Trends in movie themes are peculiar things. Sometimes they don’t manifest themselves in predictable or expected ways, but they’re there right on the screen, looking you straight in the face, begging to be noticed. Case in point: Less than a week after Dallas’ first and only showing of Abel Ferrera’s…

The Music of Chance, a little-seen film directed by Philip Haas, is an enigma of sorts, but a fascinating one: After a card sharp loses a poker game, he and a friend must pay off their debt by building a stone wall that serves no purpose. You keep expecting the…

Jackie Chan, the most popular screen actor in the world, doesn’t make movies. He is his movies–a one-man film industry, kicking and spinning and leaping his way into cinemas all over the planet. For more than 15 years, he’s helped define and develop the Hong Kong film community, appearing in…

Many actors–hell, maybe even all actors–can easily outdistance Christian Slater for on-screen magnetism. He’s gotten away with that bargain-basement Nicholson ripoff since Heathers, but he’s never been able to equal Nicholson’s evil energy–the devilish charm that makes Nicholson captivating in almost any part. When the story doesn’t demand of him…

As a rule, I oppose giving away the endings of movies–not because of some vague notion of devotion to the film itself, but because it isn’t necessary. If a movie is bad, it’s usually bad all the way through, and divulging the climax is pointless. Rules were made to be…

Anthony has spent the last few weeks in a mental hospital. Dignan, Anthony’s best friend, wants to get him out, and has planned an elaborate escape: Anthony ties his bed sheets together, shimmies out the window to his pal waiting below, and together they make a daring, daylight break for…

“I’ll tell you something,” Bob Musgrave whispers while standing in Goff’s Hamburgers, a curiously highbrow dive off the Tollway. “Back in the ’70s, the owner, Harvey Goff, used to keep this side door to the restaurant open, and every once in a while, he’d shoot a .38 slug into a…

“Oscar-caliber” is the kind of backhanded cliche that film critics dole out at year’s end like gruel at a soup kitchen. (Critics hope to guilt Academy voters into seeing things their way or suffering the consequences–whatever those might be.) The plaudit, so overused to begin with, is faint praise at…

When the new Ridley Scott film, White Squall, really gets rolling, it lives up to the energetic image of its title. The sea rages on like some great, angry ogre of wind and water as a schooner–a floating Outward Bound high school called the Albatross–is mercilessly batted about by a…

The surprisingly strong, sensitively handled feminist themes that run through the films of Chinese director Zhang Yimou have earned him praise around the world and vilification at home. In Ju Dou, a Double Indemnity-style drama set during the 1920s, he told the story of a peasant girl who dared to…

If Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino aren’t careful, they’ll risk overstaying their critical welcome even before they’ve had a chance to get really cozy. Both directors’ careers have followed arcs that quickly intersected: Each directed independent, critically lauded feature debuts (Rodriguez, his $8,000 miracle El Mariachi; Tarantino, the festival-circuit hit…

For a few minutes at the beginning of Mr. Holland’s Opus, it might occur to you that if George Bailey, the Joblike hero played by Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life, were a teacher rather than an S&L owner, this film might have been moot. Glenn Holland (Richard Dreyfuss)…

I enjoy movies. You might be surprised how often I have to prove the truth of that simple declarative statement. “Critics are too…critical,” people often gripe. “We go to the movies for escapism, not for art. You never like anything.” Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Oh, most…

In an age when the British Royal Family is more of a sick joke than it is a necessary monarchical body, it would seem to follow that many of Shakespeare’s regal tragedies (Henry IV, Richard II, etc.) become noteworthy for their historical significance even as they lose their obvious relevance…

It’s comforting to think of leadership as an innate ability among certain men and women, a talent much like any other, such as playing the harpsichord or doing long division in your head. “A born leader,” you often hear, as if no training were involved to demonstrate proficiency at it…

It’s the old dilemma: Spectacle vs. substance–which do you choose for a movie? Ideally, you choose both–even if in unequal doses. Jurassic Park, for all the backlash it finally endured (ranging from gripes that the special effects dominated the actors to the complaint that there were only 10 minutes of…

Heat, writer-director Michael Mann’s heavy-hitting crime drama, has some eye-catching images, a wonderfully ambiguous mood, and numerous detailed characters ably performed by a great cast. You have to admire the brazen magnitude it’s reaching for, even though the film’s impressive scope ultimately works against it. The central narrative–about the symbiotic…

I wasn’t much of a fan of Sean Penn’s first effort as a writer-director, The Indian Runner. The film, a mood piece about a man’s return from Vietnam and his big brother’s attempts to understand him, had the kind of problems you’d expect from many freshman efforts; it was long…

As Sabrina opens, a woman’s voice purrs in breathless tones: “On the north shore of Long Island there was a big house–a castle almost,” and it’s clear you’re being set up for a fairy tale. The only thing missing is an overstuffed, gilt-edged, leather-bound book with large gothic letters spelling…

Nick of Time begins with the type of set-up that should be the makings of high drama: The young daughter of drab businessman Gene Watson (Johnny Depp) is kidnaped, and will be killed unless he assassinates the governor (Marsha Mason). The difference from any other movie is that this one…

Although ostensibly a film, Carrington, about painter Dora Carrington (Emma Thompson) and her decades-long platonic love affair with writer Lytton Strachey (Jonathan Pryce), is pregnant with literary conceits: the nature of true love as spiritual, not physical; the interdependence of strong creative personalities; the anti-Victorian ethic of early bohemianism. The…

In Milton’s Paradise Lost, as God casts him out of paradise, Lucifer declares, “Better to reign in hell than serve in heav’n,” a sentiment not unlike ones expressed by the vicious lowlifes that infest Martin Scorsese’s brilliant new film, Casino. The idea of going legitimate–at least the way normal people…