It’s Christmas vacation, 1958. The movie my dad has chosen for a first-grade pal and me to see is the new Disney live-action adventure, Tonka, starring Sal Mineo as a young Sioux named White Bull who traps and domesticates a clear-eyed, spirited wild horse named Tonka. Having seen The King…
High Art is a low-budget, American independent movie about a junkie, lesbian photographer, Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy), who spends most of her time looking romantically mournful. She’s famished and abrasive and oh-so world-weary. When she smokes cigarettes, she exhales in a way that can best be described as existential–the smoke…
The X-Files is a movie that answers questions…No, wait a minute. The X-Files is a movie that asks questions…Hmmm. OK. The X-Files is a movie that makes me wanna ask some questions, like: What the hell does “Fight the future” mean? I mean, I can understand “The truth is out…
Henry Jaglom’s movies offer everything that Americans hate about French films, but with little of the philosophical depth or visual daring that mark the best French cinema. He captures the annoying qualities of Woody Allen movies–the self-absorption, the feigned feminism, the pretentiousness–without achieving anything like Allen’s humor and charm. Talky,…
Early on in Six Days, Seven Nights, Harrison Ford’s drunken beach pilot Quinn Harris offers some advice to Anne Heche’s vacationing Robin Monroe. He warns that people often go to isolated island paradises looking for romance. But if you don’t bring it with you, you ain’t gonna find it. If…
Star Wars notwithstanding, film revivals rarely work on a large scale anymore. Blame it on cable or videotape, or just the ever increasing number of new films released every year, but today’s audiences–born and bred on the blockbuster and a steady diet of coming attractions, waiting eagerly for tomorrow’s movie,…
It’s a truism that unless your film picks up momentum as it goes along, you’d do well not to put a ticking clock in it. Thrillers like The Big Clock and DOA work because they’re superior mousetraps that have found a way to put time itself in pursuit of the…
Rule number one: when crafting a thriller, make sure the audience can relate to, identify with, or empathize with at least one of the characters. Rule number two: the characters’ motivations must be clear. Fail in either area–or worse yet, both–and you end up with a film like A Perfect…
Lawn Dogs doesn’t start with the words “Once upon a time,” but it might as well. The film is a fairy tale, plain and simple–and if you argue that this is nothing more than a clever way to say the symbolism and plot points are terribly tired, you won’t get…
The Truman Show, starring Jim Carrey, is the zeitgeist movie of the hour. How could it not be? It’s all about the omnipotence of television and how our lives seem scripted by some unseen force–a TV producer, perhaps? Zeitgeist movies, almost by definition, get written about not only by film…
Most people associate the disco era with hedonism, homosexuality, a sense of community, tacky fashions, and awful music. But in The Last Days of Disco Whit Stillman imagines the era as merely a singles bar for romantics in search of soulmates, largely heterosexual and hardly debauchees. The clothes, and the…
Frank Sinatra never gave a better performance as an actor than he did in The Man With the Golden Arm (1955) as Frankie Machine, a hot-shot poker dealer and junkie who emerges from prison hoping to kick all his bad habits (heroin included) and earn a living as a drummer…
Only a week after lizards came crawling across the nation’s screens in both Godzilla and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hope Floats comes lumbering along, scourging all in its path with saccharine sentimentality and bogus emotions. Let’s start with the title: two words whose juxtaposition is neither evocative nor…
Could it have been all the drugs that kept Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas from being made into a movie? Whatever the cause, journalist Hunter S. Thompson’s staggering, semi-fictional account of “a savage journey to the heart of the American dream” has proven to be one of the most…
No genre of film is quite as beleaguered as the humble romantic comedy. Ideally suited to the modest budgets and limited chops of the burgeoning filmmaker–no horses, no explosions, no alien embryo pods filled with disgusting slime–the genre often takes the blame for twentysomething tales told without the benefit of…
The “Size Matters” marketing campaign for Godzilla is far more ingenious than the movie. It’s also highly annoying–and somewhat misleading. After all, as the ads for a new film called Plump Fiction remind us, “Width matters, too.” Perhaps the best thing about this week’s ballyhooed arrival of Godzilla is that…
The Horse Whisperer, the latest film from Robert Redford–and the first of his directorial efforts in which he also stars–could almost serve as a compendium of Redford’s best and worst tendencies. It features his eye for gorgeous, pictorial vistas; his straightforward narrative approach; and, most importantly, his understanding of actors…
Not since the death of Diana has there been a pop phenomenon as cataclysmic as the demise of Seinfeld. The surrounding hoopla has reached such, well, titanic proportions that it has turned the series’ saturnine co-creator–balding, bespectacled Larry David–into a cult celebrity. The press has presented David as a mysterious…
It’s the tail end of the 1996 California primary election, and incumbent Democratic Sen. Jay Bulworth (Warren Beatty) is having a nervous breakdown. Sleepless for days, famished, he channel-surfs aimlessly in the darkness of his office where, in a rare moment of lucidity, he has an inspiration: He arranges to…
In Barbara Kopple’s new documentary Wild Man Blues, we follow Woody Allen around Europe on a whirlwind concert tour with his New Orleans jazz band. He’s kvetching from the get-go. “I would rather be bitten by a dog than fly to Paris,” he announces mid-air, then mellows on the Champs-Elysees…
Most disaster movies would be a lot better with more disaster and less “human drama.” In Deep Impact, the impending obliteration of much of earth by a pair of comets is merely the sideshow. The main event is all that goopy human-interest stuff–the daughter who reunites with her estranged father,…
One of the few seemingly spontaneous bursts of energy at this year’s Oscar ceremony was provided by motor-mouthing Dutch director Mike van Diem, who seemed genuinely surprised to have won the award for Best Foreign Film for his debut feature, Character. If the commercial popularity and Oscar sweep for Titanic…
