A hand-wringing reassessment of the libertine 1960s has hit full stride–stirred as much, you can’t help thinking, by the transfiguration of former acidheads and ex-leftist firebrands into establishment power-mongers as by the half-baked grumblings of their children. The antiwar and civil rights movements were shot through with self-service and intolerance,…
When we first see Isa, the 21-year-old heroine of Erick Zonca’s The Dreamlife of Angels, she’s trudging under the weight of a huge backpack through the chill dawn of an almost featureless European city. With her close-cropped dark hair and street urchin’s sniffle, she seems to be carrying the burden…
For the second week in a row, Dallas is being treated to a dazzling new Spanish import. Last week it was Alejandro Almenabar’s Open Your Eyes; this week it’s Julio Medem’s Lovers of the Arctic Circle–arguably an even more intriguing work. The two stars of Medem’s film, Najwa Nimri and…
The “SLC” in SLC Punk! stands for Salt Lake City, but it might as well stand for Some Lucky Chump. The filmmaker, James Merendino, has stated that this tale of two punk buddies trying to spread anarchy through the Utah capital in 1985 reflects his own rebellious teenage years there…
The most surprising thing about the new teensploitation horror film Idle Hands is the lack of masturbation jokes. It is a movie about a 17-year-old boy who loses control of his right hand to an evil demon, yet there’s only one such obvious crack. As the gloriously lazy hero Anton…
We seem to be in the middle of one of those thematic blitzes that happen every now and then in the film world. Last year there was The Truman Show and Dark City; this year, so far, there have been EdTV and The Matrix. Coming up in the next month…
Sean Connery has always been a terse, minimalist actor, spitting out his lines in tight bursts of Scottish brogue. But in Entrapment, the kingly Scot goes beyond minimalism to the point where he’s practically doing semaphore with his eyebrows. As the legendary art thief Robert MacDougal, Connery isn’t just reserved,…
Comedian David Spade’s chosen shtick–every line a zinger, every crack calculated to draw blood–works well in the short bursts characteristic of stand-up, sketches, and TV sitcoms. But the man can wear you out over the course of a two-hour movie. Like the too clever motormouth at a cocktail party, he…
In Pushing Tin, the edgy new comedy from British director Mike Newell, the dominant image is a black screen pulsing with obscure fluorescent markings, like the characters on some early prototype of Pac-Man. In this case, though, nobody’s playing any games. The markings represent very real jet airliners filled with…
Too often baseball players are reduced to statistics, hollow numbers that resonate with the fetishist who drifts off to sleep counting runs batted in and home runs and career batting averages. Baseball demands such precision: It’s a team sport, yes, but ultimately it’s man against man, record against record, history…
Plenty of celebs lend their fame to charitable causes. Richard Gere has his Dalai Lama. Sharon Stone supports pediatric AIDS patients. Kim Basinger props up animal rights–and Alec Baldwin’s career. Then you have Quentin Tarantino, a man whose cause celebre is orphans–albeit of a different sort than might first spring…
Imagine, if you will, one of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s classic road movies that never leaves the terminal, and you get a pretty good description of Life, the strikingly uneventful new comedy starring Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence. It’s their Road to Nowhere. Life, which was directed by Ted…
David Cronenberg has a thing for body openings. His movies are, literally, full of holes. There’s the botched surgery wound on Marilyn Chambers that bites and infects unsuspecting sexual partners in Rabid; the vaginal VCR in James Woods’ chest where he plugs into tapes to experience ever more exotic porn…
Courage comes in an infinite variety of forms and faces, but who among us would be brave enough to go back and relive our high school years, face the horrors of homeroom, and confront hallways so fraught with danger that the most treacherous battlefield would look as placid as a…
Jimmy Cagney brought the same electric physicality to gangsters that he did to song-and-dance men. He gave a bright-eyed mug like his character in Public Enemy extraordinary powers of attraction and repulsion. In The General, Brendan Gleeson enacts a real-life criminal chieftain–Dublin’s notorious Martin Cahill–with a belly-hanging-out buffoonery that is…
Has any major American director had quite so many career swings as Robert Altman? Maybe not, but if there’s one thing the last 30 years have made clear, it is that it’s never safe to count Altman out. The mid- and late ’90s have been particularly unfriendly to him. After…
Steve Martin says he doesn’t want audiences to expect the same old Steve Martin whenever he stars in a comedy. But that means one thing when he’s referring to Roxanne and L.A. Story, two inspired flights of romantic farce (based on his own scripts), and another when he’s talking about…
A couple of years or so ago, Jane Austen suddenly rose from classical obscurity to become the hottest screenwriter in Hollywood. Now, it is Shakespeare himself who has become the magic name to drop. There are straight-up productions of his plays in the works–a star-studded version of A Midsummer’s Night…
Stuffed full of fantasy comics, addicted to action, and steeped in digital technology, the frenetic moviemakers Andy and Larry Wachowski have done what they must–create an eye-popping, morph-mad, quasi-mythical sci-fi flick that will thrill computer nerds as it kicks serious ass. The Matrix also presumes to (ahem) think deeply–although this…
Six Ways to Sunday is director Adam Bernstein’s second theatrical film, so it’s a little early to attempt a coherent analysis of his career. On the surface, this young mobster story couldn’t be more different from his earlier effort, the egregiously unfunny It’s Pat, which foolishly bloated Julia Sweeney’s one-gag…
Back in 1993, Disney released Swing Kids, a dead-earnest portrait of rebellious German jazz fans during the Third Reich. This bizarre hybrid–a blend of Footloose and Schindler’s List, of The Dead Poets Society and The Diary of Anne Frank–pitted big bands vs. armbands; it was a classic case of high-concept…
Self-serving confessions are a mainstay of best-seller lists; now we’re doomed to see their ilk on-screen. 20 Dates is the not-so-verite story of Myles Berkowitz, a tyro filmmaker in his mid-30s who tries to advance his career and up his happiness quotient by filming himself on a score of dates…
