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…
If the concept of dubious celebrity Ben Affleck romping in a water park with cinematic darling Gwyneth Paltrow and two adorable moppets does not inspire in you spasms of dizziness and nausea, then you may find plenty to tolerate in Bounce, the new romantic dramedy from writer-director Don Roos. This…
The soon-to-be-talked-about sensations in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream include three or four flashing, near-subliminal montages that combine an eye’s iris and dilating pupil, an extreme close-up of heroin cooking in a teaspoon, and a sucking hypodermic needle; a surpassingly frightening sequence in which Ellen Burstyn, in the midst…
There once was a man, and he called himself Seuss, Who wrote the best children’s books ever produced. With drawings elaborate, and tales subtly moral Of his greatness, not even this critic would quarrel. Alas, he’s now dead, and so all is not groovy, For someone said, “I know! Let’s…
Refreshingly, the biggest wonder about the new Arnold Schwarzenegger ride is not that human cloning has become a reality, nor that the America of the future (“sooner than you think,” as an opening caption ominously suggests) very closely resembles present-day Vancouver, British Columbia, in Canada. It’s not even that technological…
Given the stress and emotional turmoil associated with family holidays, in the cinema, as in life, it’s very peculiar that anyone feels obliged to entertain the notion of Thanksgiving anymore. Really, thanks for what, exactly? Jammed freeways? Delayed flights? Overcrowded supermarkets? Big, dead birds? Witchhunts? Territorial conquest and genocide? Well,…
This fall, two local film festivals celebrate their second birthdays, and already both have learned to run before they bothered to crawl. The Vistas Film Festival, which had its run last month, proved that no line exists between “great Latin cinema” and “great cinema”; Vistas featured some of the best…
November may mean Thanksgiving to most of you, but in the film biz it means a rush of “serious” films trying to gouge an impression into the short memories of Oscar voters. This shouldn’t be a bad thing, but since the relationship between “Oscar” and “actually interesting filmmaking” is nearly…
Little Nicky will redefine the phrase “worst movie ever,” because it might actually be the worst movie ever. Never again will one be able to so casually sling around that phrase about, say, anything produced by Jerry Bruckheimer or anything starring Richard Grieco or Robert Davi or Rodney Dangerfield (who,…
If you’re planning to take a look at Antony Hoffman’s Red Planet, it is highly advised that you squint. This way, instead of observing a facile romance lightly spiced with danger and heavily laden with rawkin’ effects, you’ll see the movie for what it really is: a cadre of little…
