Bats This horror picture about mutant killer bats terrorizing a little desert town is basically just like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. There are two major differences: First, The Birds was about birds, while Bats is about bats; and second, The Birds was a flawed but brilliant work by one of…
“That reminds me of the movies Marty made about New York,” stammered Lou Reed somewhere in the mid-’80s. “All those frank and brutal movies that are so brillyunt.” It was a clumsy, rhyme-impaired album track (“Doing the Things That We Want To” from New Sensations), but, as has often been…
Boys Don’t Cry, the first effort from writer-director Kimberly Peirce, unfolds as slowly and deliberately as the reel of film it’s printed on, dawdling on the minor, mundane moments of growing up and growing bored in a small Midwest town. It’s as though Peirce wants to show just how easy…
Since there is no way to talk about The Best Man without eventually invoking the phrase “Spike Lee’s cousin,” let’s just get it out of the way: The Best Man is the directorial debut of Malcolm D. Lee, who is Spike Lee’s cousin. Having worked on various S. Lee films,…
Based on his directorial debut, there are three things we can safely say about Antonio Banderas: He’s an actor’s director, meaning he can pick a good cast and coax great performances from them; he knows how to make a good image and where to point the camera; and he has…
There have been so many recent movies about modern gay teenage life, you’d think a filmmaker would be hard-pressed to find a new wrinkle on what has become an increasingly familiar tale. But Head On isn’t a pro forma drama of self-discovery and self-acceptance. As directed by Ana Kokkinos and…
David Fincher needs a hug, the poor bastard. Or possibly a diaper change. Ever since 1992, when he ruined the Alien series with the excrescence of his pointless, senseless third installment, he’s been making the same bratty, obnoxious movie over and over again: gloom, doom, indestructible protagonist, bureaucratic evil, quasi-religious…
Steven Soderbergh may have had some rocky times after his 1989 breakthrough with sex, lies, and videotape, but these days he’s on a roll. Last year he produced Pleasantville and directed Out of Sight, two of the year’s most praised films. This year he has The Limey, a complex, introspective…
Toward the end of his published journal on the making of the watershed indie film sex, lies, and videotape — his 1989 million-dollar feature debut that jump-started the independent-film-is-hip craze, put the Sundance Film Festival on the map, upset Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing for the top award at…
Am I a traitor to my gender because I didn’t find this unabashed film about female sexuality erotic, brave, or even — can I say it — interesting? The ironically titled Romance, directed by the audacious French filmmaker Catherine Breillat (36 Fillette), has become something of a cause célèbre wherever…
According to The Story of Us, men and women have different responses to life, love, and sex, and this can sometimes result in conflicts and tension in a marriage. And you thought American Beauty was daring. The “us” of the title are Ben (Bruce Willis) and Katie (Michelle Pfeiffer). He’s…
When I was growing up, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was the closest thing I had to a paternal mentor, the only authoritative voice I consistently trusted. Novel after freakish, scattershot, infinitely humane novel, the man provided tools to identify and cope with the daily horrors of America — this vast sea…
The triumvirate is complete. First, Paris, Texas; then Dancer, Texas Pop. 81; and now Happy, Texas. German existentialism. Coming-of-age melodrama. Screwball mistaken-identity crapfest. Is there any situation small-town Texas can’t fulfill, any scenario it can’t endure? Apparently not, according to indie filmmakers. In this one, two cons on the lam…
Trust Allison Anders and her old running mate Kurt Voss to come up with a piquant, carefully observed movie about tarnished hope, overfed vanity, and half-baked scheming on the treacherous Los Angeles music scene. They know the territory. In 1988, the ex-UCLA Film School classmates wrote and directed Border Radio,…
Insomniacs, rejoice! During the first several decades of Sydney Pollack’s bloated, interminable Random Hearts, your eyelids will droop, your pulse and respiration will slow, and you’ll get that $8 nap you’ve been craving. Once the credits roll and the lights come up, you’ll awaken refreshed, undisturbed by vague dreams about…
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! The repressed Irish Catholic schoolgirl that Molly Shannon plays on Saturday Night Live is certainly not everyone’s cup of glee. But there’s no denying the tug she exerts on anyone whose past is littered with the dry husks of Latin verbs and memories of nuns swinging…
There is nothing gratifying about watching a bullet blast through a woman’s skull. Exploding helicopters and splattered cattle are utterly indefensible. And few would smile at the image of a little boy being obliterated by a flashy missile. So why is David O. Russell’s Three Kings such rousing entertainment? This…
It begins with a simple request. “Do you want anything to drink?” asks the Warner Bros. publicist, a lanky young man outfitted in a pressed green shirt, a businessman’s tie, and dark slacks. “Some water maybe?” The visiting journalist, ushered into the Crescent Court Hotel suite to interview Three Kings…
The premise is preposterous, the final score inevitable, and the record reading on the feel-good-ometer totally predictable. But Mystery, Alaska comes furnished with some winning quirks and charms — including a very funny bit concerning premature ejaculation at 20 degrees below zero. So even if you don’t really believe that…
Ah, May-December romance! It’s a grand old tradition in movies dating back to 1919’s Daddy Long Legs, and it’s almost always a male fantasy: With the exception of a very small handful of titles, it’s the guy who’s December and the girl who’s May. And even in that small handful,…
A classic that fully merits the designation, Jean Renoir’s 1937 anti-war masterpiece Grand Illusion is, quite simply, one of the greatest films ever made. Recently restored, with a new print struck from the film’s original camera negative — confiscated by the Nazis after the fall of France and thought to…
Period films are, in general, not what you would call a commercial sure shot in the current marketplace, unless of course the period in question is the 22nd century or some “long, long ago” that resembles the 22nd century. In Plunkett & Macleane, director Jake Scott — son of Ridley,…
