Any moviemaker who ventures into the sewers of New York City corruption will find Sidney Lumet’s wet footprints. In films such as The Pawnbroker, Serpico, and Q&A, this streetwise director has explored, among other things, individual morality in the face of big-city vice, and individual transcendence of ethnic conflict. Other…
The stark simplicity of A Time for Drunken Horses, one of the few films that have slipped out of post-revolutionary Iran to the West, does nothing to obscure its emotional power or the complexity of the geopolitical issues underlying it. Filmed on location in wintry Kurdistan, it is the heartbreaking…
Early in Spanish director Carlos Saura’s stunning new film, the 82-year-old protagonist, the great 19th-century painter Francisco de Goya, awakens from a disturbing dream and rises to see an apparition of his lost love, the Duchess of Alba. Following her down a surrealistically white hallway, he suddenly finds himself outdoors…
Italian-Americans might be glad to note that Two Family House, which focuses on the Italian community on Staten Island, features not a single gangster, gun, or ring to be kissed. They might be even happier if the film had also chosen not to depict them as fat, pasta-eating, quick-tempered racists…
To put it mildly, it is uncomfortable and embarrassing to have one’s cynical ass whipped by a huge, hulking Hallmark card, and this is exactly the sensation one takes away from Mimi Leder’s Pay It Forward. Not that the near-total emotional submission isn’t preceded by a knock-down, drag-out battle for…
Let’s be honest: As much as people may complain about Spike Lee’s public pontifications on race, or his controversial stances, or his being a rabble-rouser, that’s the way we like him. What first comes to mind when you hear his name mentioned? Certainly not Girl 6 or The Original Kings…
The setting of Stephen Daldry’s uplifting comedy Billy Elliot, about a working-class boy who wants to be a ballet dancer, is a beleaguered coal-mining town in the north of England, circa 1984. A coat of grime covers the squat brick-row houses, drying laundry flaps sadly in the breeze, and the…
Oh, the plight of the common nebbish, aching to be adored, mugging for attention, and eternally desperate to bag a sexy babe. Sounds familiar, no? That’s because the little fella pops up all over the place, in movies as disparate as Losin’ It, Wings of Desire, and Fight Club, but,…
In recent years, the fabulous Chilean-expatriate director Raoul (sometimes Raul) Ruiz has moved from shoestring-budgeted features that could qualify as avant-garde to increasingly opulent movies with major art-house stars and a shot at mainstream success. Not yet 60, he has made more than 60 films since his 1968 debut Three…
The first thing to know about The Legend of Drunken Master is that there is no Legend of Drunken Master–not really. Miramax/ Dimension’s new Jackie Chan release is a repackaging of the star’s 1994 Drunken Master 2. This is not inherently a bad thing. Nearly all Jackie Chan buffs–count this…
Richard Gere, as Dallas gynecologist Sullivan Travis, has never been more likable onscreen, perhaps because he’s never been more human, more vulnerable, more there. After so many years of so many duds, after so many years of playing ladies’ man to little girls (and this year’s Autumn in New York…
Slash a steer’s throat or snip the beak off a bird and most people don’t give anything remotely resembling a damn. But take, for instance, an adorable dog–perhaps that peculiar lupine descendant you live to shelter, feed, and soul kiss. Imagine laying that poor pooch’s head on the block, then…
There’s no getting around it: The Contender is the most offensive movie of the year. It pretends to be high-minded even while it slings mud and semen at the audience in its attempt to make its bludgeoning point, which is: If a woman wants to ascend to one of the…
It’s nearly impossible to give a film like Under Suspicion a simple thumbs up or thumbs down. Ninety percent of this thriller is absolutely terrific; but the 10 percent that fails is so troubling that it threatens to undermine all that is wonderful in the rest. (This problem may also…
So a Jew and a Christian walk into the economically challenged valleys of Wales… No, it’s not a joke–not until the absurd, maudlin third act, anyway–but rather the essence of Solomon & Gaenor, the feature debut of British television director, documentarian, and psychotherapist Paul Morrison. Taking its cue from Jim…
We should be ashamed for overlooking the Vistas Film Festival last year, its first in existence. In our haste to cover those in Deep Ellum and Fort Worth, and in our haste to once more bury the USA Film Festival, this four-day celebration of Latin film fell between the cracks,…
Meet the Parents has just enough class to make for Prestige Pop: Robert De Niro as star, Randy Newman as composer, Blythe Danner as wallpaper, Ben Stiller as schmuck. It has just enough “comedy” to qualify as crowd-pleaser: sight gags (Stiller chasing a cat across a roof before setting fire…
According to Patrice Leconte, women live to be vulnerable, men thrive when they are in command, and the two genders can only find happy fusion once they’ve tasted each other’s fates…unless they capriciously kill each other. At least, this seems to be the director’s thesis in Girl on the Bridge,…
With global overpopulation neatly intertwining with the advent of the home video camera, we have been afforded, as a species, several near-miracles. For instance, when supersonic jets explode, or when mobs impolitely loot and riot in urban centers, the common consumer can now document the event and sell it to…
Remember the Titans–based on a true story about how a football team brought together a segregated Alexandria, Virginia, in the early 1970s–is the first film from producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s Technical Black production company, meant to offer more contemplative and slower-paced films than his hollow, slam-bang filmography suggests: Flashdance, The Rock,…
It takes a special mindset to celebrate castration, and audiences confusing feminine empowerment with the crude hacking off of seemingly oppressive huevos are certain to get a bang out of Girlfight, the gritty debut feature from writer-director Karyn Kusama. Metaphorical or otherwise, there’s already a movie about deballing to suit…
It’s a sorry fact that what everybody in Hollywood really wants to do–writer, actor, best boy, and caterer alike–is direct. This has led, over the years, to some embarrassing debuts and some unexpected triumphs. For many, the notion that Sally Field–after Gidget and Sister Bertrille and “You like me…you really…
