Has any major American director had quite so many career swings as Robert Altman? Maybe not, but if there’s one thing the last 30 years have made clear, it is that it’s never safe to count Altman out. The mid- and late ’90s have been particularly unfriendly to him. After…
Steve Martin says he doesn’t want audiences to expect the same old Steve Martin whenever he stars in a comedy. But that means one thing when he’s referring to Roxanne and L.A. Story, two inspired flights of romantic farce (based on his own scripts), and another when he’s talking about…
A couple of years or so ago, Jane Austen suddenly rose from classical obscurity to become the hottest screenwriter in Hollywood. Now, it is Shakespeare himself who has become the magic name to drop. There are straight-up productions of his plays in the works–a star-studded version of A Midsummer’s Night…
Stuffed full of fantasy comics, addicted to action, and steeped in digital technology, the frenetic moviemakers Andy and Larry Wachowski have done what they must–create an eye-popping, morph-mad, quasi-mythical sci-fi flick that will thrill computer nerds as it kicks serious ass. The Matrix also presumes to (ahem) think deeply–although this…
Six Ways to Sunday is director Adam Bernstein’s second theatrical film, so it’s a little early to attempt a coherent analysis of his career. On the surface, this young mobster story couldn’t be more different from his earlier effort, the egregiously unfunny It’s Pat, which foolishly bloated Julia Sweeney’s one-gag…
Back in 1993, Disney released Swing Kids, a dead-earnest portrait of rebellious German jazz fans during the Third Reich. This bizarre hybrid–a blend of Footloose and Schindler’s List, of The Dead Poets Society and The Diary of Anne Frank–pitted big bands vs. armbands; it was a classic case of high-concept…
Self-serving confessions are a mainstay of best-seller lists; now we’re doomed to see their ilk on-screen. 20 Dates is the not-so-verite story of Myles Berkowitz, a tyro filmmaker in his mid-30s who tries to advance his career and up his happiness quotient by filming himself on a score of dates…
There’s an old adage that says that by the age of 40, a man gets the face he deserves. If that’s true, then Clint Eastwood, the producer, director, and star of the death-row thriller True Crime, must have committed a capital offense or two of his own. To call it…
Ginger and Fred. Shirley Temple and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds. To the list of unforgettable movie dance partnerships, we may now add Omar Epps, the trim, handsome young man who stars as one-third of The Mod Squad, and Michael Lerner, the heavyset middle-aged actor who played…
“I hope it’s better than The Truman Show,” said the woman in line behind me at the publicized “sneak preview” of EDtv. Afterward, a man in my row declared, “That was a lot better than The Truman Show.” Pretentious high-concept films like The Truman Show often garner accolades and let…
The last decade has been an extraordinary period for Iranian cinema: Restricted by minuscule budgets, filmmakers have been forced to fall back on exactly those qualities that Hollywood thinks it can afford to ignore–character insight, social analysis, and unadorned storytelling. The success of Abbas Kiarostami, Iran’s best-known moviemaker, at international…
Imagine a bunch of kids watching the classic 1956 film musical The King and I on television, then going outside and spending the rest of the afternoon acting it out in the back yard. Apart from a lack of hired-gun Broadway voices performing the songs, their re-creation might not be…
At the movies, the fun-loving temptress has been liberating the buttoned-up clod ever since Katharine Hepburn’s dog made off with Cary Grant’s dinosaur bone in Bringing Up Baby 61 years ago. Maybe even longer, if you count pioneer vamp Theda Bara’s effect on a long succession of speechless men. In…
Immodesty becomes Guy Ritchie, the British writer-director who makes a jovial debut on a Jovian scale in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. In this wayward gangster comedy set in London’s East End, Ritchie cooks up a gleefully improbable tale out of mismatched ingredients–a rigged card game, a hydroponic marijuana…
It took me a while to fall for Julia Sweeney’s one-woman movie–but when I fell, I fell hard. God Said, ‘Ha!’ originated at the Magic Theater in San Francisco in 1996; the next year, Sweeney turned it into a book. She put the movie together from two performances shot on…
The Deep End of the Ocean starts out as a maternal horror movie and ends up as a family therapy session. Michelle Pfeiffer plays the photographer wife of a restaurateur (Treat Williams) and mother of two sons and an infant daughter. While checking into a jammed hotel for her 15th…
For Cruel Intentions, his directorial debut, writer Roger Kumble has come up with the clever idea of updating Choderlos de Laclos’ durable 18th-century novel Dangerous Liaisons. With its focus on amoral protagonists who use sex as a tool to manipulate innocents, the book caused a scandal when it was first…
In the three decades that director Ken Loach has been a steadfast champion of the British working class, his films have lost none of their sting. Whether examining a brutal Belfast police incident in Hidden Agenda (1990) or the plight of an unemployed man struggling to buy his daughter a…
“Honey,” Ellen Burstyn’s character in The Last Picture Show remarks to her daughter, “everything gets old if you do it often enough.” The specific activity she had in mind was sex, but the maxim applies at least as appropriately to genre conventions in movies, which even the casual moviegoer can…
When hit men wore hats and Cadillacs had running boards, the average Mafia don could knock off the bosses of the five boroughs in mid-afternoon and sit down to a nice plate of chicken cacciatore that evening, content that he’d seen to the family business and blazed a path for…
Here’s the pitch: It’s New Year’s Eve, 1981. Wait, there’s more. But not much. Kevin (Paul Rudd) and Lucy (Courtney Love) are best friends out on the town, dateless. He’s a sad sack of self-loathing; she’s into slapstick sex in bathroom stalls. Kevin was just dumped by Ellie (Janeane Garofalo),…
In Hungary, the Holocaust lasted only for a year. But the word only is deceptive in this context. The Nazis, who entered the country in March 1944, had been in the genocide business for a few years by then, and they’d gotten good at it. They were efficient, and they…
