What’s entertaining about October Sky is the unlikely-but-true spectacle of backwater West Virginia teens teaching themselves rocket science in the Eisenhower ’50s. They progress from a glorified cherry bomb to sophisticated missiles through trial-and-error-and-error. Their inner rocket fuel is the desire to avoid getting stuck in the dying coal industry…
Plot is a central problem in both Jawbreaker and Office Space, two comedies opening this week: The first has too much, and the second (and far better of the two movies) has too little. Jawbreaker’s 26-year-old writer-director, Darren Stein, says he wanted to make an homage to the films he…
The independent production and distribution company The Shooting Gallery probably got a lot more attention when Monica Lewinsky showed up in Washington wearing a cap with its logo than it is likely to from the release of The 24-Hour Woman, a modest, deserving film from writer-director Nancy Savoca. Savoca has…
In the archetypal dead-end town of Lawford, New Hampshire, cold-eyed men looking for trouble prowl the streets in four-by-fours with chrome spotlights and loaded gun racks. The gloomy barrooms are not gathering places so much as solitary confinement cells, and the most popular local sport is macho posturing. In wintry…
Short of nuclear holocaust, a major sale at Kmart, or a confirmed Clint Eastwood sighting back in rural Iowa, there’s probably no way to keep the movie version of Message in a Bottle from overwhelming the tender emotions of the hearts-and-flowers crowd. After all, this relentless assault on the tear…
For better or worse, the father figure in Larry Clark’s ironically titled Another Day in Paradise turns out to be Mel, a foul-mouthed, 40-year-old junkie wearing a devil’s-red tennis shirt. His notion of good counsel is showing his surrogate son how to disable the burglar alarm at a medical clinic…
The new Mel Gibson movie, Payback, is arguably the first major-studio release this year to have even a modicum of aesthetic ambition. For his directorial debut, Brian Helgeland–who won an Oscar for his screenplay for 1997’s L.A. Confidential (cowritten with director Curtis Hanson)–has chosen to adapt The Hunter, the first…
In the 1993 hit Groundhog Day, Bill Murray played a show-biz smart-ass who grew into a human being. Murray added a core of warmth and romance to his comic arsenal without losing his zinging wit and crack-up irony, and he’s kept that progress going, even in piddling vehicles such as…
Nearly everyone–certainly every film buff–who saw the last James Bond movie, Tomorrow Never Dies, came away excited, though the film was certainly no match for Goldfinger or From Russia With Love. Audiences were buzzing, not about the gadgets or about Pierce Brosnan, but about Michelle Yeoh–the Hong Kong actress who…
Between the current nostalgia for platform shoes and the epidemic of midlife crises that has so many baby boomers in its grip, director Brian Gibson’s Still Crazy just might be able to find an audience among the disturbed, the deafened, and the disenchanted. It is, after all, the comic tale…
Elevate The Jerry Springer Show a notch or two–in other words, dispense with the one-legged serial killers who are having sex with their blind mothers, and other such nonsense–and you’ve got Willard Carroll’s Playing by Heart. Too harsh a judgment, some will say. After all, this well-meaning, relentlessly sincere ensemble…
“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” Kris Kristofferson sings in his most beguiling song, “Me and Bobby McGee.” Stephen Frears’ The Hi-Lo Country tries in vain to be just as lyrical about love and liberty. In this 20th-century Western, a cattle rancher named Pete (Billy Crudup) narrates…
Directed by Walter Salles (1995’s Foreign Land), the Brazilian film Central Station concerns the relationship between a homeless 9-year-old boy and the insensitive, acerbic woman who reluctantly agrees to help him find his father. Winner of the Golden Bear for Best Film at the 1998 Berlin Film Festival (as well…
Viewers who find Hurlyburly one of the most weirdly annoying movies they’ve seen–which is likely–will probably locate different “last straws” in the self-indulgent bundle of hay that has been made from David Rabe’s grueling 1984 play. For me, it was watching Eddie (Sean Penn) stretched out beneath a glass coffee…
For critics (and for audience members who enjoy thinking too much), there are movie devices and there are movie effects. Movie devices–happy endings, sad endings, emotion-wracked confessions, harrowing confrontations–are those stock contraptions that filmmakers employ with varying degrees of subtlety to induce movie effects–making you laugh, making you cry, creating…
Somewhere under the glossy imbecility of Varsity Blues lurks an idea that could make a great American movie: a coming-of-age story in a setting where no one else has come of age, a place where the hero must find his way to maturity without a mentor. The setting, in this…
The great attorneys of our time–Tom Cruise, Susan Sarandon, Tom Hanks–must now make room in the firm for a new partner. John Travolta, who in past lives has been a disco king, a hip hit man, and a deep-fried presidential candidate, reinvents himself in A Civil Action as a greedy…
Writer-director Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, the filmmaker’s adaptation of James Jones’ 1962 bestseller about the World War II battle for Guadalcanal, arrives in theaters with an almost unbearable weight of expectation. After graduating in the first class at AFI’s Advanced Film Studies program and working briefly as a…
Silver lining or slender thread? That question nags at me as I go over my best-of-the-year list. There were some terrific movies in 1998–eight, according to my count. But the average film keeps on getting worse. If movies remain as synthetic and incompetent as they are for the most part,…
The past year has been filled with good films…interesting films…worthwhile films. In fact there were many that I think of as being wonderful or droll or whatever. But 1998 failed to produce a single film to which the term “great” might be applied. Most years have at least one great…
British actress Jane Horrocks is thrice-gifted: She can act, she can sing, and she can sing like Judy Garland–and like Shirley Bassey, Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, and a host of other legendary performers. Horrocks’ ability to mimic the singing and speaking voices of these artists lies at the heart of…
In 1933, producer Merian C. Cooper, director Ernest B. Schoedsack, and pioneering animator Willis O’Brien created one of this century’s most indelible and powerful archetypes: King Kong. Then they did a peculiar thing: As if appalled at what they had wrought–but also delighted at the money it made them–they spent…
