Skeptics will not take easily to the optimism in Thomas Carter’s teen love story Save the Last Dance, and outright cynics may find the whole thing absurd. The notion that a sheltered white girl from shopping-mall country and a knowing black boy from the inner city can dance their way…
In case you were wondering, here’s the most fulfilling way to enjoy the alleged thriller, Antitrust. Step One: Go shopping for groceries at your favorite supermarket. Step Two: When the smiling employee asks you whether you prefer paper or plastic, choose paper. Step Three: Seek out the young actor known…
If M. Night Shyamalan makes movies to be seen twice, then Joel and Ethan Coen make films to be pawed over a dozen times. O Brother, Where Art Thou?, an opulent and often slapstick updating of Homer’s The Odyssey by way of Preston Sturges, Robert Johnson, and Clark Gable, sneaks…
The War on Drugs has become this generation’s Vietnam, the unwinnable conflict that will, in the end, destroy the innocent and reward the guilty. That, in a coke vial, is the premise of Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, a film that gives flesh and face to bloodless government statistics and statements seldom…
Maybe it wasn’t such a bad year for filmgoing after all, if only because it’s far harder to assemble a top-10 list this year than it was last year. Or maybe the best of 1999 towered so far above the worst (and the middling, which includes the grossly overrated American…
The cream of this year’s crop are films carefully selected not only for their countless wonderful qualities, but because, as the list indicates, they form terrific thematic double features for contemplation and discussion. These days, there’s plenty of evidence to indicate that now, more than ever, movies may not be…
The year 1999 was too good to last, but did 2000 have to be such a big letdown? Did the best film year in at least a decade and a half have to be followed by one of the worst? This year, there are a good 20 films that would…
During the summer of 1994, while most of the world was greeting Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump with dewy eyes and outstretched arms, this critic was grinning his fool head off at a very different tale of a lost, lone hero. While a featherweight Tom Hanks bumbled his lobotomized way through…
For slightly more than a decade, Chinese martial arts films have–directly and indirectly–gained a growing audience in America. Now the genre may find its greatest breakthrough coming from an unlikely source–director Ang Lee, best known for such comedy-dramas of social manners as Sense and Sensibility, The Wedding Banquet, and The…
The Family Man offers but a slight variation on the threadbare holiday theme of what life might have been like had Our Hero followed a different path–or never been born. Not only is it a redo of It’s a Wonderful Life–complete with an angel (played by a dreadlocked Don Cheadle,…
In Hollywood, all it takes is one big hit. Sandra Bullock’s ticket to stardom was the 1994 sleeper Speed, a rip-roaring action/crime thriller that elevated co-star Keanu Reeves to similar megawatt status. With her cute girl-next-door looks and ingratiating physical klutziness Bullock established an instant rapport with audiences. That perception…
Here you will find the ingredients required to spin an audience into throes of fuzzy warm-heartedness–the hope, the compassion, the joie de vivre–all blended with the skill of a consummate confectioner. Much like a box of sweets with a convenient guide inside the lid, there are no surprises in Lasse…
It’s where Walter Huston found paradise at the end of The Treasure of Sierra Madre, where the murdering lovers Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw rode into the sunset at the end of The Getaway, and where Thelma and Louise were headed when they ended up at the Grand Canyon. There…
Assessing the merits of Quills, the lusty new feature by director Philip Kaufman (Henry and June), it’s tempting to seek correlative characters from popular movies to illustrate just how radical this business is not. In Kaufman’s film–affectionately constructed upon a screenplay by Doug Wright, who adapts his award-winning play–we discover…
What Women Want could be the first movie to win a Clio Award for Advertisement of the Year. No fewer than two dozen products receive prominent placement in the film, from Federal Express to Foster’s Lager to Cutty Sark to L’eggs pantyhose to US Airways. After a while, you begin…
“See, there’s this pre-Columbian emperor who’s a spoiled brat, and he gets turned into a llama, and he meets this peasant and the two of them become buddies and save this little village…” It takes nothing away from The Emperor’s New Groove, Disney’s delightful new animated feature, to say that…
There tend to be two poles when it comes to making semiautobiographical movies about one’s childhood, and both are designed to make the viewer cry. There’s the “those were the good old days” approach (see My Dog Skip or Stand By Me), usually depicting the time in a young boy’s…
Day One: It was just part of the job, just another movie on another afternoon. This one promised to be no more special than any other, save for the casting of Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe. Proof of Life was the movie during which they fell in love, or whatever…
About halfway through the megabudget mountain climbing adventure Vertical Limit, even the most rugged, thrill-hungry disaster movie fans may find themselves going numb. Not from the howling weather on the icy faces of K2, in the Himalayas, where the action supposedly takes place. Not from oxygen deprivation. Not even from…
Thirty-five years ago, at the height of Beatlemania–the phenomenon, not the stage show–some cynics pooh-poohed the notion that the unprecedented hysteria around the Four Lads from Liverpool would endure. (“What are you going to do when the bubble bursts?” a smug, apparently drunk Tallulah Bankhead sneered at John and Paul…
Unbreakable is such a quiet film that whenever a character speaks above a whisper, it sounds like the shattering of glass in a monastery. It’s also a terribly sad movie; almost no one cracks a smile or a joke, and everyone wears the look of someone who’s just spent the…
The moods of Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me are so artfully mingled that it’s difficult to get a fix on this highly personal independent feature. Set in a quiet little town in upstate New York’s lovely Catskill Mountains, it is at once a drama about the unresolved traumas…
