It’s always amusing when the movie industry discovers its spiritual side. Profoundly secular institution that it is, Hollywood promotes–at its peril–the notion that teenagers spewing pea soup in Georgetown can be purged of their demons by Catholic priests, that angels from heaven intercede in the lives of ballplayers from losing…
Robert Wise’s 1963 version of The Haunting, from Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House, has long been considered one of the milestones of horror film. Now, after 36 years, DreamWorks has bankrolled a new version, under the direction of Jan de Bont (Speed, Twister)–an idea that should sound…
Runaway Bride, the long-anticipated reunion of Pretty Woman, starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, isn’t a sequel, but it feels like one. In everything, there is a distinct sense of predestination, of events occurring according to some irresistible force of the inevitable. This makes life especially easy for Garry Marshall,…
Feel like shooting lutefisk in a barrel? Pick on beleaguered Minnesota again as the epicenter of everything that’s square-headed and unhip in America. Eager to let the world know that two plus two equals four? Take aim one more time at the vain stupidity of beauty contests. Drop Dead Gorgeous,…
First the good news: Despite this summer’s rash of double entendres, the title of the high school comedy/Gen-X nostalgia flick The Wood is not a dirty joke. The name’s as earnest and literal as the film itself and simply marks the setting as Inglewood, California, the Los Angeles ‘burb best…
You can tell the first wave of summer blockbusters have shot their wad when the studios start tossing out their second- and third-string films. Back in the old days, these would have been called “programmers”–thoroughly competent entries that reiterated all the conventions of their reliable, easy-to-market genres. Such is Lake…
The Blair Witch Project, the bone-chilling indie by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, is easily the scariest horror picture of the Nineties–a movie that can take its place among the most potent and inexorable of modern shockers, like Night of the Living Dead or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Three…
Eyes Wide Shut, the final motion picture from the late, great Stanley Kubrick, is easily the most anticipated adult film of the year. It’s The Phantom Menace for grown-ups. Kubrick made only thirteen features in his 46-year career, but his death in March (just after the movie’s completion) and the…
Do you feel snug and secure in your cozy suburban life? Are you happy in your picture-perfect home, with your carefully manicured lawn, your kids and your soccer games and barbecues? Do you feel safe? Well, the creators of Arlington Road, the ponderous new thriller starring Jeff Bridges and Tim…
For Morgan J. Freeman (a young writer-director, not the heralded actor), comic timing couldn’t get any worse–or better. That’s because one of the unhappy teenagers in Freeman’s second feature, Desert Blue, is a melancholy girl dressed in moody black who likes to detonate homemade bombs. The Columbine High School massacre…
It’s about time we had a talk. Yeah, you know, that talk. The one about how uncomfortable and strange it is to be a young human male, how raging and unforgiving the hormones, how fragile the ego, how mysterious the female form. You see, well, how do I say this?…
London-born novelist-screenwriter Hanif Kureishi doesn’t have Margaret Thatcher to kick around anymore, as he did so incisively and effectively in My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, but his concerns have not wandered too far afield. Rather, he’s softened the hard edges. Universal issues still inspire him, but…
It won’t take long for anyone familiar with the television original to notice that something is not right with the listless Barry Sonnenfeld-directed film version of Wild Wild West. Yes, the film features Will Smith in the role of James West, with Kevin Kline as his cerebral sidekick, Artemus Gordon…
To hear Spike Lee tell it, Summer of Sam means to be a panoramic view of the summer of 1977 in New York City–when temperatures shot into the high ’90s and power blackouts set nerves on edge, when the party agenda included snorting coke at Studio 54 and copulating with…
Woe be to the scribbler who presumes to rewrite a master–unless he is so deft that his invasion of privacy produces something new and exciting. Enter British writer/director Oliver Parker, who has the nerve to meddle with Oscar Wilde’s sublime farce An Ideal Husband–and the skill to pull it off…
Simon West, the director of The General’s Daughter, the new thriller starring John Travolta and Madeleine Stowe, likes the kind of close-ups that bore into an actor’s face, exposing every clogged pore and mascara smudge. In the film, his camera also tracks in to capture the thick layer of sweat…
Disney departed from its usual practice of basing big, animated features on classic literature or myth when it made what has proved to be one of the studio’s most popular films ever, The Lion King. Yet just barely beneath its surface, that film had a streak of xenophobia carried almost…
There is, near the end of the spy-spoof sequel Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, a dick joke. It begins like many run-of-the-mill dick jokes, of which the rest of the film is almost entirely composed, but it blossoms into one stellar, protracted, deftly executed, masterful dick joke. It…
Pretentiousness masquerading as profundity; self-indulgence masquerading as art. The Loss of Sexual Innocence, the dreadful new film from writer/director Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas, One Night Stand), joins the ranks of the worst films ever made. On the surface, this statement may seem harsh and heartless–but it will strike anyone…
In John Sayles’s Limbo, which is set amid the rough-and-tumble of southeast Alaska, an ex-salmon fisherman with guilty memories (David Strathairn), an itinerant lounge singer with a lousy voice (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and the singer’s melancholy teenage daughter (newcomer Vanessa Martinez) become stranded, Robinson Crusoe-style, on a remote island. This…
Bernardo Bertolucci’s Besieged is a movie of enthralling visual poetry. Set almost entirely within a ravishing Roman villa, the film is a love story played out in furtive glances and stolen looks by characters on opposite sides of the ethnic divide. Culturally, Mr. Kinsky (David Thewlis) and Shandurai (Thandie Newton)…
The peerless Ethiopian distance runner Haile Gebrselassie is a tiny man–5’3″ and barely 115 pounds–but in his native country, his heroism looms large. Since 1994 he has set fifteen world records at five different distances, and at the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, he outdueled a trio of favored…
