Nearly a quarter of a century after the fall of Saigon, only a small film industry has managed to grow on Vietnam’s war-scarred soil. And what has emerged is rarely seen outside of local cinemas. If ever there was a country that needed to seize back control of its cinematic…
The Love Letter has the dubious distinction of being the other studio film to open this week. In a week when all the other majors have run for cover, Dreamworks has taken a gamble with a classic bit of counter-programming–in nearly every way, this sweet romance/romantic comedy is the opposite…
Relentlessly hip? You’d better be. Enjoy pretentious talk about the great god Art and the hidden meanings in old gangster movies? Couldn’t hurt. Like to sit up till dawn smoking cigarettes and exchanging ironic barbs about the tragedy of life? Bingo. Amos Poe, an East Village-based avant-gardian since the Talking…
If your poodle is decked out in the complete Captain Kirk uniform, you’ve taken Klingon language classes, or you once mailed DeForest Kelley a joint taped to a piece of cardboard just “to return the favor,” the 86-minute documentary called Trekkies is must viewing–love it or loathe it. In the…
The return of Jesus Christ would have trouble living up to the advance billing of Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace. (“I mean, it’s OK, but why isn’t he turning water into wine like he used to? And where’s Peter? He was, like, my favorite disciple.”) That’s not an…
This, of course, is an exercise in futility. The Force is strong with this film; you’ve seen the Boba Fetted geeks lined up outside theaters, their freaky, frightening, flashlight-turned-lightsaber-wielding numbers growing every day. Good Lord, Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace could be two hours of static–and it nearly…
The Castle is a modest little comedy from Australia that falls into the subgenre of Capraesque idealism, in the little-guy-triumphs-over-evil-powers-that-be division. The story revolves around the unpretentious Kerrigan clan: Darryl (Michael Caton), the father, has his own little towing business. Sal (Anne Tenney), the mother, is the family cook, and…
A Midsummer Night’s Dream came early in Shakespeare’s career. He had written it by at least 1598, in roughly the same period as another lyric-romantic masterpiece, Romeo and Juliet. Despite Samuel Pepys’ famous dismissal of Dream as “the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life,” it…
Even English actresses of a certain age have a difficult time finding good roles, so it’s understandable that Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, and Joan Plowright might jump at the chance to star in Tea With Mussolini, Franco Zeffirelli’s new film about a group of English expatriates living in Florence during…
In 1932, when director Karl Freund wanted to scare the socks off the brave movie patrons who had come to see the original Universal Pictures production of The Mummy, he didn’t have the miracle of state-of-the-art computer imagery to create his bogeyman. All he had was gauze–a lot of gauze…
The latest release from Paramount Pictures’ bouncing baby, MTV Films, is set in a high school and has been inoculated with the usual doses of teenage angst, teenage wit, and teenage lust. Here’s the surprise: It declines to get down on hands and knees to woo Generation Y to the…
A hand-wringing reassessment of the libertine 1960s has hit full stride–stirred as much, you can’t help thinking, by the transfiguration of former acidheads and ex-leftist firebrands into establishment power-mongers as by the half-baked grumblings of their children. The antiwar and civil rights movements were shot through with self-service and intolerance,…
When we first see Isa, the 21-year-old heroine of Erick Zonca’s The Dreamlife of Angels, she’s trudging under the weight of a huge backpack through the chill dawn of an almost featureless European city. With her close-cropped dark hair and street urchin’s sniffle, she seems to be carrying the burden…
For the second week in a row, Dallas is being treated to a dazzling new Spanish import. Last week it was Alejandro Almenabar’s Open Your Eyes; this week it’s Julio Medem’s Lovers of the Arctic Circle–arguably an even more intriguing work. The two stars of Medem’s film, Najwa Nimri and…
The “SLC” in SLC Punk! stands for Salt Lake City, but it might as well stand for Some Lucky Chump. The filmmaker, James Merendino, has stated that this tale of two punk buddies trying to spread anarchy through the Utah capital in 1985 reflects his own rebellious teenage years there…
The most surprising thing about the new teensploitation horror film Idle Hands is the lack of masturbation jokes. It is a movie about a 17-year-old boy who loses control of his right hand to an evil demon, yet there’s only one such obvious crack. As the gloriously lazy hero Anton…
We seem to be in the middle of one of those thematic blitzes that happen every now and then in the film world. Last year there was The Truman Show and Dark City; this year, so far, there have been EdTV and The Matrix. Coming up in the next month…
Sean Connery has always been a terse, minimalist actor, spitting out his lines in tight bursts of Scottish brogue. But in Entrapment, the kingly Scot goes beyond minimalism to the point where he’s practically doing semaphore with his eyebrows. As the legendary art thief Robert MacDougal, Connery isn’t just reserved,…
Comedian David Spade’s chosen shtick–every line a zinger, every crack calculated to draw blood–works well in the short bursts characteristic of stand-up, sketches, and TV sitcoms. But the man can wear you out over the course of a two-hour movie. Like the too clever motormouth at a cocktail party, he…
In Pushing Tin, the edgy new comedy from British director Mike Newell, the dominant image is a black screen pulsing with obscure fluorescent markings, like the characters on some early prototype of Pac-Man. In this case, though, nobody’s playing any games. The markings represent very real jet airliners filled with…
Too often baseball players are reduced to statistics, hollow numbers that resonate with the fetishist who drifts off to sleep counting runs batted in and home runs and career batting averages. Baseball demands such precision: It’s a team sport, yes, but ultimately it’s man against man, record against record, history…
Plenty of celebs lend their fame to charitable causes. Richard Gere has his Dalai Lama. Sharon Stone supports pediatric AIDS patients. Kim Basinger props up animal rights–and Alec Baldwin’s career. Then you have Quentin Tarantino, a man whose cause celebre is orphans–albeit of a different sort than might first spring…
