The religious and philosophical underpinnings of Tim Blake Nelson’s Eye of God get pretty weighty and mighty dense in places–especially for an 84-minute movie set in the decaying little town of Kingfisher, Oklahoma. Unlike most of the 4,042 residents, Nelson is a graduate of Brown in classical studies and an…
Wes Craven’s Scream, which opened almost exactly a year ago, was the surprise hit of an overcrowded Christmas season. In part, the success was a triumph of counter-programming: In the midst of a glut of classy Oscar contenders, Scream was the only teen horror film. And it was helped by…
The bizarre documentary Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist asks us to believe that the late Mr. Flanagan, who regularly nailed his penis to a block of wood, hung himself upside down for untold hours and gladly submitted while his sex partner force-fed him scoops of Alpo,…
In Kiss or Kill, the migration of Hollywood’s old drama of lovers on the lam to the Australian countryside seems to be a mixed blessing. Nikki and Al, the fatalistic young couple in Bill Bennett’s rambunctious new effort, descend from famous runaways like Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney in You…
Disney Studios has had a near-monopoly on feature animation for almost sixty years now, and near-monopolies are almost as destructive as full-on monopolies. Twentieth Century Fox is to be applauded for going up against the giant mouse; one only wishes that its first effort were itself more to crow about…
You can’t exactly call Alien Resurrection a pleasurable experience, but, then again, you wouldn’t say that about its predecessors, either. Directed by the Frenchman Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who previously co-directed Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children with Marc Caro, this fourth installment in the Alien onslaught is once again designed…
In Flubber, Disney’s new and improved version of The Absent Minded Professor, that famously bouncy green goop is still powering cars through the clouds and transforming lab nerds into high-flying basketball stars. But now the stuff also has personality–in gobs. It splits into a hundred little green dancers and does…
Clint Eastwood has reached the stage of life when he can sit down at the piano and doodle jazzy riffs whenever he feels like it. Without fear of failure or banishment, he can direct fair-to-middling movies from crappy bestsellers like The Bridges of Madison County. He can exercise the broadest…
John Grisham’s The Rainmaker lulls you into the mindset you get while reading a bestseller at the beach. What a sad thing to say about a Francis Ford Coppola movie! Rather than heighten your awareness the way The Conversation or The Godfather did, The Rainmaker makes you feel lazy and…
A glance at the cast list for the new Sidney Lumet hospital drama Critical Care might lead you to expect an embarrassment of riches. Instead, the results are often just plain embarrassing. How could a film starring James Spader, Helen Mirren, Albert Brooks, Kyra Sedgwick, Anne Bancroft, Jeffrey Wright, Wallace…
In 1756, Voltaire wittily observed that “this agglomeration which…calls itself the Holy Roman Empire is neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” Likewise, of Nick and Jane it might well be said that this abomination which calls itself a charming romantic comedy is neither charming, nor romantic, nor a comedy…
When last we glimpsed the ruthless international assassin known as the Jackal, 24 years ago, he was a dead ringer for the suave British actor Edward Fox and he was hot on the trail of Charles de Gaulle, armed only with cunning and a sniper’s rifle concealed in a suitcase…
Even in the best of his movies, like that clever play on deja vu, Groundhog Day, Bill Murray never quite escapes the role of sketch artist–a comic built for short attention spans whose TV shtick is never quite big enough for the big screen, whose caricatures never quite grow into…
For those of us living here in the Colonies, British slapstick has always been an acquired taste, and the Mother Country’s ever-so-popular TV character “Mr. Bean” takes more acquiring than most. Meanwhile, the producers of Bean, which marks the goggle-eyed buffoon’s first appearance on the big screen, have collected more…
The rebellious heroines of Deepa Mehta’s Fire have gotten viewers in the filmmaker’s native India a lot more worked up than Thelma and Louise ever dreamed of doing here. While women are applauding, hundreds of thousands of Indian husbands apparently see the picture as a threat to their happy homes…
Put brutally, The Wings of the Dove is the story of a romantic frameup that backfires. Thankfully, nothing is put brutally in this smart, lyrical movie. Director Iain Softley and screenwriter Hossein Amini cut to the thick of Henry James’s masterpiece about amorous extortion and moral purification. Helena Bonham Carter…
Writer-director Mike Figgis has mastered a kind of style I usually mistrust: Jumpy and almost free-associative, it begs to be dubbed “arty.” At Figgis’s best (say, Leaving Las Vegas), this mercurial mode can be sensationally effective, allowing him to leap from one supreme expression of extreme emotion to the next…
In Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, based on the late Robert Heinlein’s 1959 sci-fi opus, the killer arachnids upstage the humans. Not that it’s much of a contest, since the humans are all raging dullards. We’ve seen these young men and women with their square jaws and pert noses emoting their…
The Joe Eszterhas who wrote the screenplay for Telling Lies in America is a kinder, gentler soul than the hard-nosed hipster who got a couple million bucks for turning Sharon Stone into the lethal temptress of Basic Instinct or conceived that masterpiece of the cinematic arts, Showgirls. This new Joe…
The quirky documentarian Errol Morris finds human drama in strange places. His most renowned film, 1988’s The Thin Blue Line, made such a compelling case for the innocence of a convicted Dallas cop-killer that the prisoner eventually walked off death row. Morris has also examined the genius physicist Stephen Hawking…
Mad City, a descendant of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, may irritate orthodox movie buffs. In the coruscating Wilder classic, Kirk Douglas’s supremely cynical newspaper reporter turns the rescue of a cave-in victim into “the big carnival” (the film’s alternate title). The protagonist of Mad City, a TV reporter…
The ongoing anxieties and agonies of the American family don’t make for a pretty picture. Divorce and disorder have replaced macaroni and cheese as the domestic commonplace, but most people can give little credence to either the self-righteous prescriptions of the fundamentalist right or the ecstatic bleatings of the new-agers…
