The world’s demand for minimally talented thirty-year-old high-school dropouts who believe they’re great poets or great musicians or great movie directors isn’t going to catch up with the supply anytime soon. That won’t keep the strivers from striving, of course; nor will it snuff out their dreams. Case in point:…
The engaging and delightful low-budget feature Where’s Marlowe? began life as an unaired one-hour TV pilot. Somehow director Daniel Pyne and John Mankiewicz, his co-writer, have managed to expand their footage to roughly an hour and forty minutes without any of the seams showing. That would be an accomplishment in…
“Yesterday I wasn’t even sure God existed,” laments Bethany (Linda Fiorentino), the reluctant yet divinely touched heroine of Kevin Smith’s ambitious new film, Dogma. “Now I’m up to my ass in Christian mythology.” As it turns out, so are we. Strutting to a spiritually snappy groove not observed in mainstream…
The mutant children of Dr. Hannibal Lecter and his star pupil, agent Clarice Starling, remain doggedly at large in moviedom. There’s no serial killer (and no gruesome method of dispatch) that Hollywood now refuses to indulge, and no detective, no matter how hackneyed, who cannot be assigned to the case…
Luc Besson, director of La Femme Nikita, The Professional and The Fifth Element, is not the first name that would leap to mind to helm a biopic of Joan of Arc. Sure, he’s French, and sure, most of his films have women/girls as the protagonist or savior, but this is…
Much like the religion that has swirled around the Star Wars trilogy for twenty-some years, the fanaticism evidenced among American fans of Japanese anime remains a mystery to some of us. Writer-director Hayao Miyazaki’s megahit Princess Mononoke does very little to cast light on this obsession. And more’s the pity,…
Susan Sarandon is one of the screen’s most gifted actresses, a fiercely intelligent artist who invests her roles with depth, compassion, wit and humor. She has the ability to elevate even mediocre material, taking a potentially schmaltzy part, as in Stepmom, and making it totally believable. In her best films…
Actor Frank Whaley has appeared in more than thirty movies, including Swimming With Sharks and Pulp Fiction. But none of them cuts as close to the bone, I suspect, as Whaley’s debut in the writer-director ranks, Joe the King. Set in the Seventies and carefully described by its maker as…
The first rule of Being John Malkovich is, you do not look at the poster for Being John Malkovich! Plot-spoiling critics are harmless compared to what these filmmakers have opted to disclose in their own promotional art. (This package is second only to Kevin Smith’s Dogma for foolishly trotting out…
All hail. America is the seat of democracy and the world’s most mobile society — the place where a printer’s apprentice named Samuel Clemens can take a new name and remake himself as the country’s greatest satirist, where a geeky college dropout can become a software billionaire and shoeless boys…
Since there is no way to talk about The Best Man without eventually invoking the phrase “Spike Lee’s cousin,” let’s just get it out of the way: The Best Man is the directorial debut of Malcolm D. Lee, who is Spike Lee’s cousin. Having worked on various S. Lee films,…
“That reminds me of the movies Marty made about New York,” stammered Lou Reed somewhere in the mid-’80s. “All those frank and brutal movies that are so brillyunt.” It was a clumsy, rhyme-impaired album track (“Doing the Things That We Want To,” from New Sensations), but as has often been…
Wes Craven — purveyor of fine horror movies, including A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and the Scream trilogy — has apparently decided to go “legit.” And with Music of the Heart, he has done so with a vengeance. The film’s only death is the result of…
And now…a G-rated movie from David Lynch! No, Lynch hasn’t lost his mind. He hasn’t gone soft in the head. And he hasn’t sold out to the smiley-faced bean counters at Disney. While the notion of America’s King of Weird — the man who brought us Blue Velvet and Twin…
Steven Soderbergh may have had some rocky times after his 1989 breakthrough with sex, lies, & videotape, but these days he’s on a roll. Last year he produced Pleasantville and directed Out of Sight, two of the year’s most praised films. This year, he has The Limey, a complex, introspective…
David Fincher needs a hug, the poor bastard. Or possibly a diaper change. Ever since 1992, when he ruined the Alien series with the excrescence of his pointless, senseless third installment, he’s been making the same bratty, obnoxious movie over and over again: gloom, doom, indestructible protagonist, bureaucratic evil, quasi-religious…
According to The Story of Us, men and women have different responses to life, love and sex, and this can sometimes result in conflicts and tension in a marriage. And you thought American Beauty was daring. The “us” of the title are Ben (Bruce Willis) and Katie (Michelle Pfeiffer). He’s…
When I was growing up, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was the closest thing I had to a paternal mentor, the only authoritative voice I consistently trusted. Novel after freakish, scattershot, infinitely humane novel, the man provided tools to identify and cope with the daily horrors of America — this vast sea…
Jesus, Mary and Joseph! The repressed Irish-Catholic schoolgirl Molly Shannon plays on Saturday Night Live is certainly not everyone’s cup of glee. But there’s no denying the tug she exerts on anyone whose past is littered with the dry husks of Latin verbs and memories of nuns swinging big rulers…
Insomniacs, rejoice! During the first several decades of Sydney Pollack’s bloated, interminable Random Hearts, your eyelids will droop, your pulse and respiration will slow, and you’ll get that $8 nap you’ve been craving. Once the credits roll and the lights come up, you’ll awaken refreshed, undisturbed by vague dreams about…
Am I a traitor to my gender because I didn’t find this unabashed film about female sexuality erotic, brave, or even — dare I say it — interesting? The ironically titled Romance, directed by the audacious French filmmaker Catherine Breillat (36 Fillette), has become something of a cause célèbre wherever…
There’s a long tradition of stories about mysterious drifters who arrive in a small town and either create trouble or catalyze an explosion of long-simmering problems. Mark Twain used that hook, as did Dashiell Hammett (Red Harvest), Akira Kurosawa (Yojimbo) and Sergio Leone (A Fistful of Dollars). Now Hampton Fancher…
