Can we please, for the love of God, declare a moratorium on the use of Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music” on the soundtrack of any and all movies? (While we’re at it, “We Want the Funk” can go, too.) At the very least, if the plot of the movie…
I don’t know about you, but I love Billy Ray Valentine. Whenever Trading Places pops up on the boob tube, I tune in to watch the ebullient Eddie Murphy in one of his most uproarious performances and what could be his most deftly directed comedy. A penniless street hustler refurbished…
Imagine a large, dead Saint Bernard with its bones removed. Then visualize a hefty bellows inserted into it from behind with a gorilla hopping up and down on it, causing the huge dog’s bag-like corpse to twitch spasmodically, wheeze and croak. Voilà — this is today’s Nick Nolte. What’s amazing…
In 1997’s The Apostle, Robert Duvall took on a subject near and dear to his heart: Southern Pentecostal preachers. No one would make the film for him, so he went ahead and directed it himself, garnering much acclaim from media both secular and religious for his warts-and-all portrayal of a…
The powerful brand of political muckraking pioneered in the 1960s by the Greek filmmaker Constantin Costa-Gavras has largely fallen from favor, replaced by the sloppy, self-serving outbursts of oafs like Michael Moore. An opponent of tyranny in any form and under any flag, Costa-Gavras indicted right-wing Greek militarism in his…
Where in hell does all this stuff come from? That’s a question constantly posed by readers, movie-goers and half-soused nightclub audiences. What are the sources of an artist’s art? What weird compulsion enables a performer to stand naked before the prying eye of a camera, an empty canvas or a…
When you see a glamorous movie star like Kate Beckinsale tying her hair back and wearing glasses, it’s surefire shorthand that she’s an uptight soul. But just in case you aren’t familiar with the usual signals, writer-director Lisa Cholodenko gives a couple of even more obvious ones in her second…
You can be sure of one thing: None of the Hollywood glitterati who, on the advice of their agents, obscured their cleavages and kept their politics under their hats at this year’s supposedly war-dampened Academy Awards orgy have seen two minutes’ worth of the short films that were nominated for…
Lawrence Kasdan directs and co-writes (with William Goldman) Dreamcatcher, the latest addition to the Stephen King-adaptation genre, currently at 74 — including film and TV — and counting. According to the Internet Movie Database, this puts King handily ahead of Michael Crichton (23) and Bram Stoker (38); he’s closing in…
Director David Cronenberg has led his loyal fans down some pretty spooky corridors, including the telepathic netherworld of Scanners, the violent sibling rivalry of twin gynecologists in love with the same woman (Dead Ringers) and the drug-haunted imagination of William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch). So it comes as no surprise…
The French are about as popular at the Pentagon this week as cat food on a croissant, but even the hawks would admit that the Gauls have made some wonderful movies. Among the most stylish and original is 1964’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Jacques Demy’s bittersweet charmer about a clerk…
What more can go wrong in suburbia? Director Rose Troche (Go Fish) wants us to know, and to that end, she has recruited another army of wounded parents, troubled children and broken dreamers, then marched them all into a whirlpool of dysfunction on the quiet, tree-lined streets just minutes from…
Being of the minority who did not worship Schindler’s List (vital message, tedious movie), it’s easy to feel skeptical of the preachy delivery of Ararat, which concerns not the Jewish Holocaust but the Armenian one, its genocidal forebear of 1915-1918. Armenian-Canadian writer-director Atom Egoyan (The Adjuster, The Sweet Hereafter) has…
If you have a taste for really vile, totally degenerate bad guys, the late John Frankenheimer’s neglected crime thriller 52 Pick-up may be the movie for you. Adapted in 1986 from one of Elmore Leonard’s more perverse potboilers, it’s a sleazy tale of sex and revenge in which a Los…
John Shaft went to Africa, so why shouldn’t Die Hard’s John McClane? In the new action romp Tears of the Sun, Bruce Willis undertakes a jungle-rescue operation on the Dark Continent, and it’s a McClane adventure in camouflage, minus all the sass and most of the spectacle. As Navy SEAL…
Emerging from Till Human Voices Wake Us, it was easy to overhear some male viewers striving adamantly to put the film’s metaphysical themes in their place — to explain them away, as it were. This is a shame. The source of the story’s mystique is fairly simple and may be…
Long before director Jonathan Demme sent the bean counters reeling with box-office hits like The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, he made one of the most energetic and engaging rock-concert films ever. Stop Making Sense, from 1984, stars David Byrne and the Talking Heads, and it’s a treat not…
Filmmaker Terry Gilliam is no stranger to fiasco. After all, this is the human dynamo who saw 1989’s inventive (if sometimes incoherent) The Adventures of Baron Munchausen through a series of artistic and financial crises that would have landed most people in an asylum. But Gilliam’s encounter with the tale-spinning…
Apart from “I Am Fascinating” and/or “My Parents Are Horrid,” the reigning theme of film students’ movies is “Lovers Are Bonkers.” Thus, it comes as no surprise when a director’s first feature contains many elements that’ll be instantly familiar to anyone who’s ever hung around a film school. So it…
The Fly does not loom large in the great scheme of things. It may not even rank high on the list of movies in which airborne objects — doomed dirigibles, hijacked 747s, Alfred Hitchcock’s assorted jays and starlings — play a major part. But director Kurt Neumann’s low-budget shocker has…
Right-wing pundits will be coming out of the woodwork to holler about this one. Bad enough, they’ll say, that The Life of David Gale attacks the death penalty; it also features a caricature Governor of Texas with big ears and a familiar, Scripture-quoting smirk. There’s a character who notes that…
Someone’s got to say it, so let’s start here: We’ve underestimated Will Ferrell. Honestly, it wasn’t that hard to do. His Saturday Night Live stint was never hugely impressive, as he’d often fall back on the same shtick of yelling his lines with detailed enunciation in a passive-aggressive tone that…
