Billy Bob Thornton’s richly observed Sling Blade opens with a prologue that can only be described as its own small film, a laconically eerie sequence that, as the rest of Sling Blade unfolds, begins to take hold in the memory like a particularly dense nightmare. As Daniel Lanois’ quietly atmospheric…
William Faulkner’s novella Old Man has a biblical magnetism–a primal moral pull. During the horrifying 1927 Mississippi flood, convicts are conscripted for disaster relief. A guard orders two of them to take out a boat, find a man clinging to a cotton house and a woman stuck in a cypress…
Terry George, the director and co-writer (with Jim Sheridan) of Some Mother’s Son, has more complicated feelings about Northern Ireland than he can express coherently. They shoot out in piercing shards of action and potent gutter or pulpit rhetoric. Some Mother’s Son is about the fight to save the lives…
Richard Jewell got his half-million bucks, so I guess he’s satisfied with the whole deal, but I still wish he’d filed a case and pursued it to the Supreme Court. Even AFTER the Richard Jewell case–where an innocent man was hounded half to death by a media convinced of his…
While Tupac Shakur lay bleeding to death inside Suge Knight’s car last fall after an attack on the Strip–all his crack bodyguards couldn’t even ID the perps’ getaway car–Death Row Records realized it was losing a franchise player. But Hollywood may never have had a clue about what it was…
For years the brief, roaring life of runner Steve Prefontaine must have seemed an ideal subject for a movie. A no-nonsense, everything-to-prove kid takes on an intimidatingly prestigious history of track champions in his home state of Oregon and becomes the fiercest competitor, an unforgettable personality, and a mind-boggling distance…
At a 20-year remove, Star Wars comes off less as the work of a wizard than as the weird obsessive outgrowth of an eccentric American primitive. George Lucas is a tycoon version of those self-taught craftsmen who fill back yards, storage rooms, and cramped city apartments with paintings or gewgaws…
How come when you go to an Indian casino, there aren’t any Indians? There USED to be Indians. There were Indians out the wahzoo. Indians parked your car. Indians ran the bingo game. Indians sold you your overpriced Wampum Breakfast Special in the Teepee Coffee Shop. But now you go…
You can bet that at one point or another, some executive wanted the title of this long-awaited nonsequel to A Fish Called Wanda to be A Lemur Called Rollo (for the story does include such a character). While the latter wouldn’t have been the most commercial of titles, neither is…
Playwright Herb Gardner managed to immortalize retirement-age concerns on the American stage with his 1986 Tony Award-winning I’m Not Rappaport, and now his film version–which he also directed–comes along to try to reclaim geriatric humor from the Grumpy Old Men gang. Of course, one of those grumpy old men, Walter…
Hamlet (Kenneth Branagh) is Prince of Denmark. After his father (Richard Briers) dies, his uncle Claudius (Derek Jacobi) takes the throne and marries Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude (Julie Christie). When the late king’s ghost reveals he was murdered by Claudius, Hamlet must decide which course of action to take. Meanwhile, he…
You know why I think gay marriage is a good idea? ‘Cause if they start letting the lesbos and the Castro Street beach boys get hitched, then what they’re gonna be saying is, “Anybody that wants to be married for ANY reason, it’s OKAY WITH US.” And I think that’s…
Lars von Trier is, perhaps consciously and defiantly, one of the least commercial brilliant directors in the world. His best-known movie, the 1991 Zentropa, and his earlier The Element of Crime both open with hypnotic voice-overs, seemingly daring us to succumb to sleep before the credits are even over. Nonetheless,…
World governments may topple, stock markets may soar and crash, deadly viruses may mantle the globe, but one constant remains: Woody Allen still hankers for a Cole Porter-ized New York. You have to be a deep-dish romantic, or else a blinkered snoot–or maybe both–to persist in such a demonstration. We…
Kevin Spacey sits in his Four Seasons hotel room to talk about his first experience as a director, about the two years he spent navigating Albino Alligator through the treacherous waters of Hollywood. He does so with passion and patience; he is easygoing, casual in a denim shirt and brown…
OK, metaphor buffs: An Albino Alligator, we’re informed in the movie of that name, is what the other alligators in a group send out as a sacrificial lamb. Members of another group of gators attack the albino, and the remainder of the first group violently dispatches their competition for their…
This baby that Wanda Bodine is gonna have–which I did NOT father, even though we haven’t had a blood test yet, and I don’t care what it says, I’m hiring Barry Scheck–as I was saying, this baby that Wanda Bodine is gonna have is a boy. We know this because…
New Line’s release of Jackie Chan’s First Strike is salvo number three in Chan’s invasion of America. (Miramax’s version of the 1991 Operation Condor, the last film on which the star also took a director’s credit, is due out in May.) Like its predecessors, Rumble in the Bronx and Supercop,…
Marvin’s Room, starring Diane Keaton and Meryl Streep as sisters who reunite uneasily for the first time in 20 years, is one of those movies about people who confront the choices they’ve made and become better people for it. Adapted by the late Scott McPherson from his popular 1992 play…
In the opening minutes of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, the friends of the family’s grown children, Micol (Dominique Sanda) and Alberto (Helmut Berger), take a sylvan bike ride to the Finzi-Continis’ tennis court. Director Vittorio De Sica invests even this expository scene with psychological acuity. The sun-dappled color photography,…
A famous movie composer once told me a joke: Two songwriters are sitting around, and one of them says to the other, “I just saw the most amazing thing. A man fell off the roof of a building, hit a ledge, fell to the street, got winged by a bus,…
Ever since his first film, 1979’s Real Life, Albert Brooks has occupied his own little niche in American cinema. While his old buddy Rob Reiner quickly moved from the small, quirky, and wonderful This Is Spinal Tap to slick mainstream films, the 49-year-old Brooks (n. Albert Einstein) has released a…
