The heroines of Gavin O’Connor’s offbeat road movie Tumbleweeds are a struggling single mother named Mary Jo Walker (Janet McTeer) and her feisty 12-year-old daughter, Ava (Kimberly J. Brown), who set out together from a back hollow in West Virginia to make a new life — or something like one…
“A Joel Schumacher film.” Among a certain breed of filmgoer — say, anyone for whom theaters provide something other than shelter — there may no more frightening four words in the English language. Ever since he killed Batman, Schumacher’s name has become the equivalent of a swear word on many…
Being called “brave” all the time must be almost as annoying for a disabled person as living in a world designed for the abled. Sure enough, peruse reviews of Firdaus Kanga’s “autobiographical novel” Trying to Grow or the astringently unsentimental film version of it, Sixth Happiness, and you’ll find critics…
It’s not surprising to discover that Perfect Blue was originally supposed to be filmed using humans. After all, the debut of director Satoshi Kon, who has worked on other Japanese animated films, is the very antithesis of most anime. Meaning, there are no sci-fi action sequences, no lavish fantasy settings,…
Toy Story, the 1995 hit from Disney and Pixar, was not only the first fully computer-animated feature; it was also as brilliantly written and directed a film as any of the classic Disney releases. Pixar did nearly everything right — from story, dialogue, and voice casting to the impossibly complex…
A tangible sense of sadness and longing hangs over The Legend of 1900, the mesmerizingly beautiful and poetic new film from Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore, best known in the United States for his Academy Award-winning Cinema Paradiso. Based on a dramatic monologue by contemporary Italian novelist Alessadro Baricco but filmed…
The last half-decade has been very good to Jane Austen: Besides Ang Lee’s estimable 1995 version of Sense and Sensibility, we’ve been given film or TV adaptations of Emma, Persuasion, and Pride and Prejudice, not to mention Clueless, Amy Heckerling’s remarkably apt updating of Emma. Now Miramax and the BBC…
Eight years have passed since Terminator 2, otherwise known as the last Arnold Schwarzenegger movie worth a damn. Since then, he has appeared in one half-decent actioner (James Cameron’s wink-wink True Lies), one pale imitation of a pale imitation (Eraser, which is what its script was written with), and a…
“The spectre is known at all the country firesides by the name of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow,” writes Washington Irving in his original fantasy. Thanks in large part to the silly, watered-down fun of the animated Disney version, the Horseman and his victim, the gangling and gallant Ichabod…
Poor old MGM — the once-golden studio that has been battered and abused by ever-changing ownership and management for nearly three decades — still has one sure-shot franchise among its assets: the James Bond series, whose longevity is astounding. If nothing else, the series’ overseas popularity keeps the films profitable…
Be forewarned: In the continuing quest to get people to pay attention to their films by any means necessary, the marketing wizards at Artisan Entertainment have been misrepresenting Felicia’s Journey to an even greater extent than they did The Minus Man. No doubt hoping to attract a young male demographic,…
There’s a turning point when Felicia’s Journey becomes a completely different movie from the one you’ve been watching, and if you’re unfamiliar with William Trevor’s 1994 novel upon which the film is based, it makes your back stiffen with alarm. It is, satisfyingly, a very Atom Egoyan moment: The film…
“Yesterday I wasn’t even sure God existed,” laments Bethany (Linda Fiorentino), the reluctant yet divinely touched heroine of Kevin Smith’s ambitious new film, Dogma. “Now I’m up to my ass in Christian mythology.” As it turns out, so are we. Strutting to a spiritually snappy groove not observed in mainstream…
Had things worked out the way writer-director Kevin Smith planned, Matt Damon would not have appeared in Dogma, much less starred in it. The role of Loki — an avenging angel who, along with fellow fallen angel Bartleby, discovers a way to escape an eternity of exile in Wisconsin –…
Some days, when he’s not making movies, peddling comic books, or fighting denunciations from the Catholic League, Kevin Smith wonders when the time will come to quit the biz. He’s spoken in the past of his admiration for Spike Lee’s career, of the wily Brooklynite’s ability to make all kinds…
Susan Sarandon is one of the screen’s most gifted actresses, a fiercely intelligent artist who invests her roles with depth, compassion, wit, and humor. She has the ability to elevate even mediocre material, taking a potentially schmaltzy part, as in Stepmom, and making it totally believable. In her best films…
The world’s demand for minimally talented 30-year-old high school dropouts who believe they’re great poets or great musicians or great movie directors isn’t going to catch up with the supply anytime soon. That won’t keep the strivers from striving, of course, nor will it snuff out their dreams. Case in…
Back in the 1940s, just as the cynical tough guys Cagney and Bogart created were beginning to show signs of iconographic wear and tear, a newer brand of antihero arrived in the form of John Garfield. Better-looking and softer spoken and more articulate than his predecessors, he embodied men every…
Luc Besson — director of La Femme Nikita, The Professional, and The Fifth Element — is not the first name that would leap to mind to helm a biopic of Joan of Arc. Sure, he’s French, and sure, most of his films have a woman or girl as protagonist or…
Actor Frank Whaley has appeared in more than 30 movies, including Swimming With Sharks and Pulp Fiction, but none of them cuts as close to the bone as Whaley’s debut in the writer-director ranks, Joe the King. Set in the ’70s and carefully described by its maker as “loosely autobiographical,”…
The first rule of Being John Malkovich is you do not look at the poster for Being John Malkovich. Really, avoid that poster, despite its curious, clinical design, until after you’ve seen the movie. Plot-spoiling critics are harmless compared with what these filmmakers have opted to disclose in their own…
And now…a G-rated movie from David Lynch! No, Lynch hasn’t lost his mind. He hasn’t gone soft in the head. And he hasn’t sold out to the smiley-faced bean counters at Disney. While the notion of America’s King of Weird — the man who brought us Blue Velvet and Twin…
