Some days, when he’s not making movies, peddling comic books, or fighting denunciations from the Catholic League, Kevin Smith wonders when the time will come to quit the biz. He’s spoken in the past of his admiration for Spike Lee’s career, of the wily Brooklynite’s ability to make all kinds…
Susan Sarandon is one of the screen’s most gifted actresses, a fiercely intelligent artist who invests her roles with depth, compassion, wit, and humor. She has the ability to elevate even mediocre material, taking a potentially schmaltzy part, as in Stepmom, and making it totally believable. In her best films…
The world’s demand for minimally talented 30-year-old high school dropouts who believe they’re great poets or great musicians or great movie directors isn’t going to catch up with the supply anytime soon. That won’t keep the strivers from striving, of course, nor will it snuff out their dreams. Case in…
Back in the 1940s, just as the cynical tough guys Cagney and Bogart created were beginning to show signs of iconographic wear and tear, a newer brand of antihero arrived in the form of John Garfield. Better-looking and softer spoken and more articulate than his predecessors, he embodied men every…
Luc Besson — director of La Femme Nikita, The Professional, and The Fifth Element — is not the first name that would leap to mind to helm a biopic of Joan of Arc. Sure, he’s French, and sure, most of his films have a woman or girl as protagonist or…
Actor Frank Whaley has appeared in more than 30 movies, including Swimming With Sharks and Pulp Fiction, but none of them cuts as close to the bone as Whaley’s debut in the writer-director ranks, Joe the King. Set in the ’70s and carefully described by its maker as “loosely autobiographical,”…
The first rule of Being John Malkovich is you do not look at the poster for Being John Malkovich. Really, avoid that poster, despite its curious, clinical design, until after you’ve seen the movie. Plot-spoiling critics are harmless compared with what these filmmakers have opted to disclose in their own…
And now…a G-rated movie from David Lynch! No, Lynch hasn’t lost his mind. He hasn’t gone soft in the head. And he hasn’t sold out to the smiley-faced bean counters at Disney. While the notion of America’s King of Weird — the man who brought us Blue Velvet and Twin…
In the eyes of the general public, Michael Mann is still best known for Miami Vice. He has received a great deal of critical acclaim for films about serial killers, Mohicans, and bank robbers. So who would have guessed that his most engrossing and suspenseful film to date would be…
Much like the religion that has swirled around the Star Wars trilogy for 22 years, the fanaticism evidenced among American fans of Japanese anime remains a mystery to some of us. Writer-director Hayao Miyazaki’s megahit Princess Mononoke does very little to cast light on this obsession: More’s the pity, since…
Harmony Korine’s directorial debut, Gummo, was like a hard smack to the face of contemporary cinema. Relentlessly nonlinear, filled with disturbing imagery, and impossible to synopsize, it caused many viewers to wince in pain and persuaded even more to walk quickly past its poster — of the slightly misshapen head…
Wes Craven — purveyor of fine horror movies, including A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, and the Scream trilogy — has apparently decided to go “legit.” And with Music of the Heart, he has done so with a vengeance. The film’s only death is the result of…
Lord, just what is it about rock and roll that so befuddles filmmakers? Save for This Is Spinal Tap, there has never been a movie about the music business that got it right…or, for God’s sakes, merely half-wrong. Too often, these films are made by people who seem to have…
Fran Lebowitz once observed that if the problem with communism is that it’s too boring, then the problem with fascism is that it’s too exciting. This aphorism neatly sums up the strange sex appeal some people find in Nazi drag: high leather boots, padded shoulders, shaved heads, various daunting interrogation…
Bats This horror picture about mutant killer bats terrorizing a little desert town is basically just like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. There are two major differences: First, The Birds was about birds, while Bats is about bats; and second, The Birds was a flawed but brilliant work by one of…
“That reminds me of the movies Marty made about New York,” stammered Lou Reed somewhere in the mid-’80s. “All those frank and brutal movies that are so brillyunt.” It was a clumsy, rhyme-impaired album track (“Doing the Things That We Want To” from New Sensations), but, as has often been…
Boys Don’t Cry, the first effort from writer-director Kimberly Peirce, unfolds as slowly and deliberately as the reel of film it’s printed on, dawdling on the minor, mundane moments of growing up and growing bored in a small Midwest town. It’s as though Peirce wants to show just how easy…
Since there is no way to talk about The Best Man without eventually invoking the phrase “Spike Lee’s cousin,” let’s just get it out of the way: The Best Man is the directorial debut of Malcolm D. Lee, who is Spike Lee’s cousin. Having worked on various S. Lee films,…
Based on his directorial debut, there are three things we can safely say about Antonio Banderas: He’s an actor’s director, meaning he can pick a good cast and coax great performances from them; he knows how to make a good image and where to point the camera; and he has…
There have been so many recent movies about modern gay teenage life, you’d think a filmmaker would be hard-pressed to find a new wrinkle on what has become an increasingly familiar tale. But Head On isn’t a pro forma drama of self-discovery and self-acceptance. As directed by Ana Kokkinos and…
David Fincher needs a hug, the poor bastard. Or possibly a diaper change. Ever since 1992, when he ruined the Alien series with the excrescence of his pointless, senseless third installment, he’s been making the same bratty, obnoxious movie over and over again: gloom, doom, indestructible protagonist, bureaucratic evil, quasi-religious…
Steven Soderbergh may have had some rocky times after his 1989 breakthrough with sex, lies, and videotape, but these days he’s on a roll. Last year he produced Pleasantville and directed Out of Sight, two of the year’s most praised films. This year he has The Limey, a complex, introspective…
