Smoke Signals billows in from the Sundance Film Festival, noteworthy not simply because it won both the Audience Award and the Filmmaker’s Trophy, but because it is the first feature film written, directed, and co-produced by American Indians to receive a major distribution deal. The buzz has kicked its screenwriter,…
“In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines, lived 12 little girls in two straight lines. They left the house at half past nine, in two straight lines in rain or shine. The smallest one was Madeline.” If these words don’t instantly conjure up captivating images of…
If you loved Don Rickles as the acid-tongued voice of Mr. Potato Head in Toy Story, wait till you get a load of Tommy Lee Jones’ gung-ho warmonger, Major Chip Hazard, in Small Soldiers. In Joe Dante’s uncommonly clever fantasy, Jones’ “character” is a military action figure just 12 inches…
Michael Bay is the director of Bad Boys and The Rock and the new asteroid-attack movie Armageddon–which should be called The Very Big Rock. He has, I’m afraid, perfected a new form: His movies are trailers for themselves. Every scene is all climax and no foreplay. When it’s all over,…
When Quentin Tarantino started up his boutique releasing company, Rolling Thunder, last year, his first release was, unsurprisingly, a Hong Kong production. Tarantino, after all, has been one of the most vocal boosters of Hong Kong cinema in the United States. What was surprising was the choice: Chungking Express, a…
I Went Down is the highest-grossing independent Irish film in history–which, of course, doesn’t say much in the States, where we’ve turned independent filmmaking into a corporate subsidiary and consider Ireland a drab place where either Daniel Day-Lewis or American heartthrobs with poor accents struggle with The Troubles. So the…
There will always be a Britain; and that means there will always be movies about the pluck and sacrifice, during World War II, of the little people. Not Billy Barty little people–though surely there must have been a few of them involved–but the simple salt-of-the-earth types who kept muddling along…
Too many post-Woody Allen movies have been made about “sex in the head.” The smart, engaging Out of Sight is an action comedy about love in the head. The real thing ignites between bank robber Jack Foley (George Clooney) and U.S. Marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) when she stumbles into…
The 1967 musical Dr. Dolittle, which starred Rex Harrison, was a commercial disaster for its studio, Twentieth Century Fox. The new nonmusical Fox version of this material, starring Eddie Murphy, isn’t in the same overblown category as the Harrison film–its disasters are more mundane. It’s a kiddie comedy that really…
Technicolor was a movie lover’s aphrodisiac during Hollywood’s Golden Age. It produced colors of astonishing depth, boldness, and subtlety via a complex beam-splitting camera that generated three separate negatives. Lab technicians built them into a photographic sandwich that was developed with a unique dye-transfer system called imbibition. Gone With the…
It’s Christmas vacation, 1958. The movie my dad has chosen for a first-grade pal and me to see is the new Disney live-action adventure, Tonka, starring Sal Mineo as a young Sioux named White Bull who traps and domesticates a clear-eyed, spirited wild horse named Tonka. Having seen The King…
High Art is a low-budget, American independent movie about a junkie, lesbian photographer, Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy), who spends most of her time looking romantically mournful. She’s famished and abrasive and oh-so world-weary. When she smokes cigarettes, she exhales in a way that can best be described as existential–the smoke…
The X-Files is a movie that answers questions…No, wait a minute. The X-Files is a movie that asks questions…Hmmm. OK. The X-Files is a movie that makes me wanna ask some questions, like: What the hell does “Fight the future” mean? I mean, I can understand “The truth is out…
Henry Jaglom’s movies offer everything that Americans hate about French films, but with little of the philosophical depth or visual daring that mark the best French cinema. He captures the annoying qualities of Woody Allen movies–the self-absorption, the feigned feminism, the pretentiousness–without achieving anything like Allen’s humor and charm. Talky,…
Early on in Six Days, Seven Nights, Harrison Ford’s drunken beach pilot Quinn Harris offers some advice to Anne Heche’s vacationing Robin Monroe. He warns that people often go to isolated island paradises looking for romance. But if you don’t bring it with you, you ain’t gonna find it. If…
Star Wars notwithstanding, film revivals rarely work on a large scale anymore. Blame it on cable or videotape, or just the ever increasing number of new films released every year, but today’s audiences–born and bred on the blockbuster and a steady diet of coming attractions, waiting eagerly for tomorrow’s movie,…
It’s a truism that unless your film picks up momentum as it goes along, you’d do well not to put a ticking clock in it. Thrillers like The Big Clock and DOA work because they’re superior mousetraps that have found a way to put time itself in pursuit of the…
Rule number one: when crafting a thriller, make sure the audience can relate to, identify with, or empathize with at least one of the characters. Rule number two: the characters’ motivations must be clear. Fail in either area–or worse yet, both–and you end up with a film like A Perfect…
Lawn Dogs doesn’t start with the words “Once upon a time,” but it might as well. The film is a fairy tale, plain and simple–and if you argue that this is nothing more than a clever way to say the symbolism and plot points are terribly tired, you won’t get…
The Truman Show, starring Jim Carrey, is the zeitgeist movie of the hour. How could it not be? It’s all about the omnipotence of television and how our lives seem scripted by some unseen force–a TV producer, perhaps? Zeitgeist movies, almost by definition, get written about not only by film…
Most people associate the disco era with hedonism, homosexuality, a sense of community, tacky fashions, and awful music. But in The Last Days of Disco Whit Stillman imagines the era as merely a singles bar for romantics in search of soulmates, largely heterosexual and hardly debauchees. The clothes, and the…
Frank Sinatra never gave a better performance as an actor than he did in The Man With the Golden Arm (1955) as Frankie Machine, a hot-shot poker dealer and junkie who emerges from prison hoping to kick all his bad habits (heroin included) and earn a living as a drummer…
