At first glance, Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother seems uncharacteristically grim for a filmmaker with such a demonic sense of humor. Within 10 minutes, the heroine’s 17-year-old son is hit and killed by a car, which propels her and the events of the film into motion. In the next…
Although he couldn’t have known it at the time, growing up in Baltimore during the 1950s would prove to be filmmaker Barry Levinson’s smartest career move. First in Diner, then in Tin Men, Avalon, and now Liberty Heights, he has drawn on the specific time, place, and culture of his…
It ain’t that hard to parody Star Trek’s original series; Lord knows it did a good job of that itself. And certainly, many have tried; Jim Carrey did on In Living Color (with the “Wrath of Farrakhan” sketch), Kevin Pollak has built an entire career on his William Shatner impersonation,…
Ah, what a miracle that Andy Kaufman was. So sublime his wit, so pioneering his spirit. Astonishing! A hero to be loved, adored, and emulated by all artists and performers for the rest of eternity. An opener of doors, a smasher-down of barriers, a glorious, luminous, intrepid spirit without whom…
Nobody is innocent in America, but there is one segment of the population that seems doggedly determined to deny its own ignorance, ugliness, and violence: the redneck. The sludge on the bottom of the melting pot, this offshoot of European ancestry continues, to this day, to foment racist terrorism, religious…
It is rare to find a movie that is as accomplished, multilayered, and rewarding as the novel from which it was adapted, but The Cider House Rules is such a film. Directed by Lasse Hallström (My Life as a Dog, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?), the film displays the kind of…
If there’s anything that could make me believe in a cruel and vengeful God (or in the existence of the Dark Prince himself), it’s the incredible success of writer-turned-director Chris Columbus. Columbus is, in sheer dollar terms, the most successful comedy director of all time, having been at the helm…
It’s too tempting to resist. You see, there’s a secret about Stuart Little that the fine folks at Sony don’t want to blow. It’s not that each one of the half-million computer-generated hairs on the mouse’s head is cute as the dickens. It isn’t that human stars Geena Davis and…
I sincerely hope Jodie Foster gets a chance to relax and unwind this holiday season, because the lady has obviously worked like a horse to instill her latest role with humanity and significance. As intrepid British widow Anna Leonowens in the huge and poetic new Anna and the King, Foster…
Have you ever endured a relationship in which your partner beat you up mercilessly just to be able to “heal” you and play the redeemer later on? Granted, that’s a weird question and perhaps one better explored by Akbar and Jeff in Matt Groening’s Life in Hell strip, but it…
Millennial hysteria takes many forms. Some people fall prey to a travel agent and book a cruise to the Aegean, bent on passing New Century’s Eve with Aristotle’s ghost and a nice plate of moussaka. Others, of appropriate age and inclination, vow to get drunk and copulate at the stroke…
The heroines of Gavin O’Connor’s offbeat road movie Tumbleweeds are a struggling single mother named Mary Jo Walker (Janet McTeer) and her feisty 12-year-old daughter, Ava (Kimberly J. Brown), who set out together from a back hollow in West Virginia to make a new life — or something like one…
“A Joel Schumacher film.” Among a certain breed of filmgoer — say, anyone for whom theaters provide something other than shelter — there may no more frightening four words in the English language. Ever since he killed Batman, Schumacher’s name has become the equivalent of a swear word on many…
Being called “brave” all the time must be almost as annoying for a disabled person as living in a world designed for the abled. Sure enough, peruse reviews of Firdaus Kanga’s “autobiographical novel” Trying to Grow or the astringently unsentimental film version of it, Sixth Happiness, and you’ll find critics…
It’s not surprising to discover that Perfect Blue was originally supposed to be filmed using humans. After all, the debut of director Satoshi Kon, who has worked on other Japanese animated films, is the very antithesis of most anime. Meaning, there are no sci-fi action sequences, no lavish fantasy settings,…
Toy Story, the 1995 hit from Disney and Pixar, was not only the first fully computer-animated feature; it was also as brilliantly written and directed a film as any of the classic Disney releases. Pixar did nearly everything right — from story, dialogue, and voice casting to the impossibly complex…
A tangible sense of sadness and longing hangs over The Legend of 1900, the mesmerizingly beautiful and poetic new film from Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore, best known in the United States for his Academy Award-winning Cinema Paradiso. Based on a dramatic monologue by contemporary Italian novelist Alessadro Baricco but filmed…
The last half-decade has been very good to Jane Austen: Besides Ang Lee’s estimable 1995 version of Sense and Sensibility, we’ve been given film or TV adaptations of Emma, Persuasion, and Pride and Prejudice, not to mention Clueless, Amy Heckerling’s remarkably apt updating of Emma. Now Miramax and the BBC…
Eight years have passed since Terminator 2, otherwise known as the last Arnold Schwarzenegger movie worth a damn. Since then, he has appeared in one half-decent actioner (James Cameron’s wink-wink True Lies), one pale imitation of a pale imitation (Eraser, which is what its script was written with), and a…
“The spectre is known at all the country firesides by the name of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow,” writes Washington Irving in his original fantasy. Thanks in large part to the silly, watered-down fun of the animated Disney version, the Horseman and his victim, the gangling and gallant Ichabod…
Poor old MGM — the once-golden studio that has been battered and abused by ever-changing ownership and management for nearly three decades — still has one sure-shot franchise among its assets: the James Bond series, whose longevity is astounding. If nothing else, the series’ overseas popularity keeps the films profitable…
Be forewarned: In the continuing quest to get people to pay attention to their films by any means necessary, the marketing wizards at Artisan Entertainment have been misrepresenting Felicia’s Journey to an even greater extent than they did The Minus Man. No doubt hoping to attract a young male demographic,…
