It must be math season in the film world. Recently, Darren Aronofsky’s Pi hit Dallas’ screens, and now we get Vincenzo Natali’s Cube. The connection isn’t merely in the movies’ titles–if it were, I would have cited Sphere too–but in their stories. The plots of both films rely upon mathematical…
When Montoya, one of the fearless vampire killers in John Carpenter’s Vampires, tells another character that nobody believes in the title creatures because nobody wants to, there’s no mistaking the ancestry of the line. It comes down, through two generations of horror films, from the moment in the original Dracula…
For filmmaker Todd Solondz, it’s always midnight in suburbia. Life is lonely, and the natives can be hostile. In his daring second film, Happiness, the darkness engulfs victims of all ages: a boy in the throes of impending adolescence, three New Jersey sisters tormented by sex and love, an obscene…
The first time we see Ray Joshua, the young hero of director Marc Levin’s impressive feature debut, Slam, we get a vivid taste of the conflicting forces that rule him. His olive-drab pants, so hip-hop baggy that you could fit two rail-thin Rays inside, are stuffed with bags of weed,…
A riveting but darkly disturbing thriller, Apt Pupil isn’t easy to sit through. The subject matter itself proves deeply unsettling, while two brief acts of sadism are so horrifying as to be unwatchable. Yet this brutal film borders on the brilliant. Beautifully structured and edited, with a chilling central performance…
At the beginning of Gary Ross’ Pleasantville, fraternal twins who are unhappy suburban teenagers (is there any other kind?) fall down the rabbit hole of their television set and find themselves trapped in a parallel universe: a ’50s sitcom of the same name in which the family is more idealized…
Insofar as filmmaker Tony Gatlif’s justly admired “Gypsy trilogy” is an exploration of his roots and a search for his nature–he was born in Algeria to Gypsy parents of Spanish origin, but later educated at Paris’ L’Ecole des Beaux Arts–it comprises one of the most passionate and telling self-examinations in…
The Jonathan Demme-directed Beloved runs nearly three hours, and it’s a long haul. This adaptation of the 1987 Toni Morrison novel bursts with ambition. On one hand it tries to get inside the fevers of the African-American slave experience, but it also wants to be an epic family saga and…
The hero of The Mighty–the title character, in fact–is an eighth-grader known by the nickname Freak (Kieran Culkin). His might isn’t physical–he’s a small, frail boy who suffers from a degenerative birth defect. His spine curves painfully, and he’s able to walk only with crutches and leg braces. But he…
The Montreal World Film Festival runs for 10 days through Labor Day, and the Toronto Film Festival picks up a few days later and carries on for another 10. Twin colossi of the Great White North, they each unspool some 300 movies, and, as in the past three years, I…
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita still has the power to scare off people. Proof is the book’s new movie adaptation, directed by Adrian Lyne and scripted by Stephen Schiff and starring Jeremy Irons as the passionate pedophile Humbert Humbert, a man entranced by nymphets. Completed more than two years ago, the movie…
The ants in Antz show a lot of personality. The film is the best example yet of how a fully animated computer-generated feature can delineate facial movement. Toy Story (1995), the first such feature to be released, was brasher and more child-friendly, but Antz is more of a–how shall I…
Who would have guessed that a movie called Firelight could give off so little glow? William Nicholson, the screenwriter of Shadowlands (1993) making his directorial debut here, isn’t attempting to be ironic. He wants to create a love story in which the ardor pours through the confines of upper-class decorum…
As a professional lamenter of how “they just don’t make ’em like they used to,” I am always thrilled on those rare occasions when someone even tries to make ’em that way. So I am doubly thrilled that, with The Impostors, writer-director Stanley Tucci has tried and richly succeeded. Those…
Have adultery, murder, and greed all moved to the sticks? Once firmly rooted in the big city, the seven deadly sins have taken on a distinct country-and-western twang in recent years, thanks to noirish, tough-minded scamfests such as John Dahl’s Red Rock West (1992) and The Last Seduction (1994), James…
As a director of action thrillers, John Frankenheimer has been a peerless stylist for nearly four decades–without leaning on a pile of glitzy special effects. What’s more, his most memorable movies, from The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to The Birdman of Alcatraz (also 1962) to 1986’s wickedly entertaining, unappreciated 52 Pick-Up…
Leelee Sobieski is a mouthful of a name (40 years ago, studio moguls would have made her change it to something short and unassuming), but get used to it, because the young actress behind it is going to be getting a lot of attention. She almost single-handedly carries A Soldier’s…
Back in the early ’70s, when John Waters made his first splash with such low-budget gross-outs as Pink Flamingos and Multiple Maniacs, who would have guessed that someday he’d be making a Hollywood film as benevolent as Pecker? In retrospect, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. If any director has ever…
One True Thing, directed by Carl Franklin, is trying to be the Terms of Endearment of the ’90s. Scripted by Karen Croner from the 1995 Anna Quindlen novel of the same name, One True Thing pushes the same high-gloss homilies about making peace with your family, and it caps everything…
For better or worse, the confessional memoir has become the most popular literary form of our time, prompting ballplayers, Irish bartenders, prosecuting attorneys, and mothers of quadruplets everywhere to lay bare their deepest thoughts and secrets, all based on the presumption that their miserable lives are more interesting than anyone…
You can’t keep a good ship down. No sooner have a billion or so Titanic videos hit the shelves than a little-known Spanish moviemaker complicates the issue with a French-language film called, in English, The Chambermaid on the Titanic. Cheap profiteering? An attempt to cash in? Absolutely not. In fact…
Jackie Chan’s American fans–and I include myself among them–have suffered through a nervous 1998 so far. The momentum the star earned with the 1996 release of Rumble in the Bronx has seemed to dissipate steadily: An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, the first American production to employ Chan since…
