Arts & Culture

Is there a more bankrupt genre than the parody movie? Many movies nowadays are so painfully self-aware and referential that there often isn’t much left to make fun of, which is especially the case for Kevin Williamson-penned films like Scream and its clones, clichéd teen-slasher movies that were regarded as…

Director Alison Maclean, from Canada by way of New Zealand, turns her camera on the American landscape–or, more accurately, the underbelly of the American landscape–in Jesus’ Son, an uneven but often effective adaptation of Denis Johnson’s autobiographical book. Billy Crudup stars as a thoroughly marginalized character known to his friends…

In his discomfiting 1998 book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind painted a none-too-flattering portrait of a post-Jaws Steven Spielberg. The author portrayed him as a raging egomaniac who wanted a writing credit on the film, though he contributed very little to the script. Indeed, the film’s most famous monologue,…

The press kit for The Perfect Storm contains the damnedest thing I’ve ever read. Right at the top, there is a “special request to the press” that reads, in full: “Warner Bros. Pictures would appreciate the press’ cooperation in not revealing the ending of this film to their readers, viewers…

Despite what many believe, it doesn’t come down to explosions, star power, or millions of greenbacks thrown at the producers. The true indicator of success for a summer movie is The Moment, that one memorable scene that sticks in your head, the one that Billy Crystal parodies the following spring…

So this is what Robert De Niro’s career has come to, starring in films in which he parodies his most familiar roles until he becomes the master painter urinating on his own beautiful canvases. Last year, it was pleasant and harmless enough: Analyze This was no Sopranos, but at least…

For most Americans, the social and political issues underlying Jose Luis Cuerda’s ButterflyButterflybBu may seem remote at best. The tensions between republicans and fascists in Spain after the fall of that nation’s monarchy in 1931, and dictator Francisco Franco’s victory in the bloody Spanish Civil War, may have stirred strong…

In Me, Myself & Irene, Jim Carrey plays a meek Rhode Island state trooper named Charlie whose aggressions are so pent-up they finally erupt in the form of a second personality, “Hank.” Where Charlie silently endures potty-mouthed curses from little girls skipping rope, Hank swipes ice-cream cones from kids at…

About nine years ago, in a humble Los Angeles-area nightclub, urbane British folk singer Billy Bragg reappraised 20th-century politics–as is often his Socialist wont–by means of an intriguing correlation. Might it be, he postulated, that contemporaries Leon Trotsky and Harlan Sanders were not merely striking doppelgängers, but, in fact, the…

I never imagined the day would come when I would cringe to see Ralph Fiennes onscreen. Not only is he shamelessly good-looking but, whether playing the brooding, remote figure doomed by love in The English Patient or the bloodless commandant of a Nazi death camp in Schindler’s List, he projects…

So, when was the last time you shared a woman with your dad? No, not your mom–don’t be gross. You know, just some woman that you and your dad both dug, who perked you up a bit. It’s probably been a while, huh? What? Never? Really? Well, that may be…