Marvin’s Room, starring Diane Keaton and Meryl Streep as sisters who reunite uneasily for the first time in 20 years, is one of those movies about people who confront the choices they’ve made and become better people for it. Adapted by the late Scott McPherson from his popular 1992 play…
In the opening minutes of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, the friends of the family’s grown children, Micol (Dominique Sanda) and Alberto (Helmut Berger), take a sylvan bike ride to the Finzi-Continis’ tennis court. Director Vittorio De Sica invests even this expository scene with psychological acuity. The sun-dappled color photography,…
A famous movie composer once told me a joke: Two songwriters are sitting around, and one of them says to the other, “I just saw the most amazing thing. A man fell off the roof of a building, hit a ledge, fell to the street, got winged by a bus,…
Ever since his first film, 1979’s Real Life, Albert Brooks has occupied his own little niche in American cinema. While his old buddy Rob Reiner quickly moved from the small, quirky, and wonderful This Is Spinal Tap to slick mainstream films, the 49-year-old Brooks (n. Albert Einstein) has released a…
I be readin’ about “Ebonics.” It’s the new “Black English” just officially certified by the Oakland school board as a second language. Why didn’t they have this when I was in high school? I had to take Spanish and French. I hated Spanish and French. Especially French. Hell, I would…
Now and again, as I sit here on my power perch–having just praised some pleasing cinematic trifle with a mot so bon it could singlehandedly vault the producers into new tax brackets or having characterized some hack with invective withering enough to permanently brand his pathetic career like some Puritan…
My first impulse in putting together a 10-best list for 1996 was to dispense with the new stuff altogether and go for the revival gold. The best films of 1996 were the rereleased restorations: Vertigo, Strangers on a Train, Lolita, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and…
How do you make the water stay in the bathroom sink? You may think this is a stupid question, but take it from a man who’s stayed in hundreds of motel rooms–it’s IMPORTANT. Here’s how they want you to THINK you make the water stay in the bathroom sink: By…
Hollywood routinely creates movies whose sole reason for existing is to provide a beloved celebrity a showcase to deliver a scenery-chewing star turn; occasionally, these films even win their lead performer an Oscar (recent example: Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman). But The Evening Star may be the first…
In Mother, Albert Brooks plays John Henderson, a science-fiction novelist recently divorced from his second wife who decides he can’t risk another relationship until he comes to terms with his mother. So he does the logical thing: He moves in with her. He hauls out of her garage all his…
The People vs. Larry Flynt is a Hollywood rags-to-riches success story with a twist. The recipient of the American Dream is a pornographer (Woody Harrelson) who admits to losing his virginity at 11 to a chicken and is known for saying things such as, “A woman’s vagina has as much…
What are the five most horrifying words a man can hear at holiday time? You already know, right? “Take me to ‘The Nutcracker.”’ Why do we always PRETEND we wanna do this? Why do we sometimes even convince OURSELVES that we really do wanna go watch the Dance of the…
Wes Craven, creator of the Nightmare on Elm Street series and writer-director of its two best entries (the first and the last), works whispering distance from the commercial Hollywood mainstream, just far enough to allow for more rude wit and less comfortable resolution than most studio product. His films open…
Western civilization has taken its fair share of direct blows over the ages, but never before was it so threatened with destruction by such markedly unempowered foes until Beavis and Butt-head hit MTV in 1993. How unempowered? Consider that those who have every right to be offended by the doltish…
Why a movie of The Crucible now? Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem witchcraft trials was first staged on Broadway in 1953, when McCarthyism was still in flower, and it was not a resounding success. Now, of course, it’s a staple of rep theaters and high school and college drama…
Wanda Bodine opened up a Smell Store last week. It’s this little shop in the mall where she sells stuff that emits AROMAS. Smelly oils, smelly herbs, smelly candles, smelly dried-flower arrangements, smelly clumps of pine bark you’re supposed to stick on your desk at the office so that you’ll…
Forget Independence Day. If you really want to see Earth get it, you can’t do any better than Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! It’s a destructo orgy orchestrated without any phony-baloney sanctimony about the fellowship of man–or spaceman. Burton isn’t interested in intergalactic amity; he’s not even interested in preserving the…
Whitney Houston has had a Movie Star Moment–just not in a movie. Near the end of the “I’m Saving All My Love for You” video, she turns toward the camera with a luminous smile that wilts into heartbreak when she realizes she’s been dropped by her, um, boyfriend. It’s a…
Some amusing stuff about sports agentry drowns in the emotional shallows of Jerry Maguire, which stars Tom Cruise in the title role as a hot-shot dealmaker whose first bout of conscience torpedoes his future at his firm, the monolithic Sports Management International. After visiting a hospitalized hockey player who skates…
Every time I try to play poker in peace, like God intended, Cherry Dilday starts screaming: “I wanna go! I wanna go! I wanna go!” There’s a reason why women have been banned from poker games since the beginning of time. Lemme splain it here for you. First of all,…
It’s impossible to capture on the printed page the anticipatory thrill of watching Sylvester Stallone handle rapid-fire dialogue: the rumbling basso voice, the twisted mouth valiantly trying to wrap itself around a stream of words, the consonants and vowels hurling forward like a toppled barrel of oranges. Will any of…
The stodgy works of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, makers of Howard’s End and Jefferson in Paris, have encouraged the sad notion that costume dramas must be leaden and respectable. Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility helped rehabilitate the form; and now Patrice Leconte’s Ridicule ventilates the stifled form with yet…
