When it was first shown in rough-cut form two years ago, Bruce Weber’s documentary collage dealt primarily with his latest fetish object, college wrestling champion Peter Johnson, with occasional interludes about singer Frances Faye. Greatly re-edited, the film is now primarily about Faye, a lesbian hipster whose hard-driving style and…
Maryam Armin (Mariam Parris), a beautiful 16-year-old Iranian-born transplant so out of touch with her roots she prefers to be called Mary, has goo-goo eyes for a dim-bulb blond boy and dreams of becoming a newscaster–Jessica Savitch, actually. It’s November 1979, and Mary’s cousin, college student Ali (David Ackert), has…
Nothing happens and everything happens in Vittorio De Sica’s 1952 neorealist masterpiece; it’s a stark snapshot in which all is revealed about the “daily life of mankind,” as the director once offered by way of description. Umberto Domenico Ferrari (played by Carlo Battisti, a former professor in his sole big-screen…
When in doubt, the first-timer always turns to the numbingly familiar; in this case, co-directors Charles A. Addessi and William DeMeo lift damned near every mob-movie cliché they can lay their mitts on, going so far as to directly reference The Sopranos in one dreadfully flat joke–assuming, perhaps, that by…
With Panic Room, about the night Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) and her teen-age daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart) are home-invaded by a trio of burglars seeking hidden treasure, dyspeptic director David Fincher reveals himself as little more than a derivative visionary. For some, this will be enough: As mainstream, studio-financed movies…
Writer-director Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo takes its basic hook from the Native American myth of the Windigo, as it’s more frequently spelled. (You say Wendigo, I say Windigo–let’s call the whole thing off.) In its classic form, the Windigo is an evil spirit that possesses humans in the grip of hunger…
It’s readily apparent that Danny DeVito’s Death to Smoochy deals with a thoroughly debauched children’s television host (Robin Williams) who plots, amid much dark zaniness, to destroy his squeaky-clean successor (Edward Norton). It’s also quite easy to proclaim it the greatest movie ever made…about a singing vegan in a fuchsia…
The Asian Film Festival, taking place this weekend, features a dozen exotic entries, only a few of which have ever screened locally; the range is impressive, from Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 masterpiece Seven Samurai to John Woo’s The Killer to Kinji Fukusaku’s, ahem, banned-in-the-U.S. Battle Royale from last year. There’s also…
This film is loosely based, without credit, on H.G. Wells’ short story “The New Accelerator,” in which a scientist figures out a way to slow time down to such an extent that everything else moves in super slo-mo; in essence, he’s moving so fast that to the rest of the…
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…
There’s allegory and there’s excess, and in his latest, longest feature to date, Czech animator-cum-director Jan Svankmajer seems to have lost sight of the line between making his point and gouging us with it. Our story focuses on a loving couple in Prague (Veronika Zilková and Jan Hartl), whose hopeful…
Looking at the original Blade now, it’s not as impressive as it seemed at the time; its hugely positive reception among the comic-book crowd may have been the result of it simply not sucking. It came out before The Matrix brought Hong Kong-style wires and trenchcoats to the world’s attention,…
Kissing Jessica Stein ends several times–which likely explains how a film with so short a running time, 94 minutes, feels as though it lasts much longer–and each conclusion satisfies; each feels real, natural and, best of all, inevitable. That is, except for the actual finale, which so betrays what’s come…
Since his debut with 1992’s Rebels of the Neon God, which made the rounds of U.S. festivals the following year, Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang has continued to make movies that offer variations on themes of isolation and human loneliness. This is not nearly as dreary as it may sound; indeed,…
The work of Henry Jaglom is an acquired taste that for many of us remains unacquired. While his new film, Festival in Cannes, is not a huge departure from usual, it may be his most accessible work for non-fans since 1991’s Eating. Not surprisingly, the movie is set at the…
Ice Age posits a heretofore unfathomable question: Is it possible for computer-generated characters to go through the motions? Everything about this endeavor–from 20th Century Fox, playing cartoon catch-up after 2000’s Titan A.E., which smelled like something stolen from Saturday-morning television–feels pilfered and stitched-together. There’s not an original fossil in its…
To say that Showtime is the year’s best glossy studio entertainment film thus far may be the ultimate in faint praise. The first quarter is always pretty bad–following the majors’ traditional end-of-the-year marketing/release orgies–but 2002 has been several degrees worse than usual. From the dual Pearce-ings of The Count of…
In the original Resident Evil video game–named Biohazard in its Japanese incarnation–a brash young American infiltrates a large manor house in the country, only to find it inhabited by terrifying, soulless zombies. But since Gosford Park already came out, the makers of the Resident Evil movie had to go with…
Precious and cloying, Harrison’s Flowers sets out to prove itself a story of hope and human endurance, but swiftly deteriorates into a terribly obvious melodrama and rough-hewn vanity project for lead actress Andie MacDowell. (One can almost hear her shouting to her agent: “Hey, Meg Ryan landed a search-and-rescue picture,…
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,…
While the governments of the two Koreas plan symbolic gestures that could lead to a long-dreamed-of peaceful reunification, Ryu (Han Suk-Gyu) and Lee (Song Kang-Ho)–two special agents in South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, which handles threats from the North–must track down a female North Korean super-assassin named Hee, whose recent…
Richard O’Brien’s 1975 drag show/sci-fi-gothic parody carries on at weekly midnight screenings, attended by its devoted audience-participation following. Even these cultists have often underrated it as a film–it’s a pretty good rock musical, with a witty ensemble cast led by Tim Curry in a hilariously swaggering, drolly macho performance as…
