O! Sweet vulture of love! Picking through the bones and sinew of doe-eyed fools the world around! How exquisite is thy rending, how blissful the release! Spirits in crimson rivulets swirled, souls as carrion shredded! Two vibrant hearts made still as one, to sate thy gnashing beak! Blessed bloody bird,…
Even the press kit is up front about it: Whatever It Takes is less a film than a product of marketing research and demographic considerations. It might as well have been written on a bar graph, so fetishistic is it about making sure it appeals to teens and their parents…
Among the qualities that make Fred A. Leuchter Jr. a buffoon who’s also an accomplice to evil, his desperate hunger for attention is the most obvious. He’s like the hick-town wallflower who’s always getting lured into the visiting hustler’s backseat for a quickie. When the state of Tennessee asked Leuchter…
It’s okay. You can say it. Just five little words. Don’t be shy. “I…am…a…wrestling fan.” You certainly wouldn’t be alone if you said it. Recent surveys show that as many as one in four Americans watch professional wrestling, and the World Wrestling Federation routinely has the number-one rated program on…
The film is called Erin Brockovich, but it might as well be titled Julia Roberts. Never before in the actress’s erratic career has a film been so custom-made for her; it’s as though a screenwriter has been replaced by a seamstress who knows Roberts’s every curve. No matter that she…
The creationists are going to have a field day with this one. Since the trailers for Mission to Mars reveal everything but the end credits, it would be near impossible to set foot into the theater without knowing the story, which is that three astronauts discover the true origin of…
The first thought you have while watching The Next Best Thing is “Was Madonna always this bad an actress?” It’s a question that soon fades from consciousness to be replaced by “Was Rupert Everett always this bad an actor?” and “Was John Schlesinger always this bad a director?” Since the…
In the closing years of the twentieth century, lowbrow white America finally learned to enjoy an ironic laugh at itself, led by Hollywood’s cheerful mockery of the culturally challenged working class. Outside the system, John Waters had this stuff pegged from the get-go, but the American grotesqueries of the original,…
Three decades after Rosemary’s Baby, two decades after The Tenant, and after a series of five non-horror films, Roman Polanski returns to the supernatural thriller with The Ninth Gate. What could be more promising? Regardless of what one thinks about Polanski’s personal life or legal status, the man is clearly…
Garry Shandling does not have a face for the big screen. He has a mug that seems to spread to the edges of the theater; it’s like an approaching storm front, a sky full of billowing clouds roaring in from the north. And it’s a face built for two emotions:…
If you think the prevailing attitude toward sex in the United States is somewhat backward, consider that of late 1960s Ireland, as depicted in Agnes Browne, the new movie directed by Anjelica Huston. When asked by her best friend Marion (Marion O’Dwyer) if she misses “it,” the recently widowed Agnes…
Director John Frankenheimer has been putting bad guys on the street since Luca Brazzi slept with a teddy bear, and he shows no sign of letting up at age seventy. In Reindeer Games, a relentless, and relentlessly witty, crime thriller set in the frozen wastes of northern Michigan, a sleazy…
In the early ’90s, British actor Tim Roth made his bones with American audiences as one of Quentin Tarantino’s anointed hipsters: After getting gruesomely shot to pieces in Reservoir Dogs and sticking up a pancake house with batty Amanda Plummer in Pulp Fiction, Roth’s credentials as a bad cat were…
Step right up, youth of the world, and receive the boomer inoculation that is Wonder Boys, the first feature from director Curtis Hanson since his much-lauded adaptation of James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential. Then marvel at Michael Douglas showing off his wide spectrum of inert doldrums and tedious self-pity. Thrill to…
Twenty-seven-year-old Ben Younger delivers the message of his first feature, Boiler Room, with all the subtlety of a car bomb. To wit: Greed is alive and well in the new century, fueled by the material dreams of a generation bent on instant gratification and the distorted expectations of neophyte investors…
Even at just 92 minutes, Hanging Up feels endless. Intended as a humorous, heartwarming take on dysfunctional family relationships, this film doesn’t work as comedy or drama or anything in between. Given its wealth of above-the-line talent — director and costar Diane Keaton, writers Delia and Nora Ephron and actresses…
Moviegoers, rejoice! The first fun movie of the year has arrived. Oh, Leo’s little seaside adventure was pretty to look at, but its attempts at depth were a real bummer. And let’s not even talk about Scream 3: Even the first one was highly overrated, and it’s been downhill from…
Beware the shrieking teenagers who saw Titanic ten or twelve times and have been conducting their own shipboard romance fantasies with Leonardo DiCaprio ever since. They will be massed and marching in Bombay-at-rush-hour numbers this week, maybe in Chinese-army numbers, and anyone over the age of seventeen who doesn’t feel…
The heroine of Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke is a bold and impressionable Australian girl named Ruth Barron (Kate Winslet), who flees her middle-class suburb with friends for a spiritual adventure in exotic India. Inevitably, she is thunderstruck by a saucer-eyed guru named Baba, who quickly reveals the source of absolute…
Film director Agnieszka Holland is the daughter of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, but she was raised in communist Poland in an atmosphere of state-imposed atheism. If those bona fides don’t qualify her to make a two-hour movie about the timeless tug of war between faith and reason,…
The subject matter is surely the stuff of which can’t-miss movies are made: Jacqueline Susann, author of the best-selling Valley of the Dolls and other jerk-off (pardon — “maddeningly sexy,” to quote Helen Gurley Brown) classic lit. There was nothing at all pedestrian about this woman regaled in her day…
The evening of March 14, 1885, was an auspicious one in the annals of musical theater. Less than four years had passed since the opening of London’s Savoy Theatre, which was built specifically for the productions of librettist William Schwenk Gilbert and composer Arthur Seymour Sullivan. The partners’ first six…
