The character Simon Geist (Dan Zukovic) is a black-haired, dead-eyed intellectual who never smiles and never condescends when he talks: He’d never even think of kneeling to address you on your level. The actor Dan Zukovic is a playwright whose screenplay for his debut feature The Last Big Thing doesn’t…
According to the sparse information available in standard reference books, Chilean expatriate director Ral Ruiz, still only in his late 50s, has made more than 100 films since 1960; apparently only 50 or so are features, but that’s still an impressive number. He has been a staple on the festival…
In the rancid nightmare farce called Very Bad Things, Peter Berg, in his movie writing-directing debut, creates characters that you immediately want to see killed off. From the title to the ads to the Web site (which features a Vegas stripper who will dance for you), Very Bad Things has…
A third of the way through Home Fries, you may begin wondering whether the filmmakers haven’t outsmarted themselves. Overloaded with oddities but a bit short on horse sense, this is one of those stubbornly defiant, attitude-driven movies that’s so busy scrambling genres, breaking rules, and dashing expectations on the road…
“I just find it all so bizarre,” notes John Maybury, popping a cigarette into his mouth and lighting it in what appears to be one quick flip of the wrist. “All those issues of ‘being out’ and ‘are you in?’ We should have gone beyond that by now. I know…
Surprise and pleasure come wrapped together in A Bug’s Life. This big adventure about tiny critters is the latest piece of robust whimsy from Pixar, the computer-animation studio that broke into features with the 1995 smash Toy Story. It should prove irresistible to children. Toy Story opened up the secret…
Here we go again. Enemy of the State is Fascism in America 1998, Chapter Four…or Five…or whatever we’re up to. It readily invites comparison to The Siege, but for better or worse its goals are more mundane. While The Siege seems like an ideological agenda driving a film, Enemy of…
The prodigiously talented and now corrosively bitter Woody Allen was once quoted as saying, “I’ve always tried to dissuade people and tell them my films are not all autobiographical.” Allen’s adoring cult has never been convinced of this, of course, because many have never wanted to be. Part of the…
Even students of English history may have trouble sorting out the palace intrigues and intra-governmental conspiracies that fill Elizabeth, the handsome new production about Queen Elizabeth I’s ascension to the British throne in 1558. With the bewitching Australian actress Cate Blanchett (last year’s Oscar and Lucinda) in the title role,…
On May 30, 1957, the Los Angeles Times reported that the body of “the distinguished film producer and director James Whale” had been found floating in the swimming pool at his home in Pacific Palisades. Fully clothed, Whale’s corpse exhibited a head wound. “Whale,” the Times went on to point…
First, a disclaimer: Having missed last year’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, I deliberately put off seeing it until after viewing its sequel, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. That way I could view part two without prejudice and be able to judge whether IKWYDLS virgins…
Postwar Italy’s most heralded contribution to world cinema may have been neorealism, but its most distinctive and beloved filmmaker was Federico Fellini (1920-1993), who found his true voice when he abandoned neorealism for its polar opposite. While the conventional wisdom has Fellini moving abruptly from his neorealist roots toward a…
Well, now we know why the term “bored to death” was invented. Meet Joe Black takes an interesting idea–Death assumes human form and comes to earth to learn about human existence–and reduces it to a flat, uninspired, interminably slow movie. Not only slow but long: a full three hours. Produced…
American History X, a hard-edged look at American neo-Nazis, arrives in theaters with a lot of behind-the-scenes baggage: First-time director Tony Kaye has engaged in a protracted, high-profile battle with distributor-producer New Line Cinema over the film’s final form. While Kaye may have a justified grievance, this is not as…
Fascism is in the air…well, at least it’s on movie screens. In a two-week stretch we’ve seen old Nazis (Life Is Beautiful), neo-Nazis (American History X, due next week), old Nazis training neo-Nazis (Apt Pupil), book-burning (Pleasantville), and now, with The Siege, a story of full-blown military rule on American…
As a requiem for the ’60s, The Big Chill didn’t quite hit the mark the first time around, in 1983 (the film is scheduled for recycling November 6). Its greatest-hits soundtrack was soul-stirring, for sure; it’s hard to top the Rolling Stones, Marvin Gaye, or Aretha Franklin in any decade…
In 1994’s The Monster (Il mostro), his most recent film to gain wide American release, Italian writer-director-star Roberto Benigni put himself at the center of a mistaken-identity farce about a serial killer. In Life Is Beautiful (La vita e bella), Benigni plays a wacky, high-spirited man who convinces his young…
It must be math season in the film world. Recently, Darren Aronofsky’s Pi hit Dallas’ screens, and now we get Vincenzo Natali’s Cube. The connection isn’t merely in the movies’ titles–if it were, I would have cited Sphere too–but in their stories. The plots of both films rely upon mathematical…
When Montoya, one of the fearless vampire killers in John Carpenter’s Vampires, tells another character that nobody believes in the title creatures because nobody wants to, there’s no mistaking the ancestry of the line. It comes down, through two generations of horror films, from the moment in the original Dracula…
For filmmaker Todd Solondz, it’s always midnight in suburbia. Life is lonely, and the natives can be hostile. In his daring second film, Happiness, the darkness engulfs victims of all ages: a boy in the throes of impending adolescence, three New Jersey sisters tormented by sex and love, an obscene…
The first time we see Ray Joshua, the young hero of director Marc Levin’s impressive feature debut, Slam, we get a vivid taste of the conflicting forces that rule him. His olive-drab pants, so hip-hop baggy that you could fit two rail-thin Rays inside, are stuffed with bags of weed,…
A riveting but darkly disturbing thriller, Apt Pupil isn’t easy to sit through. The subject matter itself proves deeply unsettling, while two brief acts of sadism are so horrifying as to be unwatchable. Yet this brutal film borders on the brilliant. Beautifully structured and edited, with a chilling central performance…
