That anyone should consider making a film of Reinaldo Arenas’ memoir Before Night Falls is curious. That the person to do it should be painter-turned-film director Julian Schnabel is truly unusual. And that the results should be as good as they are is most remarkable of all. But it would…
With the canon of Jane Austen all but exhausted, literary filmmakers continue their assault on Edith Wharton, another sharply observant writer of yore with something timeless to say about the plight of women. Terence Davies’ The House of Mirth, from Wharton’s beautifully detailed, ironically titled 1905 novel about a mannerly…
There is an eerie sense of familiarity wafting through The Invisible Circus, a pervasive whiff of déjà vu that intensifies with each passing minute. Regardless of whether or not one has read the novel of the same name by Jennifer Egan, it’s impossible to deny that there’s ample foreknowledge of…
Vampires have always seemed to be the coolest of the doomed, creatures both fascinating and evil. Amid all the seduction, sexual metaphor, and consumption, however, the source of the creature’s unholy hunger usually remains a mystery. Not so in Shadow of the Vampire by E. Elias Merhige (Begotten), a film…
The Wedding Planner begins with footage of a 7-year-old girl performing a wedding ceremony with her Barbies, a fitting opening since the movie that ensues could almost be the result of a screenwriter literally transcribing the play scenario enacted by a small child and her dolls. If you were (or…
There are few things more deadly in cinema than theater types taking stage material and simply transposing it to the big screen. But occasionally such adaptations are handled so deftly that they work. To stretch a point, one could mention My Dinner with Andre as a successful instance; and, I’m…
Quite obviously, Guy Ritchie was paying very close attention to the early-’90s Tarantino double-whammy of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Fascinated by the commercial success of films that blend ruthless violence with brash cutting and cartoonish characters, Ritchie emerged with a hit called Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. For…
For his first film as director, 1991’s The Indian Runner, Sean Penn chose as his source material Bruce Springsteen’s “Highway Patrolman,” off Nebraska. It was a perfect song, and it spawned a nearly perfect movie; Penn, writing his own screenplay about two brothers–one good, one bad, each inseparable from the…
“This is some damn fine coffee you got here in Twin Peaks. And some damn good cherry pie. But I have to tell you something, sheriff: Last night, I had a dream in which a dancing midget talked backward, thus leading me to believe that our killer is a man…
The 20th century is replete with examples of unconscionable crimes carried out in the name of some quasi-political, military, or religious cause–acts of such misguided judgment and mindless brutality. The My Lai massacre of 1968, in which American GIs gunned down more than 500 Vietnamese civilians, most of them women…
Writer-director Anne DeSalvo explores the notion that compromise is a good thing with rare grace and an abundance of rich characterization in her debut feature, The Amati Girls. Centered on a gaggle of four adult sisters, the movie presents a lively discourse upon love and life that would kill you…
Playwright-filmmaker David Mamet has the sharpest gift imaginable for shooting down the sins of American greed, the con games people run to get ahead, and the corruption that comes with success. Whether he’s haunting a secondhand junk shop, a poker room, or an outlying real-estate office, he always finds enough…
Thirteen Days is a suspenseful look at the American government in the grip of a crucial, minute-to-minute, real-life crisis that threatens to destroy the country. No, it is not–as the relatively brief time span referenced in the title makes clear–about the recent election struggles…or the 1998 impeachment…or the Watergate hearings,…
Skeptics will not take easily to the optimism in Thomas Carter’s teen love story Save the Last Dance, and outright cynics may find the whole thing absurd. The notion that a sheltered white girl from shopping-mall country and a knowing black boy from the inner city can dance their way…
In case you were wondering, here’s the most fulfilling way to enjoy the alleged thriller, Antitrust. Step One: Go shopping for groceries at your favorite supermarket. Step Two: When the smiling employee asks you whether you prefer paper or plastic, choose paper. Step Three: Seek out the young actor known…
If M. Night Shyamalan makes movies to be seen twice, then Joel and Ethan Coen make films to be pawed over a dozen times. O Brother, Where Art Thou?, an opulent and often slapstick updating of Homer’s The Odyssey by way of Preston Sturges, Robert Johnson, and Clark Gable, sneaks…
The War on Drugs has become this generation’s Vietnam, the unwinnable conflict that will, in the end, destroy the innocent and reward the guilty. That, in a coke vial, is the premise of Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, a film that gives flesh and face to bloodless government statistics and statements seldom…
Maybe it wasn’t such a bad year for filmgoing after all, if only because it’s far harder to assemble a top-10 list this year than it was last year. Or maybe the best of 1999 towered so far above the worst (and the middling, which includes the grossly overrated American…
The cream of this year’s crop are films carefully selected not only for their countless wonderful qualities, but because, as the list indicates, they form terrific thematic double features for contemplation and discussion. These days, there’s plenty of evidence to indicate that now, more than ever, movies may not be…
The year 1999 was too good to last, but did 2000 have to be such a big letdown? Did the best film year in at least a decade and a half have to be followed by one of the worst? This year, there are a good 20 films that would…
During the summer of 1994, while most of the world was greeting Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump with dewy eyes and outstretched arms, this critic was grinning his fool head off at a very different tale of a lost, lone hero. While a featherweight Tom Hanks bumbled his lobotomized way through…
For slightly more than a decade, Chinese martial arts films have–directly and indirectly–gained a growing audience in America. Now the genre may find its greatest breakthrough coming from an unlikely source–director Ang Lee, best known for such comedy-dramas of social manners as Sense and Sensibility, The Wedding Banquet, and The…
