Early on in Mission: Impossible 2 (or M:I-2, as the confident Paramount now calls it), hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) complains to his boss about his new assignment: “It’s going to be difficult.” “It’s not mission difficult, Mr. Hunt,” the boss icily replies, “it’s mission impossible. ‘Difficult’ should be a…
Do not judge Shanghai Noon by its trailer, which serves as the very antithesis of advertising: It begs you to stay far away from any theater in which this film is screening. Laden with dreary sight gags (a horse that stays by sitting…just like a dog) and woeful puns (“Your…
To begin, let us discuss puking. You know, upchucking, barfing, yacking, Technicolor yawning, blowing cookies, driving the porcelain bus, screaming at one’s shoes, and, for you Aussies, chundering. Always unpleasant–and yet usually a great relief to a queasy gut–a nice vomit can be provoked by just about anything, but a…
“Industrial-strength boredom” is a vicious term to unload on anybody–friend, foe, or former actress. Considering the lingering discomfort it inspires, one must beware of its impact, even around a seemingly invulnerable producer returning to the screen to melt our hearts in yet another variation on the emotional doppelgänger narrative, à…
Woody Allen is back on screen in Small Time Crooks, a bittersweet comedy that in many ways could have been lifted straight from the ’30s. For the most part, it’s Woody Allen Lite, which is not at all a bad thing. While one doesn’t want to penalize Allen for his…
If you had asked me in 1969 what was the best movie ever made, the answer would likely have been The Valley of Gwangi, in which a group of cowboys in the Mexican desert find a gully full of leftover dinosaurs, animated by Ray Harryhausen, and lasso a tyrannosaurus rex…
Road Trip makes American Pie look like Fast Times at Ridgemont High; Fast Times look like Animal House; and Animal House look like Citizen Kane. It ranks (indeed, it is rank) among the most soul-deadening movies ever made; it has no pulse and seeks to steal yours with a cynical…
Yet another version of Hamlet? Will they never stop? Ah, well, at least Michael Almereyda’s new adaptation is one of those really different takes on the venerable play. While the last two widely seen versions–the 1990 Mel Gibson/Franco Zeffirelli film and the four-hour-plus 1996 Kenneth Branagh/Kenneth Branagh version–were relatively straight…
Digital video is poised to become a major factor in commercial filmmaking, and Time Code, the new feature from Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas), could be used as a commercial for the process, which is its greatest point of interest. The movie is not so much an intriguing story as…
Silence, you who will dismiss Tom Tykwer’s lugubrious follow-up to Run Lola Run as a sophomoric step backward, because Winter Sleepers, shot before Lola in 1997, is a step backward, literally. With this in mind, it’s easier to assess this heady precursor to Tykwer’s later fireworks for its own successes…
When stars get popular enough (or win enough Oscars), they begin to get to call their own shots: Thus we have The Big Kahuna, the debut release of Kevin Spacey’s production company. Kahuna also marks the film debut of stage director John Swanbeck and screenwriter Roger Rueff. And boy, can…
When asked to name the most erotic sequence they have ever seen in a film, people tend to pick moments like the love scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in Don’t Look Now or that indelible image of Kathleen Turner in Body Heat, standing just inside her house, silently…
Given that most film studios have multimillion-dollar marketing budgets with which to target 18- to 25-year-olds, it’s astonishing how little they seem to know about the everyday life of those they’re supposed to be studying. Drew Barrymore has never been kissed? Please. Rachel Leigh Cook undatable until Freddie Prinze Jr…
There is a killing late in Gladiator, Ridley Scott’s new heroic epic, and it is one of those wonderfully cathartic slayings that makes a wide-eyed audience rise and cheer. After several brutal battles, after much bloodshed, after considerable suffering both needless and entertaining, a blade finds its mark, and a…
Everybody’s a princess at one point or another. Rich girls work it from birth to final crack-up. Bourgeois girls play the precious ‘n’ misunderstood game through adolescence, shifting it into ruthless ambition shortly thereafter. Poor girls can blow an entire lifetime just screwing up their hair and pretending they’re Galadriel…
In her first role since bagging the 1998 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress (for L.A. Confidential, the film that should have won Best Picture and Best Director as well), Kim Basinger trembles with fear. Notoriously insecure about appearing on camera, Basinger looks paralyzed by the prospect of doing a…
East-West, the new film from Oscar-winning French director Regis Wargnier (Indochine), is, like Wargnier’s earlier film, a drama about how political circumstances can dominate personal relations. (Also like Indochine, East-West was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language film, but lost out to Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother.)…
The highfalutin soap operas in W. Somerset Maugham’s fiction earned him a huge reading public in his day and made him a favorite of movie producers on both sides of the Atlantic. Maugham’s stories and novels — every one stuffed full of romance, deceit, and tragedy — have inspired nearly…
After some hectoring and pleading, the Dallas Observer got another crack at USA Film Festival coverage. And if we get our face slapped again, we just hope good intentions and honest impatience justify our impudence. Last year, as you may recall, the Festival chose to deny access to the Observer…
Conrad Hall, who by his own account has been “gainfully employed” behind a film camera since he graduated from UCLA in 1949, is dreaming of his own paradise: a house with five acres of coconut trees on a lagoon some 600 yards from mainland Tahiti. Hall will return there shortly…
Norman Jewison’s filmography is almost unfathomable, as though it’s an amalgam of several directors’ résumés. On the surface, it doesn’t add up; it’s two plus two equaling . How does one reconcile a body of work that includes Doris Day-Rock Hudson films (Send Me No Flowers); slick fashion ads dolled…
Go get a few grains of salt to accompany these observations of tenable consistency and enduring potential: The movie industry is run by big kids; nifty sci-fi trickery may distract an audience from emotional shoals; cops and criminals are divided by a fine line; nostalgia and evil are cheaper by…
