Imps, waifs, big-eyed orphans and lovable mischief-makers have been the movies’ stock-in-trade since the first one-reeler cranked, and apparently they still enthrall the popcorn-munching public as completely as they torment the grownups forced to share credits with them. The presence of a braying Shirley Temple or an intractable Macaulay Culkin…
If you loved Don Rickles as the acid-tongued voice of Mr. Potato Head in Toy Story, wait till you get a load of Tommy Lee Jones’s gung-ho warmonger, Major Chip Hazard, in Small Soldiers. In Joe Dante’s uncommonly clever fantasy, Jones’s “character” is a military action figure just twelve inches…
The 1967 musical Dr. Dolittle, which starred Rex Harrison, was a commercial disaster for its studio, Twentieth Century Fox. The new, non-musical Fox version of this material, starring Eddie Murphy, isn’t in the same overblown category as the Harrison film–its disasters are more mundane. With all the creative range of…
Dedee Truitt, the smirky sixteen-year-old temptress who narrates and dominates Don Roos’s The Opposite of Sex, is a conniving but somehow sympathetic little shrew who’s bailed out on her feelings early in life. A kind of Lolita-without-portfolio, she gets herself pregnant by a Bible-thumping redneck from Louisiana, then sets out…
Here’s welcome news from the Emerald Isle. The obsessions of Ireland’s fledgling movie industry–religion, tragic politics and misty folklore–are nowhere to be found in Paddy Breathnach’s I Went Down. There are no glorious views of the verdant Irish countryside, no half-soused balladeering about the good old days, no impassioned cries…
Too many post-Woody Allen movies have been made about “sex in the head.” The smart, engaging Out of Sight is an action comedy about love in the head. The real thing ignites between bank robber Jack Foley (George Clooney) and U.S. Marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) when she stumbles into…
It’s Christmas vacation, 1958. The movie my dad has chosen for a first-grade pal and me to see is the new Disney live-action adventure Tonka, starring Sal Mineo as a young Sioux named White Bull who traps and domesticates a clear-eyed, spirited wild horse named Tonka. Having seen The King…
It was once said of Honore de Balzac: “Next to God and Shakespeare, he is the greatest creator of human beings.” In his time, which was the first half of the nineteenth century, this driven Frenchman wrote more than sixty novels and countless shorter tales–passionate, sprawling, obsessively detailed. Each was…
Better check your popcorn for microchip implants. And make damn sure that the guy sitting behind you at the multiplex isn’t the Cigarette-Smoking Man. Just in time for the summer blockbuster season, 20th Century Fox has released its $60 million movie version of The X-Files, and if you’re not already…
There are cheap thrills aplenty in Nick Broomfield’s scandal-enhanced, self-serving wreck of a documentary, Kurt and Courtney. For one thing, its out-of-the-picture protagonist is Kurt Cobain, the latest dead junkie rock star to be canonized as “the voice of his generation” before the body was even cold. For another, its…
John Duigan’s Lawn Dogs is the kind of arch, postmodern fairy tale in which the little girl who’s gone wandering in the dark forest winds up pointing an automatic pistol at her insufferable father’s head, and the mysterious boy who’s become her secret friend makes his getaway from demons in…
In the midst of the ludicrous national episode just past, it became clear that Americans were far more interested in the fictional fate of Jerry Seinfeld and his pals than in their actual friends and loved ones. You can also bet that the sexual politics of Ellen Degeneres, trumpeted on…
Members of the Norwegian tourist board won’t be flipping cartwheels over the dingy, smothering, rain-sodden views of the Oslo slums director Pal Sletaune employs in his new feature Junk Mail. And the film’s scruffy, rat-faced protagonist, Roy (Robert Skj3/4rstad), a furtive postman who takes revenge on his nasty bosses by…
When last we spied Sandra Bullock, the plucky action heroine was clinging to a sea-washed railing aboard Hollywood’s other doomed ocean liner–not the one that hit the major ice cube, but the one that plowed through a Caribbean resort town while audiences hooted with unintended laughter. Speed 2: Cruise Control…
Vyacheslav Krishtofovich’s A Friend of the Deceased provides another eye-opening glimpse of the former Soviet Union in this era of P.T. Barnum capitalism and spiritual confusion. Whatever else may be dense in the film, that’s worth our undivided attention. The place is Kiev, where the joyless hero, a translator named…
The Horse Whisperer, the latest film from Robert Redford and the first of his directorial efforts in which he also stars, could almost serve as a compendium of Redford’s best and worst tendencies. It features his eye for gorgeous, pictorial vistas, his straightforward narrative approach and, most important, his understanding…
The “Size Matters” marketing campaign for Godzilla is far more ingenious than the movie. It’s also highly annoying–and somewhat misleading. After all, as the ads for a new film called Plump Fiction remind us, “Width matters, too.” Perhaps the best thing about this week’s ballyhooed arrival of Godzilla is that…
Most disaster movies would be a lot better with more disaster and less “human drama.” In Deep Impact, the impending obliteration of much of Earth by a pair of comets is merely the sideshow. The main event is all that goopy human-interest stuff–the daughter who reunites with her estranged father,…
It’s the tail end of the 1996 California primary election, and incumbent Democratic senator Jay Bulworth (Warren Beatty) is having a nervous breakdown. Sleepless for days, famished, he channel-surfs aimlessly in the darkness of his office, where in a rare moment of lucidity he has an inspiration: He arranges to…
Not since the death of Diana has there been a pop phenomenon as cataclysmic as the demise of Seinfeld. The surrounding hoopla has reached such proportions that it has turned the series’ saturnine co-creator–balding, bespectacled Larry David–into a cult celebrity. The press has presented David as a mysterious demigod who…
Chinese Box arrives with one of the weirdest hybrid pedigrees in living memory. The writing credits include–in addition to the film’s director Wayne Wang–Jean-Claude Carriere, who worked on most of the best films of Luis Bunuel’s late period (Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Phantom of Liberty, Belle de Jour); classy…
One of the few seemingly spontaneous bursts of energy at the recent Oscars ceremony was provided by motor-mouthing Dutch director Mike van Diem, who seemed genuinely surprised to have won the award for best foreign film for his debut feature, Character. If the commercial popularity and Oscar sweep for Titanic…
