The Asian Film Festival, taking place this weekend, features a dozen exotic entries, only a few of which have ever screened locally; the range is impressive, from Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 masterpiece Seven Samurai to John Woo’s The Killer to Kinji Fukusaku’s, ahem, banned-in-the-U.S. Battle Royale from last year. There’s also…
This film is loosely based, without credit, on H.G. Wells’ short story “The New Accelerator,” in which a scientist figures out a way to slow time down to such an extent that everything else moves in super slo-mo; in essence, he’s moving so fast that to the rest of the…
The eternal beauty and constant surprise of baseball are always getting sabotaged by Hollywood’s urge to reduce the grand old game to a set of clichés as tedious as spring training drills. The ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson elevated Field of Dreams, the Wild Thing’s errant fastball gave momentary charm…
There’s allegory and there’s excess, and in his latest, longest feature to date, Czech animator-cum-director Jan Svankmajer seems to have lost sight of the line between making his point and gouging us with it. Our story focuses on a loving couple in Prague (Veronika Zilková and Jan Hartl), whose hopeful…
Looking at the original Blade now, it’s not as impressive as it seemed at the time; its hugely positive reception among the comic-book crowd may have been the result of it simply not sucking. It came out before The Matrix brought Hong Kong-style wires and trenchcoats to the world’s attention,…
Kissing Jessica Stein ends several times–which likely explains how a film with so short a running time, 94 minutes, feels as though it lasts much longer–and each conclusion satisfies; each feels real, natural and, best of all, inevitable. That is, except for the actual finale, which so betrays what’s come…
Since his debut with 1992’s Rebels of the Neon God, which made the rounds of U.S. festivals the following year, Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang has continued to make movies that offer variations on themes of isolation and human loneliness. This is not nearly as dreary as it may sound; indeed,…
The work of Henry Jaglom is an acquired taste that for many of us remains unacquired. While his new film, Festival in Cannes, is not a huge departure from usual, it may be his most accessible work for non-fans since 1991’s Eating. Not surprisingly, the movie is set at the…
Ice Age posits a heretofore unfathomable question: Is it possible for computer-generated characters to go through the motions? Everything about this endeavor–from 20th Century Fox, playing cartoon catch-up after 2000’s Titan A.E., which smelled like something stolen from Saturday-morning television–feels pilfered and stitched-together. There’s not an original fossil in its…
To say that Showtime is the year’s best glossy studio entertainment film thus far may be the ultimate in faint praise. The first quarter is always pretty bad–following the majors’ traditional end-of-the-year marketing/release orgies–but 2002 has been several degrees worse than usual. From the dual Pearce-ings of The Count of…
In the original Resident Evil video game–named Biohazard in its Japanese incarnation–a brash young American infiltrates a large manor house in the country, only to find it inhabited by terrifying, soulless zombies. But since Gosford Park already came out, the makers of the Resident Evil movie had to go with…
Precious and cloying, Harrison’s Flowers sets out to prove itself a story of hope and human endurance, but swiftly deteriorates into a terribly obvious melodrama and rough-hewn vanity project for lead actress Andie MacDowell. (One can almost hear her shouting to her agent: “Hey, Meg Ryan landed a search-and-rescue picture,…
Given the latest outbreaks of Middle East violence–not to mention the continuing traumas of September 11–it is timely, if unsettling, that a new Israeli film about religious fervor and extremist political commitment in that embattled nation is being released in the United States. Written and directed by 33-year-old Joseph Cedar,…
While the governments of the two Koreas plan symbolic gestures that could lead to a long-dreamed-of peaceful reunification, Ryu (Han Suk-Gyu) and Lee (Song Kang-Ho)–two special agents in South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, which handles threats from the North–must track down a female North Korean super-assassin named Hee, whose recent…
Richard O’Brien’s 1975 drag show/sci-fi-gothic parody carries on at weekly midnight screenings, attended by its devoted audience-participation following. Even these cultists have often underrated it as a film–it’s a pretty good rock musical, with a witty ensemble cast led by Tim Curry in a hilariously swaggering, drolly macho performance as…
Science fiction can wow us with gadgetry, but only the truly ambitious stuff lights up our imaginations with disturbing and unshakable aberrations, be they incredible shrinking men, 50-foot women or Sting’s winged panties from Dune. In this vast genre, it figures that the ultimate human construct–time–proves most unsettling of all,…
By day, they drive their rippling torsos beneath the blinding desert sun, pausing intermittently to gaze sexily into the distance. By night, they head for the open-air discos of Djibouti to get squiffy with the locals. When time allows, they wash their socks, shave and wander around in cylindrical white…
Call it the art-house, or thinking person’s, Ocean’s Eleven. If you’re in the mood for an all-star ensemble but prefer conversation and reminiscence over thievery, try Last Orders, a Fred Schepisi film that features the strongest lineup of English talent this side of Robert Altman’s mega-cast in the forthcoming Gosford…
As bounty hunter Buccum, Ice Cube zaps people unnecessarily with tasers, points his gun at a kid, tortures a man using metal screws and engages in ethnic slurs–all in the service of obtaining some diamonds that aren’t rightfully his to begin with. Flawed heroes are one thing, but this is…
In the mid-1980s, San Francisco-based Paul Pena–a black blues singer/guitarist best known for writing the Steve Miller Band hit “Jet Airliner”–was listening to shortwave radio when he came upon a broadcast of “throatsinging,” a vocal style from the tiny region of Tuva, then part of the Soviet Union. The technique…
Shot 20 years ago and languishing unfinished on the shelf until 1998, this tale of an artist working at the edges of the New York music scene would have had a hard time finding an audience back then. Now, it just barely qualifies for one. The late Jean Michel Basquiat–playing,…
Cell phones and silk saris, dot-coms and arranged marriages–the latest film from Indian-born director Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala) captures the heady mix of old and new, rich and poor, traditional and modern that defines contemporary India. A sort of Father of the Bride set in New Delhi, it…
