International film critics who have raved about veteran French farceur Francis Veber’s The Dinner Game (Le Diner De Cons), only to qualify the goings-on in this serviceable but meringuey little chuckler as “cruel” and “punishing,” clearly haven’t taken in a comedy by American filmmaker Neil LaBute. In much the same…
Feel like shooting lutefisk in a barrel? Pick on beleaguered Minnesota again as the epicenter of everything that’s square-headed and unhip in America. Want to let the world know that two plus two equals four? Take aim one more time at the vain stupidity of beauty contests. Drop Dead Gorgeous,…
For anyone who may be considering Inspector Gadget, here’s the sole worthwhile gag; read this if you want to save 80 minutes and eight bucks. Intercut with the end credits, we see one of the heavies in the film, Sikes (Michael G. Hagerty), a minion of the evil supergenius Claw…
Roughly halfway through Edge of Seventeen, the hero of this romantic comedy-drama, a very likable kid named Eric (Chris Stafford), is confronted by his mother (Stephanie McVay) in the living room of their home. “Are you gay?” she asks him point-blank. And his point-blank answer is “No.” I can’t think…
Eyes Wide Shut, the final motion picture from the late, great Stanley Kubrick, is easily the most anticipated adult film of the year. It’s The Phantom Menace for grown-ups. Any film by the notoriously painstaking auteur would have achieved this status. Kubrick made only 13 features in his 46-year career,…
Terry Southern and Stanley Kubrick had a star-crossed relationship — like two planets dancing in orbit with each other, achieving perfect alignment, then veering off into remote areas of the universe. They met in 1962, when they needed each other most: Stanley was preparing to make a movie about the…
The Blair Witch Project, the bone-chilling indie by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, is easily the scariest horror picture of the ’90s, a movie that can take a place among the most potent and inexorable of modern shockers, like Night of the Living Dead or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Three…
You can tell the first wave of summer blockbusters have shot their wad when the studios start tossing out their second- and third-string films. Back in the old days, these would have been called “programmers” — thoroughly competent entries that reiterated all the conventions of their reliable, easy-to-market genres. Such…
First, the good news: The title of the high school comedy/Gen-X nostalgia flick The Wood is not, despite this summer’s rash of double entendres, a dirty joke. The name’s as earnest and literal as the film itself, and simply marks the setting as Inglewood, California, the Los Angeles ‘burb best…
Do you feel snug and secure in your cozy suburban life? Are you happy in your picture-perfect home, with your carefully manicured lawn, your kids and your soccer games and your barbecues? Do you feel safe? Well, the creators of Arlington Road, the ponderous new thriller starring Jeff Bridges and…
It’s about time we had a talk. Yeah, you know, that talk. The one about how uncomfortable and strange it is to be a young human male, how raging and unforgiving the hormones, how fragile the ego, how mysterious the female form. You see, well, how do I say this?…
Twice Upon a Yesterday seems almost too geared for the Sliding Doors crowd. Because this romantic fable relies on the same kind of conceptual sleight of hand as that recent Brit hit (which owed a giant debt of its own to Groundhog Day), its sense of originality and wit is…
London-born novelist-screenwriter Hanif Kureishi doesn’t have Margaret Thatcher to kick around anymore, as he did so incisively and effectively in My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, but his concerns have not wandered too far afield. Rather, the hard edges merely have been softened. Universal issues still inspire…
It won’t take long for anyone familiar with the 1960s Wild, Wild West television series to notice that something isn’t right with Barry Sonnenfeld’s listless big-screen remake. Yes, the film features Will Smith in the role of James West, and Kevin Kline as his cerebral sidekick Artemus Gordon — but…
The animated TV show South Park was the big sensation of the 1997-98 season — or at least as big a hit as a cable channel like Comedy Central can manage. It was almost inevitable that creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone would take their batch of foul-mouthed 8-year-olds to…
To hear Spike Lee tell it, Summer of Sam means to be a panoramic view of the summer of 1977 in New York City — when temperatures shot into the high 90s and power blackouts set nerves on edge, when the party agenda included snorting coke at Studio 54 and…
Run Lola Run is proof that the influence of MTV on feature filmmaking hasn’t been all bad. The jagged stylistic excess that dominates short-form music videos can be exhausting and irritating when drawn out to feature length: Michael Bay (The Rock, Armageddon) may be the worst offender, though far from…
The new Adam Sandler comedy, Big Daddy, isn’t just the funniest movie of the summer; it’s also the most improbable feel-good movie of the season. It’s improbable because practically everything about Adam Sandler seems so unlikely, so strangely back-assward. His whole phenomenal career — from Billy Madison to Happy Gilmore,…
Woe to the scribe who presumes to rewrite a master — unless he is so deft that his invasion of privacy produces something new and exciting. Enter British writer-director Oliver Parker. He has the nerve to meddle with Oscar Wilde’s sublime farce An Ideal Husband and the skill to pull…
Pretentiousness masquerading as profundity; self-indulgence masquerading as art. The Loss of Sexual Innocence, the dreadful new film from writer-director Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas, One Night Stand), joins the ranks of the worst films ever made. OK, it’s a statement that may, on the surface, seem harsh and heartless; but…
It has not been lost on the Quinn brothers — actor Aidan, cinematographer Declan, and writer-director Paul — that in old Gaelic culture, the tribal bard (or storyteller) was held in the highest esteem. The Quinns want to be Irish storytellers too, and to that end they have loaded up…
This is the first thing you notice about John Travolta as he stands before you, extending his hand in welcome: He does not look at all like a Movie Star. At 45, he seems a bit softer and a tad shorter than he did even on television, where the small…
