You will cry when Keeping the Faith ends, if only because, after 130 minutes, the damned thing is over. They will be tears of gratitude, like those shed by marathon runners as they cross the finish line, broken and spent. There is only so much the human body can endure…
Where the Money Is is the latest attempt at a geezer vehicle — in this case for Paul Newman. Despite his unassailable movie-star credentials and his still-handsome mug, Newman is faced with the inevitable dilemma of the leading man: Either make a film that appeals only to other oldsters, step…
Rehab, sweet rehab. Last resort of the alcoholic, the drug addict, and the would-be suicide. Free room and board, lots of tender loving care, and a whole herd of fellow recovering screw-ups who’ll always be there for you, who are willing to apologize and admit their imperfections at the drop…
Editor’s note: This review originally ran in the Dallas Observer on April 29, 1999, when the film was shown as part of the USA Film Festival, before it was released nationwide. Too often baseball players are reduced to statistics, hollow numbers that resonate with the fetishist who drifts off to…
On the surface — and that’s all the movie is, a puddle instead of a lake — Return to Me is a hackneyed, silly, slapdash film. Whole scenes look, if not out of focus, then at least a little blurry, as though we’re missing something just out of frame. And…
Allow pitch-perfect Bijou Phillips, who plays hip-hopping uptown white girl Charlie, to set the tone for Black and White with her address to her stern father: “I’m havin’ a good day, goin’ wit’ my friends to da liberry an’ shit, but you have to go and ruin it for me!”…
Merchant/Ivory Productions has long been America’s quintessential purveyor of classy, “literary” films. At its best, the team of director James Ivory and Ismail Merchant has given us A Room With a View (1986) and The Remains of the Day (1993); at its worst, Slaves of New York (1989) and Jefferson…
Film topics are cyclical, of course, and boxing movies are currently enjoying their return to the spotlight. Or maybe “enjoying” is too strong a word. Despite the recent number of fighting tales — Play It to the Bone, The Hurricane, On the Ropes, Knockout, Price of Glory — not one…
Lately, it seems that even the most successful film adaptations don’t have much more in common with the books that spawned them than the title and some of the characters’ names — at best. Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential, for instance, had little to do with James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential, apart…
From its opening moments, The Road to El Dorado looks and sounds oddly out of time, as though it were removed only yesterday from a time capsule sealed and buried in 1972. With its Peter Max visuals and Elton John vocals, it’s a decidedly unhip piece of work from the…
Not so long ago, The Skulls would have starred Tom Cruise — but in which role? He could have been either lead; the one he didn’t choose could have landed in the lap of, say, James Spader or Rob Lowe. One can easily imagine Cruise as Luke McNamara, the beefy,…
What is it with filmmakers and mental retardation? It seems as though use of the differently abled as a central theme ranks second only to troubled childhood when it comes time to make a “personal” film. The connection between the two is fairly obvious: the artist as gentle innocent besieged…
Rod Lurie’s Deterrence is a bush-league foreign-policy debate disguised as a movie. There may come a day when Paramount Classics ships every print it has struck of this inert and tedious piece of business off to selected political science and social philosophy classes and tries to forget about the whole…
In the opening scenes of Price of Glory, set in the late 1970s, a young prizefighter named Arturo Ortega (Jimmy Smits) loses a career-making bout. He earns a few grand, but he’s plainly washed up, and we’re meant to see that it’s his greedy manager’s fault; like Antonio Banderas in…
The drug of romance and its rotten hangover are nothing new to stage, screen, and stereo. You’ve got your Capulets and Montagues, your Griffin and Phoenix, your Ike and Tina. Cautionary tales, the lot. (The formula is as follows: Person + Person + Lovethang – Brains = Emotional Abattoir yielding…
Even the press kit is up-front about it: Whatever It Takes is less a film than a product of marketing research and demographic considerations. It might as well have been written on a bar graph, so fetishistic is it about making sure it appeals to teens and their parents –…
Such a Long Journey is set in Bombay in 1971, shortly before the war between India and Pakistan. Gustad Noble (Roshan Seth) is as middle-class as they come: A bank teller for 20 years, he works hard to support his wife, Dilnavaz (Soni Razdan), and children. But such is the…
Is America ready for the Hong Kong action style? Certainly there are many fans of the more balletic, guns-and-martial-arts, fly-through-the-air movies that have inspired everyone from Quentin Tarantino to the Wachowski brothers. Yet Hollywood still seems to have had trouble marketing the concept. Yes, John Woo gets high-profile projects, but…
Here on Earth, the new teen romance, should do wonders for the reputation of veteran director Arthur Hiller. Not that Hiller had anything to do with the film, mind you — which wouldn’t do wonders for his rep. No, Hiller is the man who, back in 1970, directed the inexplicably…
It’s again that time of year, when we gather to praise Bart Weiss for keeping afloat the Dallas Video Festival against all odds (the odds being, in this case, a city in which culture means Mark Cuban). In its 13th year, the DVF has yet to make Weiss a rich…
In director Jem Cohen’s films, especially earlier efforts such as 1987’s This Is a History of New York and 1992’s Drink Deep, he manages to tell a story without letting on exactly what story he’s telling. Meaning: He’s definitely saying something, but it’s up to the viewer to decipher what…
The film is called Erin Brockovich, but it might as well be titled Julia Roberts. Never before in the actress’ erratic career has a film been so custom-made for her; it’s as though a screenwriter has been replaced by a seamstress who knows Roberts’ every curve. No matter that she…
