It’s refreshing that a film festival, at which independent movies are celebrated for their individuality at the same time distributors are courted for their establishment relationships, offers Jean-Luc Godard’s cynical Contempt, a dead-on dissection of the corrupting influence of “The Deal.” In the late ’50s and early ’60s, Godard was…
One of the biggest discussion topics among cinephiles these days–courtesy the recent Oscar season–is whether Hollywood is petering out because it can’t produce the kind of probing, intelligent films the independents are cranking out these days. The tragedy is, supposedly, that special-effects extravaganzas are all the studios know how to…
Like other Gotham-based directors (Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Sidney Lumet), Paul Mazursky is a New Yorker who often makes movies (often about other New Yorkers), but that’s pretty much where their similarities end. You can look at practically any scene–sometimes any frame–from an Allen, Scorsese, or Lumet picture and instantly…
You won’t find a better paradigm for the polarities of opinion about British director Peter Greenaway than in Love and Hisses, a collection of picks and pans written by members of the National Society of Film Critics. Reviews of the filmmaker’s 1990 scatological comedy The Cook, The Thief, His Wife,…
When the original theatrical version of Das Boot was released 15 years ago, it ran just under two and a half hours and didn’t feature a single marquee name in its all-male cast. And it was in German. With subtitles. Did I mention that almost all of it took place…
The USA Film Festival follows Robert Redford’s Sundance Festival in Park Cities, Utah, by about three months. If you were to rank the importance of the USA Festival against Sundance among industry types and star-gazers, that distance would seem more like three million light years. And yet, as evidenced at…
I had eight hours to kill one day, so I went to see The English Patient, just to find out what all the big hoo-haw is. Next time I’ll go to the Ukrainian karaoke bar. It’s less annoying. No wonder this thing won so many Oscars. It’s four movies all…
Kevin Smith is an impassioned jokester. The young writer-director double-whammies the audience by filling in his stick figures with thick brush strokes. His first film, Clerks, was a no-budget goof featuring an entire miniature universe of slacker goons, but its main protagonist was a sweetly jerky lovelorn convenience store employee…
Don’t let the glut of movies about hit men stop you from seeing Grosse Pointe Blank. It’s not quite like any other movie–let alone one about a hit man. That may be because it’s a hit-man movie crossed with a high-school-reunion comedy, and the two genres mesh surprisingly well: It’s…
We started worrying about Vida Stegall the week she said: “See y’all later! I’m going on vacation!” And when we asked her WHERE she was going on vacation, she said “Brunei.” And we asked her where that was, and it turns out it’s somewhere over in the Middle East, and…
When Val Kilmer walked away from the Batman franchise, it was only a matter of time before he offered up his own competing brand. The Saint isn’t just his answer to Batman–it’s a full-length commercial for all the Saint movies to come. There’s a breezy effrontery in the ploy; Kilmer…
On its surface, The Daytrippers probably seems like your generic ’90s American independent let’s-get-our-friends-together-and-make-a-movie movie. Shot in Long Island and Manhattan in 16 days for about a half-million dollars, with a cast including the inevitable Parker Posey and the almost equally inevitable Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott–where was Eric Stoltz?–it…
Film actors are generally said to have good chemistry or no chemistry. But bad chemistry in movies does exist, and a sleep-inducer called Inventing the Abbotts is a case in point. In ascending order of age, Liv Tyler, Jennifer Connelly, and Joanna Going play Pamela, Eleanor, and Alice Abbott, sisters…
Over the past five years, action star Jean-Claude Van Damme has become one of America’s leading importers of foreign talent. In 1993, he hired Hong Kong action ace John Woo to direct Hard Target. For last year’s Maximum Risk, he brought over Ringo Lam. And now he has used a…
Have you ever noticed that, every time they do a survey of sex in America, it always looks something like this: Guys who have cheated on their wives at least once: 75 percent. Gals who have cheated on their husbands at least once: 20 percent. Guys who have had sex…
By re-releasing The Godfather, Paramount Pictures is both honoring itself a and perpetrating a crime. The honor is that one of the greatest and most influential films ever made is being rereleased on the occasion of its 25th anniversary. The crime is that Paramount, according to a studio spokeswoman, has…
In The Devil’s Own, Brad Pitt plays Frankie McGuire, an Irish Republican Army gunman with 24 kills to his credit–13 British soldiers and 11 police officers. After a bloody firefight in Belfast, he escapes to New York, where, helped by a pro-IRA judge (George Hearn), he is placed in the…
Although Russian director Sergei Bodrov has made half a dozen features and won a fistful of awards since the mid-’80s, he is virtually unknown in the United States–despite having lived in Los Angeles on and off for several years. Orion Classics is now distributing his 1996 film, Prisoner of the…
I spent the 68th anniversary of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre watching The Godfather with the new soundtrack prepared for its 25th anniversary. The scene was a mixing room in the Saul Zaentz Film Center in Berkeley, and the master of ceremonies was much-honored editor and sound expert Walter Murch,…
I noticed my buddy Donald Trump’s casino company lost 31 million bucks last year. But isn’t it strange that this announcement came just three months after The Donald announced that he had personally won $20 million by betting the long odds on the Tyson-Holyfield fight? Of course, we still don’t…
Cult auteur David Cronenberg crashes and burns–his talent, that is–in Crash, a vain attempt at a techno-age Persona. It follows a demented explorer named Vaughan (Elias Koteas) into an insane new world where twisted metal, curvy skin, automotive oil, and bodily fluids merge in an explosive carnal cocktail. To Vaughan,…
Selena opens with a reenactment of the slain Tejano singer’s February 1995 event-style concert at the Houston Astrodome. Bedecked in a sparkling purple jumpsuit, the beloved Texas native (played by Jennifer Lopez) is shown singing a few disco nuggets from her childhood, including “I Will Survive” and “Last Dance.” While…
