There’s a junkie brilliance to Mission: Impossible that manages to out-shine the sparkling white teeth of its improbably smarmy star and producer, Tom Cruise. It reaches a level of such unregulated shamelessness that it easily crosses the line from schlocky fun to genuine camp. The movie doesn’t make any logical…

AMC’s The Grand–the Gotham City of film-exhibition venues–officially opened its doors in May 1995 with its inaugural movie, Die Hard with a Vengeance. One year later, The Grand can lay claim to unofficially opening the doors to something else as well–an unstoppable movie-house feeding frenzy that has seen three additional…

There is virtually no doubt in my mind that the opening scene of Twister is more terrifying than being trapped in an actual tornado. As a small farming family rushes to its storm cellar to escape the approaching maelstrom, the sense of wrenching danger comes off in two ways: first…

You have to wonder what compels capable actors–aside from pure greed, of course–to want to appear in franchise entertainment packages like Flipper. After all, it’s been predigested and massaged so much it hardly qualifies as a legitimate movie. Rather, it is an extended anecdote–or at best, a shaggy-dog story. There…

The buzz on Heaven’s Prisoners, the screen adaptation of James Lee Burke’s novel, has been so miserable for such a long time that its release date has been changed more than Hillary Clinton’s hair style. (Not surprisingly, it’s been sitting on the shelf since roughly the Bush Administration.) I tend…

When I walked out of a screening of Dead Man Walking last January, I didn’t quite know what to think. Here was a movie written and directed by Tim Robbins, and starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn–three of the most unabashed liberals Hollywood has to offer–that did not allow easy…

In 1975, Ellen Burstyn–who’d won the Academy Award for best actress the previous year–caused a stir when she publicly decried the lack of good female roles in movies, and encouraged her sisters in cinema to boycott the Oscars by refusing to nominate, vote for, or participate in the actress and…

Here’s news that could presage a disturbing trend at the movies: Two films opening in Dallas within days of each other both deal with nebbish murderers whose decisions to poison family members, friends, and enemies alike form the basis of comedy. But The Last Supper is merely a peculiarly unfunny…

In Rebel Without a Cause, James Dean, when asked by an adult what he’s rebelling against, spits back, “Whaddaya got?” And with those words, Dean became a voice for his day’s youth culture, an aimless teen looking for some tangible image to which he could cling to justify the emotions…

The standard definition of “documentary” seems inadequate to describe Mark Rappaport’s intriguing new nonfiction film, From the Journals of Jean Seberg. It doesn’t subscribe to the usual documentary conventions, coming closer in style and structure to performance art. Although it features clips from Seberg’s films, it also has plenty of…

Before the USA Film Festival’s arrival last year–its Silver Anniversary–the pre-festival buzz was a mix of hype, anticipation, and dread. Its young, newly anointed artistic director, Alonso Duralde, had held the post for only four months, didn’t have a shred of experience, and was forced to start from scratch in…

Film history is strewn with the corpses of underappreciated artists and overappreciated craftsmen. This is not a point over which to become sanguine; rather, it is a simple fact of cinematic life, predictable as the tides. What is less predictable, however, is which directors will fall into which category–and when…

Mardis Note: The 26th Annual USA Film Festival runs Thursday, April 18 through Thursday, April 25. All screenings are at the AMC Glen Lakes Theatre, 9450 North Central Expressway at Walnut Hill Lane. All tickets, available exclusively through Ticketmaster, are $6.50, except for opening-night tickets to The Grass Harp, which…

The original screen version of Jane Eyre, released in 1944–with Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles, both at the height of their powers–is one of the minor masterpieces of the studio system’s Golden Age. Like all the best Victorian pictures of the time (The Heiress, Gaslight, and others) the entire production…

Most domestic dramas fall into two types: The profound kind tends to be confrontational and even loud, where the true characters of the participants are forged in an intense furnace of conflict, and big emotions get played out for everyone to see. The gentle kind has conflict, too, but the…

As Antonia’s Line begins, Antonia (Willeke van Ammelrooy) is 88, and fully aware that she will be dead by the end of the day. As a kind of final purification, she fondly recounts the events of her life, beginning with her return 40 years ago to the village in the…

Diabolique, the black-and-white 1955 French classic from director Henri Georges Clouzot, seems like a murder thriller, but it’s much closer in tone to a ghost story. The callous headmaster of a boys’ school cheats on his prim wife Mia (played by the director’s own wife, Vera Clouzot) with the more…

Among my most cherished television memories are the outrageous movie parodies shown almost weekly on the old Carol Burnett Show. Burnett’s staff had a genius for writing those bits–distilling a two-hour movie down to its essential characters, events, and motivations, then extracting from what was left 15 minutes worth of…

The movies of Spike Lee must present something of a nightmare to the mainstream liberal mind. He’s the most confrontational, radical-left political filmmaker of his time, and a personal friend of the most powerful pair of Michaels in entertainment (Jackson and Jordan) to boot. As a director, he glides comfortably–and…

Movies hold a special, sentimental place in Giuseppe Tornatore’s heart. His second feature, 1988’s Cinema Paradiso, was the loving counterpoint to more somber films like The Last Picture Show. By providing escape from the dangers and despair of rural living in post-war Italy, moviegoing served two functions: one as entertainment,…

Mike Nichols’ new film, The Birdcage, has most of the trappings of a typical domestic comedy: Val (David Futterman) returns from college to announce to his father, Armand (Robin Williams), that he’s engaged to the daughter of a right-wing U.S. senator (Gene Hackman). The senator is embroiled in a controversy,…

Conventional wisdom says that the Coen Brothers–Joel, who directs, and Ethan, who produces–can do no wrong artistically. Of course, that’s not true. Barton Fink, with its arrogant antihero wittily subverting the idea that the creative process can take the place of real-life experience, was a generally dense and often obtuse…