Plot aside–way aside, as it’s almost a non-issue in a film that telegraphs its final scenes during its opening moments– Bandits is really about only one thing: Billy Bob Thornton’s and Bruce Willis’ bald heads. As Joe Blake (Willis) and Terry Collins (Thornton), two bank-robbing fugitives in search of retirement…
No one has more to say about life than someone who hasn’t lived it yet. While pop culture’s juvenile slaves would shout down this concept to their last breaths–jeans slung at half-mast, navel-rings linked in passionate solidarity–there’s only so much material to be strip-mined from the angst of youth, especially…
Thanks to his justly lauded work as action choreographer on The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, director Yuen Wo Ping is among the most famous creators of Hong Kong action in the United States. Following the latter film’s astonishing success, Miramax, with a prod from Quentin Tarantino, has wisely…
Tran Anh Hung’s beautiful meditation on family ties and family traumas, The Vertical Ray of the Sun, marks a captivating new chapter in the career of the writer-director who was the first to give Americans a glimpse of Vietnamese filmmaking. In 1994 Tran’s The Scent of Green Papaya made its…
There are two fundamental rules that must remain inviolate for my 4-year-old, Max, to enjoy children’s theater. First, never allow larger-than-life animal characters to frolic in any interactive fashion with the audience: Breaking the fourth wall scares the hell out of him. And second, make certain that the running time…
The late actor Anthony Quinn, who was known for having played characters of almost every ethnicity–except perhaps Nordic–during his 60-year career, surprisingly didn’t place too much importance on his own background. “It doesn’t make a difference as long as I’m a person in the world,” he said. In its third…
In my dream world, chimpanzees could live among us like squirrels. What would be nicer than waking up in the morning to see a chimp outside the window swinging on the phone lines? They could roll around in the grass, play with the neighbor’s toddlers and, maybe if I got…
Before he was editor in chief at Marvel Comics–which, by all rights, makes him the man who tells Spider-Man what he can do with himself and the X-Men where to go–Joe Quesada illustrated a comic book titled Ash. The title did not last long; there was, perhaps, little market for…
This may be a strange time to release a thriller about the dangers of corrupt law enforcement, but Training Day–with no explosions, no cheap thrills, no international conspiracies–is about as distant from current East Coast realities as possible. Still, that doesn’t mean that it qualifies as escapism. This gripping police…
It’s generally considered a violation of the unwritten code of film criticism to reveal anything that happens more than halfway into a movie, let alone near the end. Entire “flame wars” have been waged over the Internet over the slightest of spoilers, even when they involve something as minor as…
Serendipity already feels archaic, like some dusty relic that’s been unearthed from an antique store’s attic and polished off for display. It reeks of quaint and cute, from its gauzy panoramas of Manhattan at Christmastime to its tattered plot of lovers bound by destiny to its scenes of travelers casually…
A quarter-century after C.W. McCall’s smash novelty single “Convoy,” there’s still a generous spirit out there for our 18-wheeled good buddies. But consider the less catchy flip side of that single, “Long, Lonesome Road,” and its lament of a maddeningly grim and endless horizon. It’s within this uniquely American wasteland…
As the joke goes, nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. And if you doubt it, hie yourself down to shows at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary and Photographs Do Not Bend, both of which are featuring work from the distant (for Texas) past. The MAC’s show features 96 works by…
Museums like to use the word “comprehensive” to describe their exhibits. Too often it means simply that they don’t have the funds to purchase several well-known and important works by a famous artist, so they’ve bought one showpiece and a few older, less significant pieces at bargain prices. And when…
The pages of the first edition of Bridget Jones’s Diary were already yellowed by the time we finally cracked open a copy. There had been too much hype at first surrounding this piece of literary fluff about a sometimes ballsy, mostly insecure single gal who hates her job, her body…
Rene Balcer, like you and everyone you know, can’t stop talking about what we now refer to simply as The Attack. We may resume our lives, fall back into our routine until it again feels mundane and comforting, but sooner or later, The Attack becomes the only topic of conversation…
The cynic may notice only how Hearts in Atlantis plays like a Stephen King best-of compilation, a reheating of familiar stories and favorite themes. At times, it feels so much like Stand By Me–with its nostalgic, flashback tale of cherubs and bullies accompanied by sad and weary narration–one might confuse…
Combine teenage angst with suburban emptiness and you’ve got a movie formula with an appreciable advantage over some other current movie formulas–particularly in the eyes of those who believe the American family has disintegrated and most of us are headed for eternal damnation. This is not to say the right-wing…
Together is the second feature from Swedish director Lukas Moodysson, whose 1998 Fucking Amal was shown here two years ago under the title Show Me Love, renamed for obvious reasons. Together is an ensemble piece–a sharp, perceptive look at a Swedish commune in a suburb of Stockholm, circa 1975. That…
Lacking the good taste to postpone the release of this silly thriller until a less volatile time in American history (assuming one ever comes), the producers of Don’t Say a Word have opted to foist upon us images of detonating New York City buildings, carefully calculated acts of violence and…
The Italian film Bread and Tulips is a first cousin once removed of the American comedy Home Alone. A tremendous hit in Italy (it won nine Donatello awards last year, the Italian equivalent of the Oscars), it concerns a woman who, on a bus holiday with her family, accidentally gets…
One of the great issues of modern drama can best be phrased as a simple, catty question: “Why is Hedda such a bitch?” Certainly, the pioneering dramatist Henrik Ibsen was spry enough with language, structure and the subtle insertions of social conscience in Hedda Gabler to give theatergoers a thousand…
