The first shot in Steven Spielberg’s remarkable World War II epic Saving Private Ryan is an American flag with the sun behind it. It’s a delicate, almost diaphanous image–the fabric has the transparent delicacy of a chrysalis. This is the perfect introduction to a movie about the fragility–and fortitude–of compassion…
Director-writer-composer-star-visionary Vincent Gallo, a left-field character actor whose best work has been in the films of mainstream eccentrics like Emir Kusturica (Arizona Dream), Abel Ferrara (The Funeral), and Alan Taylor (the low-key Palookaville), arrives as full-blown auteur with Buffalo ’66, a million-dollar art project currently on the cover of both…
For those who thought Dumb and Dumber signaled the end of the world as we know it, my advice to you is duck and cover. Comedy avatars Peter and Bobby Farrelly, the odium savants who perpetrated what some might consider Jim Carrey’s Hamlet (the geniuses from South Park are currently…
In The Mask of Zorro, Anthony Hopkins plays the eponymous masked hero as if he were doing Shakespeare. He’s trying to turn a kitsch hero into a real one, and his efforts are so weirdly off-key that you don’t know whether to applaud or titter. This dolorous Don Diego de…
The winds that sweep across the Sahara kick up ferocious sandstorms. Dunes change shape by the hour, flying particles blind the eye, and all sense of direction and reason is lost. In such disorienting surroundings, reality and hallucination converge, and the most inexplicable, unimaginable events can occur. Passion in the…
Smoke Signals billows in from the Sundance Film Festival, noteworthy not simply because it won both the Audience Award and the Filmmaker’s Trophy, but because it is the first feature film written, directed, and co-produced by American Indians to receive a major distribution deal. The buzz has kicked its screenwriter,…
“In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines, lived 12 little girls in two straight lines. They left the house at half past nine, in two straight lines in rain or shine. The smallest one was Madeline.” If these words don’t instantly conjure up captivating images of…
If you loved Don Rickles as the acid-tongued voice of Mr. Potato Head in Toy Story, wait till you get a load of Tommy Lee Jones’ gung-ho warmonger, Major Chip Hazard, in Small Soldiers. In Joe Dante’s uncommonly clever fantasy, Jones’ “character” is a military action figure just 12 inches…
Michael Bay is the director of Bad Boys and The Rock and the new asteroid-attack movie Armageddon–which should be called The Very Big Rock. He has, I’m afraid, perfected a new form: His movies are trailers for themselves. Every scene is all climax and no foreplay. When it’s all over,…
When Quentin Tarantino started up his boutique releasing company, Rolling Thunder, last year, his first release was, unsurprisingly, a Hong Kong production. Tarantino, after all, has been one of the most vocal boosters of Hong Kong cinema in the United States. What was surprising was the choice: Chungking Express, a…
I Went Down is the highest-grossing independent Irish film in history–which, of course, doesn’t say much in the States, where we’ve turned independent filmmaking into a corporate subsidiary and consider Ireland a drab place where either Daniel Day-Lewis or American heartthrobs with poor accents struggle with The Troubles. So the…
There will always be a Britain; and that means there will always be movies about the pluck and sacrifice, during World War II, of the little people. Not Billy Barty little people–though surely there must have been a few of them involved–but the simple salt-of-the-earth types who kept muddling along…
Too many post-Woody Allen movies have been made about “sex in the head.” The smart, engaging Out of Sight is an action comedy about love in the head. The real thing ignites between bank robber Jack Foley (George Clooney) and U.S. Marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) when she stumbles into…
The 1967 musical Dr. Dolittle, which starred Rex Harrison, was a commercial disaster for its studio, Twentieth Century Fox. The new nonmusical Fox version of this material, starring Eddie Murphy, isn’t in the same overblown category as the Harrison film–its disasters are more mundane. It’s a kiddie comedy that really…
Technicolor was a movie lover’s aphrodisiac during Hollywood’s Golden Age. It produced colors of astonishing depth, boldness, and subtlety via a complex beam-splitting camera that generated three separate negatives. Lab technicians built them into a photographic sandwich that was developed with a unique dye-transfer system called imbibition. Gone With the…
It’s Christmas vacation, 1958. The movie my dad has chosen for a first-grade pal and me to see is the new Disney live-action adventure, Tonka, starring Sal Mineo as a young Sioux named White Bull who traps and domesticates a clear-eyed, spirited wild horse named Tonka. Having seen The King…
High Art is a low-budget, American independent movie about a junkie, lesbian photographer, Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy), who spends most of her time looking romantically mournful. She’s famished and abrasive and oh-so world-weary. When she smokes cigarettes, she exhales in a way that can best be described as existential–the smoke…
The X-Files is a movie that answers questions…No, wait a minute. The X-Files is a movie that asks questions…Hmmm. OK. The X-Files is a movie that makes me wanna ask some questions, like: What the hell does “Fight the future” mean? I mean, I can understand “The truth is out…
Henry Jaglom’s movies offer everything that Americans hate about French films, but with little of the philosophical depth or visual daring that mark the best French cinema. He captures the annoying qualities of Woody Allen movies–the self-absorption, the feigned feminism, the pretentiousness–without achieving anything like Allen’s humor and charm. Talky,…
Early on in Six Days, Seven Nights, Harrison Ford’s drunken beach pilot Quinn Harris offers some advice to Anne Heche’s vacationing Robin Monroe. He warns that people often go to isolated island paradises looking for romance. But if you don’t bring it with you, you ain’t gonna find it. If…
Star Wars notwithstanding, film revivals rarely work on a large scale anymore. Blame it on cable or videotape, or just the ever increasing number of new films released every year, but today’s audiences–born and bred on the blockbuster and a steady diet of coming attractions, waiting eagerly for tomorrow’s movie,…
It’s a truism that unless your film picks up momentum as it goes along, you’d do well not to put a ticking clock in it. Thrillers like The Big Clock and DOA work because they’re superior mousetraps that have found a way to put time itself in pursuit of the…
