As witch movies go–even lighthearted, supposedly comic witch movies –Practical Magic is conspicuously lacking in supernatural phenomena. There are no ritual murders, resurrected warlocks or conventions of hags bent on turning the world’s children into mice. Director Griffin Dunne (1997’s Addicted to Love) can’t scare up a single bedeviled infant…
In The Eel, which won the Palme D’Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, director Shohei Imamura once again demonstrates his empathy for the outsiders and aliens of Japanese society. In this case he muses on the tormented relationship between a paroled wife-murderer who’s struggling with his past after eight…
The hero of The Mighty–the title character, in fact–is an eighth-grader known by the nickname Freak. His might isn’t physical–he’s a small, frail boy who suffers from a degenerative birth defect. His spine curves painfully, and he’s able to walk only with crutches and leg braces. But he has a…
With all that is truly scandalous in the movies these days–namely the dimwit dramaturgy and the anything-for-a-buckism that passes for Hollywood entertainment–it is something of a shock to realize that Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita still has the power to offend. Proof is the book’s new movie adaptation, directed by Adrian Lyne,…
The 21st edition of the Denver International Film Festival gets under way at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the United Artists Colorado Center Theatre with an opening-night screening of The Theory of Flight, Paul Greenglass’s study of the friendship between a brooding artist (Kenneth Branagh) and a young woman with Lou…
Better call out the symbol police. And tell them to bring heavy weapons. Jesse Peretz’s First Love, Last Rites, a tale of young love and early disillusionment set in the overheated Louisiana bayou country, features an unseen rat gnawing away, all movie long, at the woodwork of a one-room house…
Go ahead. Drop a tab or two of windowpane before setting out to see Lance Mungia’s Six-String Samurai. A hit at Park City, Utah’s alternative Slamdance Film Festival this year, Mungia’s no-budget first feature is a trippy melange of many movies, everything from Mad Max to Star Wars to the…
The ants in Antz show a lot of personality. The film is the best example yet of how a fully animated computer-generated feature can delineate facial movement. Toy Story (1995), the first such feature to be released, was brasher and more child-friendly, but Antz is more of a–how shall I…
As a professional lamenter of how “they just don’t make ’em like they used to,” I am always thrilled on those rare occasions when someone even tries to make ’em that way. So I am doubly thrilled that with The Impostors, writer-director Stanley Tucci has tried and richly succeeded. Those…
Have adultery, murder and greed all moved to the sticks? Once firmly rooted in the big city, the seven deadly sins have taken on a distinct country-and-Western twang in recent years, thanks to noirish, tough-minded scamfests like John Dahl’s Red Rock West and The Last Seduction, James Foley’s After Dark,…
Insofar as filmmaker Tony Gatlif’s justly admired “gypsy trilogy” is an exploration of his roots and a search for his nature–he was born in Algeria to gypsy parents of Spanish origin but was later polished at Paris’s L’Ecole des Beaux Arts–it comprises one of the most passionate and telling self-examinations…
The hero of John Waters’s gently subversive new romp, Pecker, is a happy Baltimore teenager of the same name whose primary pleasure is shooting neighborhood snapshots with an old thrift-shop camera. Girls on the bus preen for him. He captures dancers in the local strip club through a back-alley window…
Jackie Chan’s American fans–and I’m one of them–have suffered through a nervous 1998 so far. The momentum the star earned with the 1996 release of Rumble in the Bronx has seemed to dissipate steadily: An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, the first American production to employ Chan since the…
Leelee Sobieski is a mouthful of a name (forty years ago, studio moguls would have made her change it to something short and unassuming)–but get used to it, because the young actress behind it is going to be getting a lot of attention. She almost single-handedly carries A Soldier’s Daughter…
As a director of action thrillers, John Frankenheimer has been a peerless stylist for nearly four decades–without leaning on a pile of glitzy special effects. What’s more, his most memorable movies, from The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to The Birdman of Alcatraz (also 1962) to 1986’s wickedly entertaining, unappreciated 52 Pick-Up…
For better or worse, the confessional memoir has become the most popular literary form of our time, prompting ballplayers, Irish bartenders, prosecuting attorneys and mothers of quadruplets everywhere to lay bare their deepest thoughts and secrets, all based on the presumption that their miserable lives are more interesting than anyone…
One True Thing, directed by Carl Franklin, is trying to be the Terms of Endearment of the Nineties. Scripted by Karen Croner from the 1995 Anna Quindlen novel of the same name, One True Thing pushes the same high-gloss homilies about making peace with your family, and it caps everything…
Who would have guessed that a movie called Firelight could give off so little warmth? William Nicholson, the screenwriter of Shadowlands (1993) who’s making his directorial debut here, isn’t attempting to be ironic. He wants to create a love story in which the ardor pours through the confines of upper-class…
You can’t keep a good ship down. No sooner have a billion or so Titanic videos hit the shelves than a little-known Spanish moviemaker complicates the issue with a French-language film called, in English, The Chambermaid on the Titanic. Cheap profiteering? An attempt to cash in? Absolutely not. In fact,…
The opening credits of Simon Birch assert that it was “suggested” by John Irving’s 1989 novel A Prayer for Owen Meany. Actually, it’s a thin but relatively faithful adaptation of the first few chapters of Irving’s comic ramble through the nature of religious faith, predestination and heroism. Screenwriter Mark Steven…
Matt Damon, the blond matinee idol, has apparently become Hollywood’s idea of a deep thinker. After playing a math whiz in last year’s Good Will Hunting, he’s now been reinvented as a poker genius in John Dahl’s Rounders. So anybody who had doubts about the second coming of Albert Einstein…
Men don’t get it. Moms don’t get it. Sometimes, even your roommate or best friend doesn’t get it. But if you bray and carp and vent long enough, someone will listen. Someone will begin to understand the precious particulars of a young woman’s sexuality. Whether they’re interested or not. That’s…
