How vulnerable children are! And how wounding life can be. The Thief, a Russian film set in the post-World War II Stalinist era, was one of five nominees vying for last year’s Academy Award as the Best Foreign Language Film. (It lost to Character.) Written and directed by Pavel Chukhrai…
Armed again with the comedy of despair, but with a far sight more focus than last time out, Kicking and Screaming director Noah Baumbach takes on one of the more coiled and resilient of the seven deadlies in Mr. Jealousy, a bright comedy of manners. Even as Eric Stoltz romantic…
There are two words guaranteed to cause mainstream movie audiences to avoid the box office–OK, two words besides the “The Avengers”–“low-budget” and “documentary.” That’s exactly what Hands on a Hard Body is, a low-budget documentary, but oddly enough, it’s also one of the most mainstream films to play Dallas this…
Slums of Beverly Hills is the first feature by the young writer-director Tamara Jenkins, and it has its mild amusements. It’s one of those movies that gets bonus points for being “personal”–it bops along from episode to episode, as if the filmmaker were discovering her subject as she went along…
The idea of destiny–especially the notion that two people are fated to meet and fall in love–is a load of crap, but a surprising number of people buy into it. Probably for that reason it has proven to be a fairly popular component in movie romances, City of Angels and…
As the lights came up after a screening of the new Neil LaBute movie Your Friends and Neighbors, a colleague next to me growled disapprovingly, “That was a nasty movie.” For LaBute–whose divisive debut film, In the Company of Men, is probably the worst date movie ever made–this comment would…
After a summer filled with third-rate pulp, Blade arrives with a pedigree that suggests first-rate pulp: characters and situations from Marvel Comics; a screenplay by David S. Goyer (who gave us this year’s truly transcendent pulp masterpiece, Dark City); and the presence (as star and producer) of Wesley Snipes, a…
The timing couldn’t be better for How Stella Got Her Groove Back. The dog days of summer are upon us, and few prospects could be more welcome to asteroid-weary moviegoers than a light romantic comedy that includes a trip to Jamaica as part of the package. Director Kevin Rodney Sullivan…
Darren Aronofsky’s debut feature, Pi, won the Dramatic Directing Award at Sundance this year, and it’s easy to imagine why: Whatever its faults–and it has more than a few–it is unquestionably different. It at least takes a stab at interpolating cerebral ideas into the format of a thriller. Max Cohen…
The editors who put together the TV ads for Return to Paradise deserve an Oscar. The spots are suffocating montages of suspense, claustrophobia, and desperation–each one a compressed 30 seconds of overwhelming doom that resonates after it’s gone. Lewis McBride (Joaquin Phoenix), captured on video, his gaunt and haunted face…
Victorian costume romance? Oh, no. Jewish Victorian costume romance? Oy, no. Historical romances–particularly Brontë sisters-style bodice-rippers–are difficult enough to swallow on-screen without feeling as if you’re gagging on a mothball. One colored with Hebrew Orthodoxy? That’s going to be one camphoric matzo ball. But Minnie Driver, fresh from her star-securing…
Nicolas Cage has never seemed more dazzling than he does in the new Brian De Palma thriller Snake Eyes. Playing Rick Santoro, a corrupt Atlantic City cop who likes to think he’s “everybody’s friend,” Cage for almost two continuous hours is boogying to his own inner beat. It’s like watching…
These are the kinds of people who show up in Hal Hartley films: a nun who writes pornography; a surly, amnesiac hit man; a gas-station attendant who plays Elizabethan ballads on his electric guitar and greets customers in French; and a “radical shortstop” who capped a decade playing for the…
Do we really need to see the great Kevin Spacey fuming and fussing in one of those we-do-things-my-way-or-we-don’t-do-them-at-all roles? In The Negotiator, he’s playing Chris Sabian, an expert hostage negotiator for the Chicago police, whose job it is to talk down Samuel L. Jackson’s Danny Roman, another police expert who…
There are disconnected sequences in Whatever, the film debut of writer-director Susan Skoog, that evoke a unique and harrowing experience: the high school party that won’t end. Skoog obviously understands there are two kinds of students–those who can mess around with drugs, alcohol, and sex yet still observe boundaries, and…
The Walt Disney Company has a smart and highly profitable business strategy: Re-release the studio’s proven hits every seven years or so, thereby reaching a new generation of kids–and making another tidy bundle of dollars in the process. Or the Mouse House just remakes its classic films–see, or don’t, last…
The feature directorial debut of writer-director Theresa Connelly is a complete misfire. What is meant to be a somewhat farcical, but also fairytale-like, midsummer night’s sex comedy instead ends up a tedious, uninvolving affair, burdened with a slim premise, grating characters, and poorly realized humor. Clearly a heartfelt project for…
Thanks to the hungry maw of cable TV, nearly every movie production is now accompanied by a documentary crew, assigned with getting enough footage for at least a half-hour making-of short. Such sub-productions are traditionally arranged by the producers of the main feature; and, not surprisingly, it is the usual…
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…
