James Gray, the 25-year-old writer/director of Little Odessa, seems to be aiming higher than most of his fellow film-school graduates. Gray’s dark and bloody family melodrama, which is set in the Rus-sian-American neighborhood of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, aspires to both Greek tragedy and Shakespearean weightiness, and while his efforts sometimes…
Clearly, the Art Cinematic has made great strides since the days when extraterrestrial invaders were all huge, featureless carcasses encased in blocks of ice, or spiders blown up to beach-umbrella size by atomic radiation. In the name of progress, the killer alien in Species is a gorgeous blonde (former model…
The absorbing drama Red Firecracker, Green Firecracker is set on a family estate and in a bustling northern Chinese river town at the end of the Ching Dynasty. These are the years leading up to the 1911 revolution, and director He Ping squeezes every bit of dialectic he can find…
Wayne Wang’s astonishing little film Smoke sneaks up on the viewer in wonderful ways. Superficially, it’s a “slice of life”–half a dozen related slices, actually–about the people who frequent a Brooklyn cigar store in 1990. But just underneath a deceptively simple surface, we come upon serious matters: the need to…
Devotees–and detractors–of the underground comics pioneer R. Crumb may be startled to learn that this trafficker in headless female sex objects, anxiety-ridden male outcasts and pornographic kitty cats was probably the happiest member of his family. That’s just one of the things we learn in the course of Terry Zwigoff’s…
What can you say? Apparently, that’s a hundred million dollars’ worth of darting laser ray, jet-powered car and black rubber suit up there, and if the whole shebang goes in one eye and out the other before you even get back to the parking lot, that’s too bad. They probably…
Steven Soderbergh’s directing career has hit a couple of snags since he enlivened the independent filmmaking scene five years ago with a cool-tempered study of yuppie obsession called sex, lies & videotape. Since then, Soderbergh’s gloomy Kafka has probably played best in Prague, and his beautifully wrought adaptation of A.E…
For now, citizens of the New Russia have more important things to do than revitalize their creaky old movie industry. Like keeping the St. Petersburg mafia at bay. Getting the telephones to work. Importing millions of hair dryers, brassieres and car alarms that play the lambada, usually from the United…
If the star of your summer fantasy/adventure movie happens to be a gorilla–or rather, a gorilla suit with a tiny actress stuffed inside–you naturally get a little stingy with the rest of the casting. That’s what the makers of Congo have done. The bogus primate is called Amy, and she…
Hal Hartley’s Amateur flirts with pretension, but Hartley always pulls its head out of the clouds with dark humor. Consider: A French ex-nun named Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), who believes the Virgin Mary has appeared to her, is now living in New York, writing pornographic sketches for a skin magazine. A…
Trying to squeeze the goo out of Robert James Waller’s romantic bestseller, The Bridges of Madison County, must have been like cleaning up the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Wherever you look, there’s another mess. Clint Eastwood, a man of few words, and screenwriter Richard LaGravenese, a man of patience, have…
What does it say about Hollywood that it has taken a British writer, Paula Milne, and a British director, Antonia Bird, to come up with the most provocative movie in years about American first love and American teenage anxiety? Mad Love is a little rough around the edges, but there’s…
If we are to believe Mel Gibson’s version of thirteenth-century history–and there’s not much evidence that we should–the ragtag army led by Scottish patriot William Wallace gloried in goring onrushing Englishmen with deer antlers, in bludgeoning, spearing, crushing and dismembering them. But first they mooned them. Braveheart, Gibson’s bloody (and…
The guards probably won’t be piping Die Hard With a Vengeance into Timothy McVeigh’s jail cell, but it might look awfully familiar to him if they did. As you might expect, the third installment of the Bruce Willis action series has but one dramatic goal–to blow things up–and even though…
Once they become “celebrities,” some Hollywood types like to hang around race-car drivers. Others prefer tennis players. Or boxers. Billy Crystal claims to have played a little hoop back in high school on Long Island, so the jocks he sniffs from one end of Tinseltown to the other are NBA…
Try to pick the moment when jazz reached its apogee in America, and the summer of 1958 is not a bad choice. In New York’s smokey Five Spot Cafe, pianist Thelonious Monk and his quartet were in the middle of an extended, overreaching engagement that would revolutionize the music forever…
The crux of Crimson Tide is a mutiny aboard a U.S. nuclear submarine at the height of an international crisis–the stuff that huge underwater explosions and tiny ruminations on the future of the planet are made of. This is also standard naval-war movie material. If you let your attention wander…
The Indian-born, Harvard-educated director Mira Nair knows a thing or two about culture shock, bigotry and the immigrant’s burdens of adjustment–three of melodrama’s classic subjects. But she is never content with merely yanking at our heartstrings. Unlike more straight-faced, straitlaced filmmakers, this independent thinker also has a healthy grasp of…
The roughhouse political slapstick in Yuri Mamin’s Window to Paris makes for perfect counterpoint to the sweetness of its plea for cross-cultural exchange. The Russian peasant in Mamin is willing to wreck a government phone booth or overturn a snob’s piano to get a laugh, but beyond the mayhem, the…
Ouch! Four centuries before Lorena Bobbitt fetched her paring knife from the kitchen drawer, the Italians began carving up assorted choirboys in the name of Art. Whether we like it or not, Gerard Corbiau’s Farinelli now tells the bittersweet tale of one Carlo Broschi, supposedly the most renowned of Italy’s…
If you choose to imagine that a woman can get pregnant by dreaming about it, or that the god of good fortune is really Quentin Tarantino and he lives on the bottom of the swimming pool at a fleabag motel in Las Vegas, then Destiny Turns on the Radio may…
We probably have William S. Burroughs to thank for the unlikely inflation of heroin use into an American literary credential. Drug vogues come and go, but ever since Burroughs sanctified smack in Naked Lunch, the wannabes of tragic hipdom have been quick to embrace anyone who owns a ballpoint pen…
