Mike Leigh’s new film, Career Girls, is compact and minor. I don’t mean that as a slam exactly. After the dawdling expansiveness of last year’s Secrets & Lies, his latest one is something of a relaxation–it’s appealingly small-scale. Leigh isn’t doing anything here he hasn’t done better before, but at…
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation–a goofy remake of the 1974 scare, uh, classic–is a film so worthless that the admission ought to come with a $7.50 rebate coupon. In retrospect, the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre seems kind of quaint, its blood-red faded with the passage of time. When it…
If you’re nostalgic for the cockeyed let-it-all-out gabfests of the late John Cassavetes, She’s So Lovely will seem like dejà vu all over again. Cassavetes wrote the script more than a decade ago, and now his son Nick–whose first feature, Unhook the Stars, starred his mother, Gena Rowlands–has directed it…
Time has a way of slipping by when you’re not looking, but don’t worry: While you’re distracted, studio executives are keeping their usual keen eyes on the calendar, tabulating the simple economic arithmetic of boomer nostalgia. Hmmm…1997 minus 1957 equals 40 years. Forty years of nostalgic forgetfulness multiplied by the…
Critics and audiences outside France have been going on for so long about the decline in French cinema that it’s fun to see a French film–Irma Vep–that says much the same thing. The rap is, of course, somewhat unfair–most raps are–but there’s no question that even the best of recent…
In G.I. Jane, Demi Moore’s Naval Intelligence officer, Lt. Jordan O’Neil, is recruited as a test case to be the first female Navy SEAL. She gets a buzzcut and loses her period. She endures the indignities of the male volunteers snickering at her in the food line. She rolls huge…
When the beautiful entomologist rips open the chest cavity of a huge, bloodthirsty insect in the sci-fi nightmare Mimic, it turns into Thoraxic Park. This movie, like Spielberg’s, features evolution gone haywire and dramaturgy gone to hell. In the prologue, the heroine–the reckless and courageous (or foolhardy and stupid) Dr…
By the end of Event Horizon, an ocean of red nearly drowns half the cast–this is a literal bloodbath. Blood pours from their throats, from their eye sockets, from their exposed veins and entrails; it splashes down corridors, runs down walls, fills every inch of screen space and then some…
The cops in Cop Land carry on like a bunch of goombahs. On the take from the Mob, they mimic the Mob. The fuzzy line dividing cops and crooks is the subject of many a strong police movie, but Cop Land goes a step further–it says there is no line…
When Time magazine columnist Walter Shapiro referred to himself last month as part of a generation that still believes “A Thousand Clowns holds all the secrets to human existence,” I thought he must be daft. Yes, high school students took Herb Gardner’s hit comedy about an urban dropout (played by…
Jerry Fletcher, the hero of Conspiracy Theory, is a comic, glamorous variation on Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Like Travis, he’s a New York cabbie obsessed with protecting a woman from the world’s hidden malignancies. Unlike Travis, Jerry snaps when he achieves sanity. Mel Gibson has been almost too willing…
In the not-so-brave new world of independent filmmaking, low-budget movies premiere at Sundance or Cannes and win plaudits from over-psyched audiences, publicity from desperate feature writers, and distribution from boutiques that are usually subsidiaries of major studios. Right now Tarantino-style thrillers are out; crazy-clan stories and upstairs-downstairs tales are in…
All you heterosexual men looking for a film to see with your girlfriend, consider this a warning–Neil Labute’s In the Company of Men is not a date movie. Nor is this slow-burn indie drama a “black comedy,” as some critics have dubbed it. The film could be described as a…
John Leguizamo is lithe and full of juice–he’s like the shy boy who suddenly discovers he can dance and can’t keep still. Given his need to express himself physically–in his first one-man stage show, Spic-O-Rama, I don’t think his feet ever hit the ground–it’s a sad irony that his breakthrough…
187, a number favored by adolescent thugs, is the California state penal code for homicide–and a harsh sentence for all involved in this hopeless, hapless movie. The gifted Samuel L. Jackson stars as a high school teacher who cracks under the constant threat of rabid teen machismo–and retaliates with his…
In Picture Perfect, Jennifer Aniston tells a whopper of a lie partially to win the attentions of a guy who has heretofore ignored her, interrupts a wedding, and humiliates a guy at his workplace. This follows on the heels of My Best Friend’s Wedding, which found Julia Roberts trying to…
It’s no secret that the “new” Jackie Chan releases in the U.S. aren’t really new at all. In fact, they’re not even showing up in chronological order: While New Line is issuing Jackie’s more current stuff in order, Miramax is putting out the star’s relatively recent back catalog out of…
Not satisfied with the president you have? Here’s Harrison Ford’s James Marshall in Air Force One–Vietnam war hero, straight as a ramrod, devoted husband and father. We first see him delivering a speech before a roomful of Russian dignitaries. Departing from the prepared, wishy-washy text, Mr. President fire-breathes his new…
Mrs. Brown (a Cannes hit and Miramax release) is dignified to the dead max–brownish-gray in mood and look and spirit. It’s based on the true story of the platonic but controversial bond between Queen Victoria (Judi Dench) and a Highlander named John Brown (Billy Connolly), who had been the devoted…
Writer-director Finn Taylor is a young filmmaker who’s smart enough to steal from the best, even if his precocious talent doesn’t always use what he’s swiped effectively. Dream With the Fishes is Taylor’s debut feature, a tightly executed, occasionally contrived study of two men trying to outrun death. The movie…
What must those poor guys in Insane Clown Posse be thinking? After all, the sad white rap act only made a record that included profanity, and still they got drop-kicked off a panicky Disney-owned Hollywood Records, a label whose greatest catalog asset is Queen. Martin Lawrence, on the other hand,…
A lot of ink has been shed in the press lately about the “seriousness” of the new Robert Zemeckis film Contact, starring Jodie Foster as an astronomer who receives humankind’s first extraterrestrial message. Forrest Gump made Zemeckis a guru; now he’s being primed as a philosopher king. Is it rude…
