Merchant/Ivory Productions has long been America’s quintessential purveyor of classy, “literary” films. At its best, the team of director James Ivory and Ismail Merchant has given us A Room With a View (1986) and The Remains of the Day (1993); at its worst, Slaves of New York (1989) and Jefferson…
Film topics are cyclical, of course, and boxing movies are currently enjoying their return to the spotlight. Or maybe “enjoying” is too strong a word. Despite the recent number of fighting tales — Play It to the Bone, The Hurricane, On the Ropes, Knockout, Price of Glory — not one…
Lately, it seems that even the most successful film adaptations don’t have much more in common with the books that spawned them than the title and some of the characters’ names — at best. Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential, for instance, had little to do with James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential, apart…
From its opening moments, The Road to El Dorado looks and sounds oddly out of time, as though it were removed only yesterday from a time capsule sealed and buried in 1972. With its Peter Max visuals and Elton John vocals, it’s a decidedly unhip piece of work from the…
Not so long ago, The Skulls would have starred Tom Cruise — but in which role? He could have been either lead; the one he didn’t choose could have landed in the lap of, say, James Spader or Rob Lowe. One can easily imagine Cruise as Luke McNamara, the beefy,…
What is it with filmmakers and mental retardation? It seems as though use of the differently abled as a central theme ranks second only to troubled childhood when it comes time to make a “personal” film. The connection between the two is fairly obvious: the artist as gentle innocent besieged…
Rod Lurie’s Deterrence is a bush-league foreign-policy debate disguised as a movie. There may come a day when Paramount Classics ships every print it has struck of this inert and tedious piece of business off to selected political science and social philosophy classes and tries to forget about the whole…
In the opening scenes of Price of Glory, set in the late 1970s, a young prizefighter named Arturo Ortega (Jimmy Smits) loses a career-making bout. He earns a few grand, but he’s plainly washed up, and we’re meant to see that it’s his greedy manager’s fault; like Antonio Banderas in…
The drug of romance and its rotten hangover are nothing new to stage, screen, and stereo. You’ve got your Capulets and Montagues, your Griffin and Phoenix, your Ike and Tina. Cautionary tales, the lot. (The formula is as follows: Person + Person + Lovethang – Brains = Emotional Abattoir yielding…
Even the press kit is up-front about it: Whatever It Takes is less a film than a product of marketing research and demographic considerations. It might as well have been written on a bar graph, so fetishistic is it about making sure it appeals to teens and their parents –…
Such a Long Journey is set in Bombay in 1971, shortly before the war between India and Pakistan. Gustad Noble (Roshan Seth) is as middle-class as they come: A bank teller for 20 years, he works hard to support his wife, Dilnavaz (Soni Razdan), and children. But such is the…
Is America ready for the Hong Kong action style? Certainly there are many fans of the more balletic, guns-and-martial-arts, fly-through-the-air movies that have inspired everyone from Quentin Tarantino to the Wachowski brothers. Yet Hollywood still seems to have had trouble marketing the concept. Yes, John Woo gets high-profile projects, but…
Here on Earth, the new teen romance, should do wonders for the reputation of veteran director Arthur Hiller. Not that Hiller had anything to do with the film, mind you — which wouldn’t do wonders for his rep. No, Hiller is the man who, back in 1970, directed the inexplicably…
It’s again that time of year, when we gather to praise Bart Weiss for keeping afloat the Dallas Video Festival against all odds (the odds being, in this case, a city in which culture means Mark Cuban). In its 13th year, the DVF has yet to make Weiss a rich…
In director Jem Cohen’s films, especially earlier efforts such as 1987’s This Is a History of New York and 1992’s Drink Deep, he manages to tell a story without letting on exactly what story he’s telling. Meaning: He’s definitely saying something, but it’s up to the viewer to decipher what…
The film is called Erin Brockovich, but it might as well be titled Julia Roberts. Never before in the actress’ erratic career has a film been so custom-made for her; it’s as though a screenwriter has been replaced by a seamstress who knows Roberts’ every curve. No matter that she…
The gun is a coward’s weapon — always has been, always will be. Likening it to the sword is like equating rape to romance. However, for reasons that can only be attributed to collective insanity, Hollywood absolutely loves to romanticize the gun, serving as an adjunct advertising agency for the…
“You are here to heal, so start healing!” announces a plucky nurse (Linda Bassett) to a grumbling trio of wounded men convalescing under her care in a crowded London hospital room. Dramatically, the scene marks as good a place as any to focus on writer-director Jasmin Dizdar’s complex and truly…
Hollywood may be crass when it comes to cloning success, but it’s not alone. Take the British Isles, for instance, ever since the success of a certain working-class comedy about unemployed louts turned male strippers. It seems as if there’s been a law put into effect that every comedy out…
What if fate has something horrific in store for you, and you can’t escape it? It’s an idea that has been around for a long time, from Oedipus Rex to The Twilight Zone. Cinematically, we tend to prefer the idea that destiny is going to be a positive force (Star…
It’s a brave thief who reveals his booty to the man from whom he stole it. But Jim Jarmusch could not resist showing his film, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai to Seijun Suzuki, the 76-year-old Japanese director whose 1967 film Branded to Kill is echoed throughout Ghost Dog…
Roman Polanski begins this interview by asking the questions — about last names, countries of origin, family members murdered by the Nazis. After all, as much as any landmark film (Chinatown or Rosemary’s Baby) or connection to tragedy (the 1969 murder of his wife Sharon Tate by members of Charles…
