When you think about how some of the smartest, most surprising films about women have been made by men–and how, when a woman filmmaker manages to score a decent budget for her project, she does the same for stories about men–you start to realize: Directors should dare to speak for…
Probably every film director itches to make a western, so let’s be thankful that, with The Newton Boys, Richard Linklater has scratched his itch. Now he can go back to making movies about subjects for which he has some genuine feeling. Linklater should not be begrudged his chance to “stretch.”…
Lovers of American movies used to joke that foreign films wouldn’t look so good if you saw them without subtitles. John Sayles’ latest movie, Men With Guns, plays better than his other films because it does have subtitles. Bald dialogue always sounds better in Spanish and Indian dialects. Set in…
For all the major American film critics who conspired to cram the ludicrously overpraised L.A. Confidential down the country’s throat, I have found a penalty befitting the crime. Fess up now that you got a little careless after downing a few too many macho-celluloid cocktails shaken by the likes of…
Though critics often compared Virginia Woolf’s nonlinear, almost cubist narratives to the then-burgeoning cinema’s use of montage, close-ups, flashbacks, tracking shots, and rapid cuts, the strength of Woolf’s novels lay in the rhythm of her arresting style, and in her heroines’ poignant and melancholic musings, which insidiously seep through the…
The American reissues of Jackie Chan films have met with declining box-office success since Chan burst onto the scene in 1996 with Rumble in the Bronx. With any luck, the latest Chan opus to be recut and redubbed for Americans, the year-old Mr. Nice Guy, should reverse the trend. No…
If ever there was an Op-Ed movie–a movie destined to be written about in an “elevated” realm beyond just the movie pages–it’s Primary Colors. Thanks to Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones, the Hollywood/Washington nexus has lifted this new Mike Nichols picture, based on the 1996 bestseller by Joe Klein, into…
The John Grisham industry has claimed another heavyweight. A few months back, Francis Ford Coppola delivered up John Grisham’s The Rainmaker, and now Robert Altman sails into view with The Gingerbread Man, based on an “original” Grisham screen story–although it’s basically a recycling of other Grisham recyclings. Who would have…
On the surface, Chairman of the Board, the film debut of comedian Carrot Top, seems perfectly aimed at young, creative, slacker types. It’s about a bumbler who accidentally makes it big in business, and its plot can be summed up as “Technicolor Gen-X freak conquers the business world without really…
Jeff Bridges is so euphorically wacked as a social dropout in The Big Lebowski that you get a secondhand high just looking at him. Padding around Venice, California, in a T-shirt that barely covers his midriff bulge, he’s like a beach bum who bowls instead of surfs. His nickname is…
A movie starring Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon, Gene Hackman, James Garner, and Stockard Channing ought to be a whole lot better than Robert Benton’s Twilight. It’s one of those “autumnal” movies about a private detective who is too old for the game but still goes through the motions. Benton, in…
Dangerous Beauty presents a 16th-century Venice filled with statesmen who hop from bed to bed without fear of “bimbo eruptions.” That’s because the courtesans aren’t bimbos, and they aren’t hidden: Everyone from the admiralty to the bishopric patronizes them. Having developed their minds along with their erotic skills, they’re boon…
His eye trained on the manic collision of Catholicism and consumerism, Pedro Almodovar has made some of the most lively, genre-bending films of the last two decades. The commander of a visual style that emphasizes bright primary colors and bold geometry, he’s in love with the glittering surfaces of pop-culture…
The science-fiction works of the late, great Philip K. Dick haven’t been served particularly well on screen. The most recent adaptation, Screamers, was junk; Total Recall had its moments, but was less ingenious by half than the short story it was based upon. Blade Runner, of course, was brilliant, but…
Back in the ’60s and ’70s, when its animation unit was in the doldrums, the Disney studio made a number of live-action “family” comedies (No Deposit, No Return and Freaky Friday, for instance) that were, within their limited ambitions, genuinely funny. The studio’s latest film, Krippendorf’s Tribe, is very much…
Bruno Barreto is the heir apparent of Brazilian cinema; he’s known on these shores for the lush romanticism of the Sonia Braga travel brochures Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (1977) and Gabriela (’83), and in his own country for teen fluff like ’81’s The Boy from Rio. With the…
Palmetto is a film noir set in a torpid seaside Florida town. It’s based on the James Hadley Chase novel Just Another Sucker, and when we first see Harry Barber (Woody Harrelson), he fits that moniker exactly. He looks dazed and confused–a sucker incarnate. Suckers are, of course, integral to…
The Only Thrill, directed by Houston native Peter Masterson, is a conventional, sentimental movie that nonetheless hits where it aims. The film, which otherwise would be competent but unremarkable, is distinguished by two memorable actors–Sam Shepard and Diane Keaton–and by the chemistry that grows between these two principals as the…
In these paradox-ridden times, producers on the hunt for cutting-edge fantasies look back: They visit their boyhood or girlhood rooms and ransack their old books and videos, or peruse their studio’s property list for works that scored well in other media. In the mid-’90s, the English company Working Title made…
A colleague confided that he feared The Winter Guest because he didn’t want to watch Emma Thompson talking to her mom for two hours. This perfectly summarizes the kind of trap Alan Rickman’s directorial debut could’ve laid for art-house patrons: Hire one respected English actor to oversee a film starring…
Ludovic, the fiercely determined young hero(ine?) of writer-director Alain Berliner’s half-hilarious, half-tragic feature debut Ma Vie en Rose (My Life in Pink), proves how age, culture, and time all conspire to decide the difference between being feminine and being effeminate. Sure, he likes to wear frilly dresses and wants to…
Dennis Rodman’s life is an open book–it’s just not clear at this point how many people are left who care to read it. Rodman’s arrogance is unparalleled and far too well documented: He’s the, um, author of two autobiographies; he briefly had his own show on MTV, if you call…
