For a film critic to react negatively to the beloved renaissance of Walt Disney animation is something akin to a Catholic priest criticizing Jesus’ personal hygiene–it just ain’t done. Indeed, it’s almost a waste of time (and since we all may be working for that corporate juggernaut in the next…

The 41-year-old Taiwanese-born director Ang Lee has been granted a rare international honor–unanimous box-office approval from audiences who don’t often mix. His second feature, 1993’s The Wedding Banquet, became one of the highest-grossing indie films ever made, and also became a beloved cult treasure that crossed gender, sexual, and ethnic…

The voice that comes across the phone line from New York City is fearlessly confident and authoritative–except when it becomes agitated or passionate about a certain point. At that moment, Agnieszka Holland’s language begins to speed up and she’s wont to stutter or repeat herself. Either way, her elegant Eastern…

While you’re watching Jodie Foster’s second directorial effort (she hit notes both gorgeous and discordant with Little Man Tate, her 1991 debut as a filmmaker), you might find yourself wondering exactly when you’ve seen a comedy-drama paced like this one before. Certainly, most people expect the laughs and the pathos…

If you had any doubts that the Hollywood script factory has run out of things to say about serial killers, Copycat stumbles into theaters like a badly miscalculated pratfall. Indeed, everything about this unimaginatively directed, awkwardly structured, but expertly performed thriller suggests filmmaking by committee, too many hands converging to…

As if the Los Angeles Police Department didn’t have a big enough public-relations disaster after the O.J. Simpson murder case, along comes Strange Days, a futuristic action thriller whose entire convoluted plot depends on one act of racist violence by an LAPD cop. Judging by the unprecedented level of media…

Filmmaker Gus Van Sant almost scored another flop to go along with his last film–Even Cowgirls Get the Blues–based on the kind of advance notice his latest movie, To Die For, got before it hit Cannes. The audiences at that much-hyped Italian film festival have been known to commit sin–deluging…

When you hear that an upcoming film has generated a positive “buzz,” that usually means one thing–studios expect it to make money and win positive critical reactions and a fistful of Oscar nominations. Jocelyn Moorhouse’s multi-generational comic-romantic epic How To Make an American Quilt has created so much advance excitement…

One of the biggest box-office successes in the history of Japanese cinema, The Mystery of Rampo arrives on these shores as a limited engagement in a few major markets. Indeed, the film has been booked for one week only at Landmark’s Inwood Theatre, so if you want to catch this…

Reading the press materials for A Month By the Lake, the latest bit of curdled whimsy from our mother country, you discover that there is a prestigious English film institute called the London School of Film Technique, and that director John Irvin (Widow’s Peak, Hamburger Hill) graduated from it. One…

If you have to compare watching the NC-17 “erotic drama” Showgirls to a non-cinematic experience, it might be getting a mammogram. There are dozens of breasts on display in this film, and they are constantly being poked, prodded, criticized, praised, bitten, licked, rubbed with ice cubes, and generally wielded as…