After nearly a decade’s absence from the big screen, Suture auteurs Scott McGehee and David Siegel finally deliver a second feature with The Deep End, an exciting, sharply realized, melodramatic film noir based on Elizabeth Sanxay Holding’s novel The Blank Wall, which was also the source for the 1949 Max…
If Sergeant York and Captain Willard ever run into each other on the battlefield — or the backlot — they’ll have plenty to talk about. Army food. The firepower of the Springfield ’03 versus the M-16 carbine. Mud and grime. The night sweats. Overwrought assistant directors. They might even discuss…
The social lessons of Captain Corelli¹s Mandolin, all of them suitable for framing in just about any dorm room, are these: War is bad. Love is good. The Italians love to sing, even when they’re supposed to be at war. The Greeks are freedom fighters. And whatever you do, don’t…
Well, my goodness, look at you! You are so alternative, so fringe, so punk! So artsy and alienated! So utterly aimless and oozing with angst! Tell us, girl, what ought we to call you? Edwina Scissorhands? That’s one easily justified reaction a viewer may take away from Thora Birch’s power-moping…
Tran Anh Hung’s beautiful meditation on family ties and family traumas, The Vertical Ray of the Sun, marks a captivating new chapter in the career of the writer-director who was the first to give Americans a glimpse of Vietnamese filmmaking. In 1994, Tran’s The Scent of Green Papaya made its…
During this cinematic Summer of Dumb, it would be all too easy to celebrate half-assed cleverness as a virtue, especially when proffered by Bobby and Peter Farrelly, who elevated the gross-out to an art form in Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary. Osmosis Jones, one of two films the Booger…
The most telling scene in Rush Hour 2 comes during the closing-credits montage of outtakes that has become the most enjoyable part of Jackie Chan’s Hollywood outings. Chris Tucker — the poor man’s Eddie Murphy, who now pockets more than the real thing per picture — and Chan have just…
Times certainly have changed. Twenty years ago, a musical about an East German transsexual rock singer would have premiered in one of New York’s Off-Off Broadway theaters or cabarets, run for a couple of weeks and remained the pleasant memory of a select few. But when John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig…
There are scenes in Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes redo that are so hysterical they drown out minutes’ worth of dialogue that follow, which is hardly a knock. Indeed, the film is often so comical, so ridiculous in that self-aware, wink-wink sort of way, that it plays like a…
When last we spotted indie icons Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau on screen together, they were knocking back fruit-flavored martinis and chasing L.A. skirt in the inventive Gen-X hit Swingers. The goofy charm of that phenomenon now gives way, sad to report, to a labored fringes-of-the-mob comedy called Made, in…
Actor “Beat” Takeshi Kitano has built an international reputation over the past decade, primarily through a series of ultra-hard-boiled crime films in which he plays either a cop or a felon. With the exception of Gonin (1995, U.S. release, 1998), which was directed by Takeshi Ishii, all of these films…
There are scenes in Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes redo that are so hysterical they drown out minutes’ worth of dialogue that follow, which is hardly a knock. Indeed, the film is often so comical, so ridiculous in that self-aware, wink-wink sort of way, that it plays like a…
Festering somewhere between an After School Special and kiddie porn lies this frank but heinously melodramatic open wound from veteran Canadian director Léa Pool (Emporte-moi). Adapted by screenwriter Judith Thompson from the novel The Wives of Bath, by Susan Swan, Lost and Delirious is about girl joy and girl sorrow,…
Who would have imagined that at this late date — more than half a century after the end of World War II, after The Diary of Anne Frank, Schindler’s List, Au Revoir, Les Enfants, Pierre Sauvage’s documentary Weapons of the Spirit and Jan Kadar’s amazing The Shop on Main Street…
A third Jurassic Park movie was, of course, inevitable, given that the second shattered box-office records (it also shattered the conventional notion that any movie starring Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore and a bunch of dinosaurs had to be at least somewhat interesting). But when you have one of the hottest…
Back in her early teens, Reese Witherspoon proved herself a terrific actress in her 1991 big-screen debut, The Man in the Moon. Since then, she’s done first-rate work in critical hits like Pleasantville, cult faves like Freeway and Election and underrated gems like Best Laid Plans. So how is it…
There’s plenty of French star power in The Closet (Le Placard), a comedy written and directed by the prolific director Francis Veber. The movie stars Daniel Auteuil, Gérard Depardieu and Thierry Lhermitte, which is roughly equivalent to a U.S. movie featuring Robin Williams, Nick Nolte and Tom Hanks, directed by…well,…
German filmmaker Tom Tykwer has a gift for fusing psychological complexity and crackling plot without forsaking the excitements of either. The success of Run Lola Run didn’t exactly turn Tykwer into a household name, but it earned him his props as a young lion of the art houses. Moviegoers hungry…
In the movies, dead husbands and dearly departed boyfriends have an irksome habit of revisiting the women who once loved them — usually at inconvenient moments. Consider Demi Moore in Ghost. Poor thing had to put up with the dramatically challenged shade of Patrick Swayze, who droned on and on…
Kiss of the Dragon — the latest vehicle for martial arts star Jet Li, a mainland Chinese talent who became a superstar in Hong Kong and has since succumbed to the blandishments of Hollywood — has a little of the best (plus a lot of the worst) of Hong Kong…
Even more than the recent Depression-era comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the turn-of-the-century drama Songcatcher is an absolute treasure trove of old-timey, traditional folk music. Set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia in the year 1907, the film follows city-bred musicologist Dr. Lily Penleric (Janet McTeer) as she…
Time and Tide — the latest action picture from producer/director Tsui Hark, one of the world’s great entertainers — is a compendium of many of the best (and a few of the worst) traits of Hong Kong action cinema. It’s relentlessly visceral, making you feel as if you’ve been shot…
