John Leguizamo is lithe and full of juice–he’s like the shy boy who suddenly discovers he can dance and can’t keep still. Given his need to express himself physically–in his first one-man stage show, Spic-O-Rama, I don’t think his feet ever hit the ground–it’s a sad irony that his breakthrough…
187, a number favored by adolescent thugs, is the California state penal code for homicide–and a harsh sentence for all involved in this hopeless, hapless movie. The gifted Samuel L. Jackson stars as a high school teacher who cracks under the constant threat of rabid teen machismo–and retaliates with his…
In Picture Perfect, Jennifer Aniston tells a whopper of a lie partially to win the attentions of a guy who has heretofore ignored her, interrupts a wedding, and humiliates a guy at his workplace. This follows on the heels of My Best Friend’s Wedding, which found Julia Roberts trying to…
It’s no secret that the “new” Jackie Chan releases in the U.S. aren’t really new at all. In fact, they’re not even showing up in chronological order: While New Line is issuing Jackie’s more current stuff in order, Miramax is putting out the star’s relatively recent back catalog out of…
Not satisfied with the president you have? Here’s Harrison Ford’s James Marshall in Air Force One–Vietnam war hero, straight as a ramrod, devoted husband and father. We first see him delivering a speech before a roomful of Russian dignitaries. Departing from the prepared, wishy-washy text, Mr. President fire-breathes his new…
Mrs. Brown (a Cannes hit and Miramax release) is dignified to the dead max–brownish-gray in mood and look and spirit. It’s based on the true story of the platonic but controversial bond between Queen Victoria (Judi Dench) and a Highlander named John Brown (Billy Connolly), who had been the devoted…
Writer-director Finn Taylor is a young filmmaker who’s smart enough to steal from the best, even if his precocious talent doesn’t always use what he’s swiped effectively. Dream With the Fishes is Taylor’s debut feature, a tightly executed, occasionally contrived study of two men trying to outrun death. The movie…
What must those poor guys in Insane Clown Posse be thinking? After all, the sad white rap act only made a record that included profanity, and still they got drop-kicked off a panicky Disney-owned Hollywood Records, a label whose greatest catalog asset is Queen. Martin Lawrence, on the other hand,…
A lot of ink has been shed in the press lately about the “seriousness” of the new Robert Zemeckis film Contact, starring Jodie Foster as an astronomer who receives humankind’s first extraterrestrial message. Forrest Gump made Zemeckis a guru; now he’s being primed as a philosopher king. Is it rude…
At first glance, the new Japanese comedy Shall We Dance? appears to be an Asian remake of the Australian hit Strictly Ballroom–but, in fact, the similarities are only surface-deep (and just barely that). Part of the difference is rooted in the cultural gap between the two countries, but wider yet…
It’s late in the day on June 9, and I’m due to talk to John Woo about Face/Off, his new action film with John Travolta and Nicolas Cage. We are meeting at a sound facility in Los Angeles, where the director is only now finishing the final touches. Woo’s still…
One speech and one prop from Men in Black combine to sum up the movie. An alien in four-legged Earthly form delivers the speech: “You humans, when’re you gonna learn that size doesn’t matter? Just ’cause something’s important, doesn’t mean it’s not very, very small.” The most refreshing thing about…
The Van is being billed as “the final chapter in the Barrytown Trilogy,” Irish author Roddy Doyle’s group of novels set in a fictional north Dublin suburb that also consists of The Commitments and The Snapper. That “final chapter” label, courtesy of the production notes, gives The Van the aura…
The title of John Woo’s Face/Off is meant to be taken literally. John Travolta and Nicolas Cage play adversaries who swap faces. Here’s how: FBI agent Sean Archer (Travolta) has been single-mindedly tracking terrorist nut Castor Troy (Cage) ever since Castor’s botched assassination attempt six years earlier, in which he…
Slapstick decadence is the dominant style at the Disney studios this summer, reaching all the way from Touchstone Pictures’ action hit Con Air to the 35th Walt Disney animated feature, Hercules. It’s a moviemaking mode that weds anything-for-a-laugh to anything-for-a-jolt, leaving imagination and authenticity in the lurch. Instead of creating…
Bring earplugs to Batman & Robin. A pair of noseplugs wouldn’t hurt either. The fourth installment in the Batman franchise is one long head-splitting exercise in clueless cacophony that makes you feel as though you’re being held hostage in some haywire Planet Hollywood while sonic booms pummel your auditory canal…
To get into a good-lovin’ mood before each date, a college housemate of mine croaked along to Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey” while blasting it through his stereo. My fondness for the song survived. So as the end credits for Ulee’s Gold unrolled against the robust lyricism of Morrison belting out…
Nothing against My Best Friend’s Wedding, but it’s a sign of just how vacuous things have become in Hollywood when folks start getting excited about a movie with a handful of partially engaging characters, a fairly intriguing storyline, and a smattering of clever lines. Look, that’s what movies are expected…
British filmmaker Peter Greenaway sits near a window in the dining room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel; he indicates with his eyes a man walking along the sidewalk toward Hollywood Boulevard. In trying to explain his use of multiple imagery in his new film, The Pillow Book, and separating it…
First, the good news: Unlike most action film sequels, Speed 2: Cruise Control is not a mere retread of the original. Now the bad news: Better it had been. Director Jan De Bont made a dazzling debut with the 1994 Speed. His riveting direction of action triumphed over a hackneyed,…
A certain kind of movie lover adores anything and everything foreign–French romantic comedies, Chinese historical dramas, English studies of class conflict. This is a perfectly defensible bias to hold, since the cinema does nothing better than take the stories of distant neighborhoods and write them so large across the screen…
It wouldn’t be completely fair to say that the hits produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer from 1983 through 1996 are stylistically interchangeable. But it wouldn’t be so awfully unfair either: A homogeneous, auteurial touch runs from Flashdance (1983) through Top Gun (1986), Beverly Hills Cop II (1987), and…
