Stylishness without substance can become wearying real fast. Twenty minutes into A Life Less Ordinary, the new movie from the producing-directing-writing team of Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, I was already into overload. It’s not that director Danny Boyle doesn’t have imagination. It’s just that sometimes imagination is all he has…
It’s hard to fault The House of Yes, the wry toast of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, for its limitations as a film. In fact, it’s hardly a film at all. Rather, it’s a barely staged, five-handed farce that trails its amiable cast around a looming Victorian mansion over the…
Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights opens with a sinuous, breathlessly extended tracking shot that swoops us into a San Fernando Valley disco and then does a curlicue around a succession of faces. In the discotheque’s low-lit luminescence, these people pop out like jack-o’-lanterns. They have the look of trashy…
Steven Soderbergh’s cinematic version of Spalding Gray’s Gray’s Anatomy opens with a hokey educational trailer from the 1950s about the crucial nature of good eyesight. It then segues into nine minutes of talking heads jabbering about their sundry unique vision problems: One woman sleeps with her eyes open; another mistakes…
Seven Years in Tibet feels more like Seven Days in the Movie Theater. It refuses to come alive–not even when Brad Pitt, hirsute as a yak, wanders the frozen Himalayas with an Austrian accent that probably gave his dialogue coach hives. It’s an epic about how an arrogant, real-life Austrian…
The ’70s were so awash in ’50s nostalgia that it’s surprising Dan Wakefield’s 1970 bestseller Going All the Way is only now turning up in big-screen form. Of course, not all ’50s coming-of-age stories are the same: Unlike The Last Picture Show and American Graffiti–which pretty much dominated the genre…
The Locusts. If Elvis Presley acted in Tennessee Williams plays instead of dragster movies and bad beach flicks, he’d have the same kind of charisma as Vince Vaughn in The Locusts. With V-neck undershirts, an early-’60s pompadour, and loads of aw-shucks charm, the Swingers star bashfully saunters his way through…
Janeane Garofalo plows right through The Matchmaker with the same disgruntled sarcasm that typifies her testy, standard-bearer-for-the-underdogs-of-the-world persona. Try though it may to cast America’s Favorite Anti-Star in a Romantic Comedy For People Who Don’t Like Romantic Comedy, this script, a wholesale retread of Local Hero, plays on the generic…
By its very definition, a thriller should, you know, thrill. It should not only scare its audience with a quick jolt, that sudden noise in the dark that comes from nowhere and fills everywhere, but with its slow burn. It’s not enough for a thriller to tell its story, to…
Oliver Stone’s low-budget, hopped-up film noir, U-Turn, is being billed as a change of pace for the Conspiracy Dude, but actually it looks quite at home in the maestro’s hothouse. After all, aren’t conspiracies and the workings of fate what noirs are all about? Stone’s JFK pulped history with the…
Kevin Corrigan doesn’t act as much as he seems to stumble from scene to scene, like a guy who doesn’t follow a script as much as his own internal stage directions. He’s got skin so pale it’s almost translucent, and he wears the face of a guy who’s always this…
The Peacemaker is the first feature from DreamWorks Pictures, the studio headed by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen. It stars George Clooney and Nicole Kidman, and it’s about terrorists who steal Russian nukes. As an intelligence officer with the U.S. Army’s Special Forces, Clooney gets to model his…
The 1950s-era Los Angeles of L.A. Confidential is Noir Central. Its denizens are tattooed in shadow; the play of light and dark–in the streets, the police stations, the morgues–is fetishistic. The postwar L.A. touted in the travelogues and billboards is a boomtown, but what we actually see is unsettling: a…
Every film adaptation of a preexisting work has its own unique set of problems; in the case of director Jocelyn Moorhouse’s A Thousand Acres, the problem is compounded. Not only was Jane Smiley’s 1991 novel a Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller with a large number of (presumably) devoted fans, but the book…
Howard and Emily’s marriage is the talk of Greenleaf, Indiana, a small town idyllic enough to repel Norman Rockwell. The town has waited three years for the couple to make it official–and slimmed-down Emily (Joan Cusack) has waited three long years for Howard (Kevin Kline) to consummate their relationship. She’s…
Bernardo Bertolucci once dubbed Los Angeles the Big Nipple. Writer-director Curtis Hanson has been suckling at it all his life. Just how much nourishment he’s drawn becomes clear in his terrific new L.A. film, L.A. Confidential. Now 52, Hanson has been a talent for critics to dead-reckon with for 20…
Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s final film, Guantanamera, shares a tone of wistful romanticism with the late Cuban director’s Letters From the Park (a sweetly lyrical film based on the Gabriel Garcia Marquez story about a man who ghostwrites love letters) and Strawberry and Chocolate. Like a Garcia Marquez novel, Guantanamera plays…
The Game is a puzzle picture, and beyond its premise there isn’t much you can divulge without giving the show away. I’m not one of those critics who like to write Stop reading now if you plan to see this movie, so I’m tempted to wrap things up right now…
Film critics rank just ahead of television meteorologists as the worst roadside psychics in the media: We make all kinds of predictions about a movie’s box office impact and Oscar-friendliness, and even anticipate whether said flick will be a beloved classic 25 years from now. Just like when weighing the…
Somewhere in the meat-packing district in downtown Manhattan, behind a nondescript door in an unremarkable building, about 100,000 reels of film sit in stacks on 12-foot-high metal shelves, and in less orderly piles on the concrete floor. The titles taped to the sides of each canister–The Honey Industry, Resistance Welding,…
Welcome to one of the slowest film weekends of the year, second only to the first week in January, when all the classy holiday releases are clogging up the available screens. This is usually when distributors put out their saddest mistakes, looking for a few quick bucks on the way…
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…
