Poor William Randolph Hearst. The snapping dogs of Hollywood just won’t leave the guy alone. It’s been barely 60 years since a little epic called Citizen Kane portrayed the great newspaper tycoon as a ruthless dictator who degenerated into an emotional basket case, and already there’s more bad publicity in…
Women who exchange descriptions of their sexual encounters are certainly no more appealing than men who boast in locker rooms, but they seem to get more free passes. If, in the name of social candor, Jerry Springer can induce sisters to confess what they’ve done with barnyard animals and every…
The perpetrators of the new Sandra Bullock vehicle, Murder by Numbers, could be hauled in on any number of charges, including plagiarism and child abuse. But their most obvious crime is first-degree dullness, giving us a thriller without thrills and a mystery devoid of urgent questions. This merely bloody piece…
Anybody who takes a second, sorrowful look at the charred rubble in lower Manhattan, the body counts in the West Bank or the brazen denials of Slobodan Milosevic will have to conclude that the brotherhood of man isn’t attracting many good recruits these days. Neither, for that matter, is the…
The two slacker anti-heroes of Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También (And Your Mother, Too) (And Your Mother, Too) come furnished with all the usual glitches of late adolescence–raging hormones, impatient wanderlust, contempt for their elders and a jones for dope and beer. In fact, Julio (Gael García Bernal) and…
The eternal beauty and constant surprise of baseball are always getting sabotaged by Hollywood’s urge to reduce the grand old game to a set of clichés as tedious as spring training drills. The ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson elevated Field of Dreams, the Wild Thing’s errant fastball gave momentary charm…
Given the latest outbreaks of Middle East violence–not to mention the continuing traumas of September 11–it is timely, if unsettling, that a new Israeli film about religious fervor and extremist political commitment in that embattled nation is being released in the United States. Written and directed by 33-year-old Joseph Cedar,…
Nanni Moretti’s meditation on a family’s trauma in the wake of a teen-age boy’s death in a scuba-diving accident is both spare and unsentimental, and that may surprise those benighted Americans who think all Italians are one part tantrum and one part tomato sauce. Best known here for the 1994…
All those war epics the big movie studios are rushing into release are certainly meant to reflect the present national mood, and if We Were Soldiers or Behind Enemy Lines or Black Hawk Down also happens to strike it rich, that will be fine with the box-office bean-counters. It was…
Australian director Ray Lawrence (best known here for the quirky 1985 comedy Bliss) provides some high-toned soap opera nicely flavored with a touch of suspense and some well-timed jolts of humor. Playwright Andrew Bovell’s busy, busy screenplay is crammed with philandering police detectives, grief-stricken psychoanalysts, traumatized gay men, gloomy husbands…
The air of danger that surrounds Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl (À Ma Soeur) never lets up, which is unusual for a film that doesn’t mean to be a thriller. Rather, it’s a merciless look at adolescent insecurity, the mixed signals of emerging desire and the ruthlessness of carnal gamesmanship that,…
The most daunting thing for an actor is to portray a god, and when that god comes equipped with a tangle of myths and the quickest left jab in history, the actor’s job can soon verge into guesswork. To Will Smith’s credit, he has managed to get, at least partway,…
The tricked-up charms of James Mangold’s Kate & Leopold may be precisely what the moment demands–if you accept the existence of chivalry, the possibility of time travel and the stream of bubbles emanating from Meg Ryan. Skeptics need not apply. Having toured the psychiatric ward in Girl, Interrupted and slogged…
At first look, the cloud of gloom that envelops Lucrecia Martel’s strangely affecting first feature, La Cienaga (The Swamp), seems to have no specific origin and no particular provocation. An alcoholic matriarch, Mecha (Graciela Borges), lolls beside a filthy swimming pool at a decrepit South American villa, sloshing glasses of…
The combatants in Patrick Stettner’s compelling first feature, The Business of Strangers, are a middle-aged software executive (Stockard Channing) wearing a steel-blue suit and an air of professional hauteur; the executive’s mysterious new assistant (Julia Stiles), fresh out of Dartmouth and full of self-righteous aggression; and a cocky “headhunter” (Frederick…
Two years ago, a colleague of Michael Cain’s asked the founder and director of the Deep Ellum Film Festival just why the hell he named his fledgling fest after a part of town in which there were, ahem, no movie theaters. “There will be,” Cain insisted, like a W.P. Kinsella…
It takes a nimble mind to mix light and dark, to wed humor with treachery, and in Novocaine newcomer David Atkins is not always up to the task. Neither is Steve Martin, who wants to be taken seriously while reserving the right to produce the occasional sick yuk. If you…
The heroine of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s bold and bracing new comedy, Amlie, is Amélie Poulain, a doe-eyed crusader with the face of a porcelain doll and a sleek helmet of jet-black hair. From her high perch in Montmartre, where she works as a cafe waitress, Amélie secretly resolves to emancipate all…
Joel and Ethan Coen’s periodic genuflections to classic Hollywood are inevitably accompanied by a knowing wink from one brother and a wry smile from the other. These devoted movie buffs’ versions of vintage gangster pictures (Miller’s Crossing) or the populist comedies of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges (The Hudsucker Proxy)…
Tran Anh Hung’s beautiful meditation on family ties and family traumas, The Vertical Ray of the Sun, marks a captivating new chapter in the career of the writer-director who was the first to give Americans a glimpse of Vietnamese filmmaking. In 1994 Tran’s The Scent of Green Papaya made its…
Combine teenage angst with suburban emptiness and you’ve got a movie formula with an appreciable advantage over some other current movie formulas–particularly in the eyes of those who believe the American family has disintegrated and most of us are headed for eternal damnation. This is not to say the right-wing…
In the annals of social change, Alma Schindler is strictly small potatoes, and Bruce Beresford’s new biopic, Bride of the Wind, unwittingly threatens to erase her altogether. For those who don’t have the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at their fingertips, Alma (Sarah Wynter) was an outspoken party girl from…
