Evidently, the French-Canadian writer-director Denys Arcand has a tremendous capacity for dividing the art-movie/film-fest crowd into enemy camps. Arcand’s fans see him as a vibrant wit with a supple mind, capable of juggling many ideas at once and spicing his quirky analyses of contemporary society with playful asides and deadeye…
William H. Macy’s plain-vanilla features and hang-dog screen demeanor have served him well. Who could resist him as the clueless car dealer who hatched the disastrous kidnapping plot in Fargo, or as the distraught husband of a frisky porn star in Boogie Nights? A splendid character actor with a gift…
In his career as a Hollywood action figure, Tom Cruise has been dressed in some pretty hip outfits–a macho fighter pilot’s sleek leather jacket, a NASCAR driver’s logo-speckled fire suit, assorted silken Armani sports jackets, even black cape and fangs. So it’s a bit unsettling to see the Cruiser stuffed…
When we first see Fanda, the craggy, octogenarian hero of a sublime Czech tragicomedy called Autumn Spring, he alights from a sleek black limousine under a rich canopy of trees and begins looking at a luxurious country mansion with obvious distaste. “Quite shabby,” he says to the obsequious sales agent…
In the annals of fraud and fakery, a discredited ex-magazine reporter named Stephen Glass likely will wind up a mere footnote. The people who forge Van Goghs and the con artists who bilk naïve grandmothers out of their life savings (not to mention certain fast-dancing corporate executives) even more richly…
The spooky beauty of Elephant, Gus Van Sant’s strange take on the Columbine massacre, arises not from the shock of sudden violence but from the filmmaker’s steady gaze at the numbing routines of life inside a suburban high school. With what first looks like cool detachment, Van Sant (My Own…
The riddles of identity that drive and disturb Philip Roth’s impressive body of fiction usually focus on contemporary Jewish characters whose conflicts between self-absorption and self-hate remain poignantly (and often hilariously) unresolved. But in The Human Stain, the first Roth novel to be adapted as a film in three decades,…
That a new feel-good sports movie called Radio contrives to move us is just fine–that’s what feel-good sports movies are supposed to do. That its makers choose to move us in the style of a linebacker sacking a quarterback is not so good. After enduring this flagrant emotional blitz, you…
The dumbed-down movie version of Frances Mayes’ best-selling travel memoir Under the Tuscan Sun is a virtual case study of Hollywood’s irrepressible urge to lower the bar in the hopes of upping the take. Mayes’ 1996 book is a nicely written, carefully observed meditation on buying a decrepit Italian villa…
From the lofty American vantage point, Mexico’s New Wave filmmakers have materialized like magic, the unexpected fruit of a renaissance that even many cinematically alert Yanqis hardly took the trouble to notice. Meanwhile, these new directors have fashioned a vivid style that combines, in various proportions, Latin American literary experimentation,…
So much for those crackpot theories about flighty teen-agers and their short attention spans. For four long years now the bland pop star Mandy Moore has stuck in the brainpan of white adolescent America like a wad of bubblegum, and there’s no sign she will loosen her grip anytime soon…
He’s 12 feet tall. He’s ripped. He’s quick as a tiger and fierce as a dragon. Lit by his fury to a dull green glow, the guy is sheer, boundless power. Any NFL team you can think of would love to start him at middle linebacker. But, as art house…
The hero of Ken Loach’s Sweet Sixteen is an isolated teen-ager mired in a gray Scottish slum with only a vague dream of family life to sustain him. Like previous Loach heroes–the impoverished boy who finds hope training a falcon in Kes, say, or the downtrodden working stiff struggling to…
Credit the quality of a superior educational system. Or the native wit of two quick thinkers with a gift for understanding the human animal. Or the power of happy collaboration. In any event, Lawless Heart, the second feature co-written and co-directed by the young Brits Neil Hunter and Tom Hunsinger,…
Whenever the stars of the adolescent street-racing fantasy 2 Fast 2 Furious were feeling balky or temperamental on the set, as movie stars are wont to do, the cure was probably easy–an oil change and a tune-up. John Singleton’s adrenaline-spiked sequel to the surprise summer hit of 2001, The Fast…
If grown-ups were meant to watch Walt Disney cartoons, God would have kept us all in the third grade for two or three decades. Still, somebody has to drive the SUV every time the Disneyfolk decide to lure the little ones down to the multiplex, and as long as the…
Many moviegoers see hyperactive Jim Carrey as the second coming of Jerry Lewis, but no one’s ever mistaken him for God. Clearly, he’d like to change that–at least for now, at least at the box office. Hey, you’d feel the same way if your last movie were The Majestic. In…
What a strange enterprise, making a movie about reading a book. It’s the kind of paradox philosophy students chew over at 3 o’clock in the morning–and a prospect any Hollywood producer would flee from as fast as his Ferragamos could carry him. But for Mark Moskowitz, a lifelong bibliophile re-examining…
The Chicago-based filmmaker Steve James rose to prominence in 1994 with Hoop Dreams, a gritty, uncomfortably intimate portrait of two inner-city kids who try to escape poverty and deprivation through basketball. Shot over four years, it was at once a stirring indictment of the social services bureaucracy, a tribute to…
Director David Cronenberg has led his loyal fans down some pretty spooky corridors, including the telepathic netherworld of Scanners, the violent sibling rivalry of twin gynecologists in love with the same woman (Dead Ringers) and the drug-haunted imagination of William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch). So it comes as no surprise…
The Harry Potter phenomenon–on the page, in the movies, at the bank–has aroused in publishers and studio heads alike a sudden new appreciation for our children’s needs. These people understand that no consumer is more motivated than a kid in the heat of a craze, so every last one of…
What more can go wrong in suburbia? Director Rose Troche (Go Fish) wants us to know, and to that end she has recruited another army of wounded parents, troubled children and broken dreamers, then marched them all into a whirlpool of dysfunction on the quiet, tree-lined streets just minutes from…
