the heavens and listening…

After the groundwork laid already this summer by Twister and Mission: Impossible, there’s no use or point in mentioning that in DragonHeart the plot-surprises are few, or that you can expect astounding special effects. (Hollywood is three-for-three so far.) But DragonHeart succeeds, in parts, where those other films don’t–as a…