As a filmmaker, actor John Turturro clearly believes in drawing from personal experience: His directorial debut, the 1992’s Mac (which won the Camera D’Or at Cannes), was avowedly based on his father’s life. For his second feature, Illuminata, Turturro takes a look at the theater, showing us the ambitions, fears,…
John Turturro may be best known as an actor, having appeared in such films as Do the Right Thing, Barton Fink, and Quiz Show, but the man speaks like a writer-director. He likes to talk about the themes of his films, and about the way one character’s actions and personality…
Joan Chen, director and co-writer of Xiu Xiu the Sent Down Girl, is best known as an actress. American audiences probably identify her most readily as the doomed wife in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor or as Josie Packard, the alternately evil and innocent character in David Lynch’s weird-o-rama Twin…
Filmmaker Bobby Bowfinger, the lead character in the intermittently funny Hollywood satire Bowfinger starring Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy, has a dream. Nothing so grand as an Academy Award, or even a table down front at the Golden Globes. No, when Bowfinger allows his fantasies to run wild, he sees…
Do not be fooled: Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley, and Peter Criss receive top billing in Detroit Rock City, but KISS doesn’t actually appear in the film until its final three minutes. And when they do show up, clad in their de rigueur leather-and-greasepaint getups, it’s simply to perform…
For Morgan J. Freeman (a young writer-director, not the heralded actor), comic timing couldn’t get any worse — or better. That’s because one of the unhappy teenagers in Freeman’s second feature, Desert Blue, is a melancholy girl dressed in moody black who likes to detonate homemade bombs. The Columbine High…
You don’t have to believe in ghosts, Haunting-style, to perceive the specter of Orson Welles hovering about The Big Brass Ring, debuting this week on Showtime. George Hickenlooper’s film is based on Welles’ last completed screenplay, co-written with Oja Kodar in the early ’80s. It has been substantially altered and…
In the highly competitive, dog-eat-dog world of the modern-day superhero, the members of the group that eventually becomes known as the Mystery Men — they don’t really have a name through most of the movie — start out with a couple of strikes against them. First off, there’s the little…
First published under the title The Iron Man in Great Britain in 1968, The Iron Giant is a minor classic of 20th-century children’s literature. The slim volume by the English poet laureate Ted Hughes is a pacifist parable in the guise of a sci-fi hero fantasy. Hughes spun his yarn…
The Sixth Sense, a kind of touchy-feely horror movie, wants to do it all — scare the hell out of us at the same time that it makes us feel good about life and death. It wants us to believe that an 8-year-old boy in Philadelphia, Cole Sear (blue-eyed, winning…
Ten-year-old Fraser Pettigrew leads an idyllic existence. He lives on a bucolic estate in Scotland with five siblings, four dogs, his gentle mother Moira (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), eccentric inventor father Edward (Colin Firth), and indomitable grandmother Gamma Macintosh (Rosemary Harris). For Fraser (Robert Norman, making his professional acting debut), life…
GQ magazine runs a column every month titled “What Were We Thinking?” to present a ludicrous photograph of a famous person dressed in what the magazine had earlier decreed to be a style every hip cat would soon be wearing. In a few short years, it’s my guess that the…
Do you know why the burglars at the Watergate Apartments failed that fateful night in 1972, causing their own arrest and, ultimately, the resignation of Richard Nixon? Or why the famous electrical tape discovered by the security guard, alerting him of the presence of burglars in the offices of the…
It has been 24 years since Jaws changed the face of the film industry and made director Steven Whatshisname moderately well-known, and it’s probably safe to say that no aquatic horror film, let alone a shark film, will ever top it. So I’d like to think that director Renny Harlin…
Runaway Bride, the reunion of Pretty Woman stars Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, isn’t a sequel; it only feels like one. In everything, there is a distinct sense of predestination, of events occurring according to some irresistible force of the inevitable. This makes life especially easy for Garry Marshall, the…
Robert Wise’s 1963 version of The Haunting (from Shirley Jackson’s novel) has long been considered one of the milestones of the horror film. After 36 years, DreamWorks has bankrolled a new version under the direction of Speed and Twister director Jan de Bont — an idea that should sound unpromising,…
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…
