There hasn’t been a good doper movie since 1978’s Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke, and even now, it reeks of yesterday’s smoke, smelling like a weedhead who hasn’t done laundry in a decade; Up in Smoke’s good for a contact high, but its buzz is gone. In 1993 Richard…
One of the conceits to which every critic must be genetically predisposed is the idea that, at the end of the day, his or her opinion actually matters. That some unknown phantasm at a nonspecific coffee shop sits immersed in said critic’s latest ill-advised screed, imbibing every word as if…
Martin Scorsese’s Kundun is a deeply ceremonial experience. It’s like watching a serene pageant of colors, rituals, and costumes. It’s about the Dalai Lama–recognized as the 14th reincarnation of the Buddha of Compassion and the spiritual and political leader of Tibet–from his childhood in 1937 through the Chinese invasion in…
After Santa’s overstuffed sack of Oscar qualifiers is disgorged onto screens in December, the studios have little left in their pipelines for January. With all the brutal competition from the big-ticket films, Hollywood has established a tradition in recent years of dumping lost-cause features during the first few weeks of…
In 1997, both the big studios and the independents got stuck in their respective sewers of cliche–conflagrations, computer graphics, and crazy comedies on the one hand; on the other, dysfunctional families, kooky proles, and drop-outs. Some of the most highly promoted and lauded films from either the big-studio or indie…
In his 1993 book Sarajevo: A War Journal, Bosnian journalist Zlatko Dizdarevic reported on an 11-year-old boy who was waiting in line for water when snipers killed his mother and father: “After the shooting, this boy started to fetch and pour water over the bodies of his dead parents. He…
Where would Irish filmmakers these days be without The Troubles? In just the past couple of years, we’ve seen The Crying Game, In the Name of the Father, Michael Collins, Some Mother’s Son, and now The Boxer, the latest collaboration between director Jim Sheridan, screenwriter Terry George, and Daniel Day-Lewis…
In Hollywood, writer-director Garson Kanin’s wonderful book of film-biz reminiscences, Kanin tells of a mortifying incident in the career of John Forsythe. In the early ’50s, the young actor, while working on a film, entertained his colleagues with a Bogart impression. When the great star visited Forsythe’s set one day,…
When was the last time the audience applauded a trailer and the movie lived up to it? Independence Day enticed millions with its preview shot of the White House blown to smithereens, but that film was a dumb, elephantine sci-fi pastiche. The trailer for Wag the Dog, a far more…
While not a movie year to go down in infamy, 1997 was still mostly full of hype and holler. If the annual yield is judged by how many great films came out, 1997 was a loser. If you factor in the number of films that brought fresh talents and fresh…
With 1994’s Exotica, Egyptian-born Atom Egoyan clinched his claim to being Canada’s leading director. His new film, The Sweet Hereafter, a Cannes hit based on Russell Banks’ celebrated novel, should solidify his hold on that problematic title. Egoyan’s work, in general, is small-scale enough to seem arty and plain enough…
The new Gus Van Sant film Good Will Hunting is like an adolescent’s fantasy of being tougher and smarter and more misunderstood than anybody else. It’s also touchy-feely with a vengeance. Is this the same director who made Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy? Those films had a fresh way of…
If Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown didn’t arrive weighted with post-Pulp Fiction expectations, it might be easier to see it for what it is: an overlong, occasionally funky caper movie directed with some feeling. It’s derived from Elmore Leonard’s 1992 bestseller Rum Punch, with the location shifted from Palm Beach, Florida,…
The ad line for As Good As It Gets is “A comedy from the heart that goes for the throat.” Isn’t this simply another way of saying, “You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll gag”? Jack Nicholson plays, of all things, a prolific romance novelist who’s a virulent xenophobe and a hopeless…
Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry is a film made by a free man. Liberated, for whatever reason, of the need for playing a nice guy, playing the bad man he does here frees Allen of the optimistic sanctimony that has weighed down so much of his recent work. Allen the filmmaker…
Now that the Japanese Tora-san series–with fiftysome entries in 30 years–has presumably drawn to a close, following the death of star Kiyoshi Atsumi last year, the James Bond films constitute the longest-running continuous series around. They’ve had their ups and downs, but something about the Bond formula has proved enduring…
If one is in a Biblical frame of mind, the sinking of the White Star Line’s R.M.S. Titanic about 400 miles off the southern coast of Newfoundland in 1912 could well be characterized as an act of divine one-upmanship. The 46,328-ton “ship of dreams” was struck down on its maiden…
Was Steven Spielberg fated to make Amistad? “Amity,” you might recall, was the name of the shark-bedeviled island in his breakthrough picture, Jaws; my dictionary defines it as “friendship, esp friendly relations between nations.” Amistad, too, means “friendship”–although the ship the movie is named for is a slave ship, and…
It’s hard for anyone under, say, 35 to understand the impact that the so-called French New Wave directors in general–and Jean-Luc Godard in particular–had on cinemaphiles (and on the art of film itself) when their films suddenly burst upon American art-house screens in the early ’60s. There was almost nothing…
Wes Craven’s Scream, which opened almost exactly a year ago, was the surprise hit of an overcrowded Christmas season. In part, the success was a triumph of counter-programming: In the midst of a glut of classy Oscar contenders, Scream was the only teen horror film. And it was helped by…
Movie special-effects maestro Phil Tippett has won billowing praise for the jaw-dropping digital transformations that turned models of alien bugs into the fearsome insect armies of Starship Troopers. But the 46-year-old founder of Tippett Studio in Berkeley, California, is his own most astonishing piece of transformation. If he’s at the…
First, The Heiress was unofficially remade as Washington Square, then The Big Carnival as Mad City, and The Day of the Jackal as The Jackal. But now we get The Absent-Minded Professor, all dressed up in new threads, as Flubber. In this frenzy of plundering the past, is nothing sacred?…
