Chopper, the first feature from Australian video director Andrew Dominik, is a strong, effective but often stomach-churning portrait of notorious Aussie criminal Mark “Chopper” Read. It can be characterized as “sensational”–in both the positive and negative senses of the word. According to the filmmakers, Chopper Read is a legend Down…
Times certainly have changed. Twenty years ago, a musical about an East German transsexual rock singer would have premiered in one of New York’s off-off-Broadway theaters or cabarets, run for a couple of weeks and remained the pleasant memory of a select few. But when John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and…
There are scenes in Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes redo so hysterical they drown out minutes’ worth of dialogue that follow, which is hardly a knock. Indeed, the film is often so comical, so ridiculous in that self-aware wink-wink sort of way, it plays like a parody of the…
If there’s any justice in moviedom, this summer’s feel-good hit will be an unassuming Dutch comedy called Everybody’s Famous! Defying long odds, writer-director Dominique Deruddere has taken a couple of shopworn subjects–the public obsession with celebrity and the ineptitude of amateur criminals–and parlayed them into an original and inventive farce…
Actor “Beat” Takeshi Kitano has built an international reputation over the past decade, primarily through a series of ultra-hard-boiled crime films in which he plays either a cop or a felon. With the exception of Gonin (1995; released in the United States in 1998), which was directed by Takeshi Ishii,…
A third Jurassic Park movie was inevitable, given that the second shattered box office records. But when you have one of the hottest box office properties of all time, isn’t it worth taking a little time to craft it? Just because you know it can only be better than The…
A year ago, John Cusack was smarting over his breakup with Catherine Zeta-Jones, who, he lamented, was “out of my class–too smart, too pretty, too much.” He couldn’t figure out why such a self-absorbed glamour doll was going out with such a regular-Joe schmo in the first place; he waited…
Back in her early teens, Reese Witherspoon proved herself a terrific actress in her big-screen debut, Man in the Moon in 1991. Since then, she’s done first-rate work in critical hits like Pleasantville, cult faves like Freeway and Election and underrated gems like Best Laid Plans. So how is it…
Even more than the recent Depression-era comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the turn-of-the-century drama Songcatcher is an absolute treasure trove of old-timey, traditional folk music. Set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia in 1907, the film follows city-bred musicologist Dr. Lily Penleric (Janet McTeer) as she traverses the…
Thirty minutes into Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, I realized I had no idea what was going on…and could not have cared less. The New Age-tinged tale set 60 years in the future–about an alien infestation and the dueling schemes to eradicate it from the planet, one of which could…
In the movies, dead husbands and dearly departed boyfriends have an irksome habit of revisiting the women who once loved them–usually at inconvenient moments. Consider Demi Moore in Ghost. Poor thing had to put up with the dramatically challenged shade of Patrick Swayze, who droned on and on about a…
Now that A.I.’s out of the way and it’s safe again to read movie reviews without dictionary and NoDoz in hand, onward and downward to the Summer of Dumb. Who has time for serious and thoughtful when there’s plenty of stupid to slather all over audiences that like to stay…
Kiss of the Dragon–the latest vehicle for martial arts star Jet Li, a mainland Chinese talent who became a superstar in Hong Kong and has since succumbed to the blandishments of Hollywood–has a little of the best (and a lot of the worst) of Hong Kong films, and a lot…
There’s plenty of French star power in The Closet (Le Placard), a comedy written and directed by the prolific director Francis Veber. The movie stars Daniel Auteuil, Gérard Depardieu and Thierry Lhermitte, which in U.S. terms is roughly equivalent to a movie featuring Robin Williams, Nick Nolte and Tom Hanks,…
The German filmmaker Tom Tykwer has a gift for fusing psychological complexity and crackling plot without forsaking the excitements of either. The success of Run Lola Run didn’t exactly turn Tykwer into a household name, but it earned him his props as a young lion of the art houses. Moviegoers…
For almost two decades, Stanley Kubrick wanted to make a film based on Brian Aldiss’ 1969 short story “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long,” about a robot child named David who wants only to be “real” so Mummy and Daddy will love him. The late director of 2001: A Space Odyssey…
Sexy Beast, the debut feature from British director Jonathan Glazer, is a riveting, scary and often funny foray into a traditional American genre: the gangster film. Like the western, the gangster film has always been predominantly American turf, but–unlike with the western–every decade or so the Brits come up with…
Like countless European-American filmmakers before him, African-American filmmaker John Singleton tends to operate under the faulty logic that vengeance equals heroism. Anyone who doubts this assertion is welcome to compare his grooveless, mean-spirited remake of Shaft to the deceptively simple and human original. This isn’t to say that he’s not…
Now here’s a tricky one. Start with a busload of familiar and appealing stars, shacked up together for a couple of weeks in a house in the Hollywood Hills. Assign them their mission: to emulate themselves–sort of–while dutifully reminding us that human relationships can be complicated. Then set the tone…
If internal combustion ever becomes obsolete–that is, if the auto industry ever allows internal combustion to become obsolete–whatever will movies do for heart-stopping drama? Hoofbeats are dramatic, and the chug of a steam engine is suspenseful, but the roar of a gasoline-powered vehicle stirs the blood of any self-respecting moviegoer…
After winning five Audience Awards and other honors at various gay and lesbian film festivals during the past year, Thomas Bezucha’s Big Eden has finally opened in general release. You don’t have to be an expert on the history of gay cinema to see why–or even to be gay to…
In a year inundated with massive movies, it’s a pleasant surprise to note that a truly spectacular adventure has arrived in the form of a Disney cartoon called Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Gushing aside, let us now consider the Atlanteans, the mythic race whom co-directors Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise…
