Despite its muckraking pretensions, Red Corner is a rickety throwback to escapist adventures that featured beautiful foreign idealists spouting high-flown hooey to fighting Americans. The heroine, a scrappy Beijing defense lawyer, ends up whispering a whole succession of sweet somethings to the hero, a framed Yank. The banalities include (I…
Neil Young has been so many things–a pink-suited and pompadoured rockabilly cat, a founding member of the SoCal folk sound of the ’70s, a tireless campaigner for the separation of art and commerce, a cyber-geek years ahead of his time, a lounge-jazz wannabe, and a relentless rocker–that it’s hard to…
Jennifer Jason Leigh follows up one of her smallest and weakest roles–in A Thousand Acres–with a far more challenging and formidable performance in Washington Square. This new film version of Henry James’ 1880 short novel chronicles the courtship of a wealthy girl who has no obvious attractive qualities. But the…
After earning worldwide accolades for her superb 1993 adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s classic The Secret Garden, Polish-born writer-director Agnieszka Holland is well aware that her equally intense new film version of Henry James’ novella Washington Square may pigeonhole her as a kind of reference librarian of world cinema…
The true-life incident of the Cottingley Fairies is so full of possibilities, so thought-provoking and hilarious at once, that it’s amazing it’s never been filmed before. Making up for lost time, the story has suddenly appeared (on its 80th anniversary) as the basis for two films simultaneously. Photographing Fairies, with…
Stylishness without substance can become wearying real fast. Twenty minutes into A Life Less Ordinary, the new movie from the producing-directing-writing team of Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, I was already into overload. It’s not that director Danny Boyle doesn’t have imagination. It’s just that sometimes imagination is all he has…
It’s hard to fault The House of Yes, the wry toast of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, for its limitations as a film. In fact, it’s hardly a film at all. Rather, it’s a barely staged, five-handed farce that trails its amiable cast around a looming Victorian mansion over the…
Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights opens with a sinuous, breathlessly extended tracking shot that swoops us into a San Fernando Valley disco and then does a curlicue around a succession of faces. In the discotheque’s low-lit luminescence, these people pop out like jack-o’-lanterns. They have the look of trashy…
Steven Soderbergh’s cinematic version of Spalding Gray’s Gray’s Anatomy opens with a hokey educational trailer from the 1950s about the crucial nature of good eyesight. It then segues into nine minutes of talking heads jabbering about their sundry unique vision problems: One woman sleeps with her eyes open; another mistakes…
Seven Years in Tibet feels more like Seven Days in the Movie Theater. It refuses to come alive–not even when Brad Pitt, hirsute as a yak, wanders the frozen Himalayas with an Austrian accent that probably gave his dialogue coach hives. It’s an epic about how an arrogant, real-life Austrian…
The ’70s were so awash in ’50s nostalgia that it’s surprising Dan Wakefield’s 1970 bestseller Going All the Way is only now turning up in big-screen form. Of course, not all ’50s coming-of-age stories are the same: Unlike The Last Picture Show and American Graffiti–which pretty much dominated the genre…
The Locusts. If Elvis Presley acted in Tennessee Williams plays instead of dragster movies and bad beach flicks, he’d have the same kind of charisma as Vince Vaughn in The Locusts. With V-neck undershirts, an early-’60s pompadour, and loads of aw-shucks charm, the Swingers star bashfully saunters his way through…
Janeane Garofalo plows right through The Matchmaker with the same disgruntled sarcasm that typifies her testy, standard-bearer-for-the-underdogs-of-the-world persona. Try though it may to cast America’s Favorite Anti-Star in a Romantic Comedy For People Who Don’t Like Romantic Comedy, this script, a wholesale retread of Local Hero, plays on the generic…
By its very definition, a thriller should, you know, thrill. It should not only scare its audience with a quick jolt, that sudden noise in the dark that comes from nowhere and fills everywhere, but with its slow burn. It’s not enough for a thriller to tell its story, to…
Oliver Stone’s low-budget, hopped-up film noir, U-Turn, is being billed as a change of pace for the Conspiracy Dude, but actually it looks quite at home in the maestro’s hothouse. After all, aren’t conspiracies and the workings of fate what noirs are all about? Stone’s JFK pulped history with the…
Kevin Corrigan doesn’t act as much as he seems to stumble from scene to scene, like a guy who doesn’t follow a script as much as his own internal stage directions. He’s got skin so pale it’s almost translucent, and he wears the face of a guy who’s always this…
The Peacemaker is the first feature from DreamWorks Pictures, the studio headed by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen. It stars George Clooney and Nicole Kidman, and it’s about terrorists who steal Russian nukes. As an intelligence officer with the U.S. Army’s Special Forces, Clooney gets to model his…
The 1950s-era Los Angeles of L.A. Confidential is Noir Central. Its denizens are tattooed in shadow; the play of light and dark–in the streets, the police stations, the morgues–is fetishistic. The postwar L.A. touted in the travelogues and billboards is a boomtown, but what we actually see is unsettling: a…
Every film adaptation of a preexisting work has its own unique set of problems; in the case of director Jocelyn Moorhouse’s A Thousand Acres, the problem is compounded. Not only was Jane Smiley’s 1991 novel a Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller with a large number of (presumably) devoted fans, but the book…
Howard and Emily’s marriage is the talk of Greenleaf, Indiana, a small town idyllic enough to repel Norman Rockwell. The town has waited three years for the couple to make it official–and slimmed-down Emily (Joan Cusack) has waited three long years for Howard (Kevin Kline) to consummate their relationship. She’s…
Bernardo Bertolucci once dubbed Los Angeles the Big Nipple. Writer-director Curtis Hanson has been suckling at it all his life. Just how much nourishment he’s drawn becomes clear in his terrific new L.A. film, L.A. Confidential. Now 52, Hanson has been a talent for critics to dead-reckon with for 20…
Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s final film, Guantanamera, shares a tone of wistful romanticism with the late Cuban director’s Letters From the Park (a sweetly lyrical film based on the Gabriel Garcia Marquez story about a man who ghostwrites love letters) and Strawberry and Chocolate. Like a Garcia Marquez novel, Guantanamera plays…
