The year 2000 was by no means the best of times for moviegoers, but only a curmudgeon would fail to find, say, ten points of light in a darkened room. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Once, we marveled at the flying gymnastics of Bruce Lee. Now it’s Ang Lee who moves…
Finding Forrester is the latest film from Gus Van Sant, one of the true American originals to emerge in the ’80s and ’90s. When Van Sant is at his best, he gives us stories and images we’ve never seen before. Finding Forrester, however, is not Gus Van Sant at his…
It’s where Walter Huston found paradise at the end of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, where the murdering lovers Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw rode into the sunset at the end of The Getaway, and where Thelma and Louise were headed when they ended up at the Grand Canyon…
If you consider Northern Ireland a part of Ireland proper, then An Everlasting Piece may easily be the best Irish film of the year (not that the competition was too stiff — anyone remember The Closer You Get?). If, on the other hand, you consider the six counties to be…
Playwright/filmmaker David Mamet has the sharpest gift imaginable for shooting down the sins of American greed, the con games people run to get ahead and the corruption that comes with success. Whether he’s haunting a secondhand junk shop, poker games or an outlying real-estate office, he always finds enough horror-tinged…
During the summer of 1994, while most of the world was greeting Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump with dewy eyes and outstretched arms, this critic was grinning his fool head off at a very different tale of a lost, lone hero. While a featherweight Tom Hanks bumbled his lobotomized way through…
In Lasse Hallström’s new film, Chocolat, you will find the ingredients required to spin an audience into throes of fuzzy warmheartedness — the hope, the compassion, the joie de vivre — all blended with the skill of a consummate confectioner. Much like a box of sweets with a convenient guide…
For a little over a decade, Chinese martial arts films have — directly and indirectly — gained a growing audience in America. Now the genre may gain its greatest momentum from an unlikely source — director Ang Lee, best known for such comedy/dramas of social manners as Sense and Sensibility,…
The subjects of Mark Singer’s extraordinary documentary Dark Days were once the stuff of urban myth — the homeless “mole people” said to inhabit dank railroad tunnels below the streets of Manhattan, eking out subsistence in the face of scurrying vermin, disease and drug addiction. As it turns out, they…
When assessing the merits of Quills, the lusty new feature by director Philip Kaufman (Henry and June), you’re tempted to seek corresponding characters from popular movies in order to illustrate just how average this story is. In Kaufman’s film — affectionately constructed from a screenplay by Doug Wright, who adapts…
What Women Want could be the first movie to win a Clio Award for Advertisement of the Year. No fewer than two dozen products receive prominent placement in the film, from Federal Express to Foster’s Lager to Cutty Sark to L’eggs pantyhose to US Airways. After a while, you begin…
With luck, Yi Yi (A One and a Two), the seventh release from writer/director Edward Yang, one of Taiwan’s most respected filmmakers, will inspire interest in Taiwan’s cinema, but time isn’t on its side. While this is a rich and rewarding film, its pace is more leisurely than most American…
About halfway through the mega-budget mountain-climbing adventure Vertical Limit, even the most rugged, thrill-hungry disaster-movie fans may find themselves going numb. Not from the howling weather on the icy faces of K2 in the Himalayas, where the action supposedly takes place. Not from oxygen deprivation. Not even from stretches of…
Day 1: It was just part of the job, just another movie on another afternoon. This one promised to be no more special than any other, save for the casting of Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe. Proof of Life was the movie during which they fell in love, or whatever…
Fascinating and engrossing on every level, the beautifully constructed Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport opens with the mournful sound of a train and images of toys and books sitting untouched in what was once a child’s bedroom. As the credit sequence ends, an elderly woman addresses…
The grandpere of all jewel-heist movies, Jules Dassin’s Rififi hasn’t lost a thing since its initial release in 1955. Seeing it anew in revival, anyone who knows and loves this cinematic gem will be reminded that its descendants — which include everything from the old Mission Impossible TV series to…
You got your Good. You got your Evil. And you got your thirty-year-old multimillionaire moviemaker to explain the difference to you. Look out popcorn vendors. Here comes Unbreakable, the first film written and directed by young M. Night Shyamalan since he lit up the box office last year with a…
Have you heard? Beauty’s only skin deep. Pay attention, now: When it comes to love, experience is the best teacher. And just in case you didn’t know, youth is wasted on the young. Such are the banalities that director Tonie Marshall dispenses in Venus Beauty Institute, a French romantic comedy…
The moods of Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me are so artfully mingled that it’s difficult to get a fix on this highly personal independent feature. Set in a quiet little town in upstate New York’s lovely Catskill Mountains, it is at once a drama about the unresolved traumas…
The biggest wonder about the new Arnold Schwarzenegger ride is not that human cloning has become a reality, nor that the America of the future (“sooner than you think,” as an opening caption ominously suggests) very closely resembles present-day Vancouver. It’s not even that technological advances appear to have added…
Given the stress and emotional turmoil associated with family holidays, in the cinema as in life, it’s very peculiar that anyone feels obliged to entertain the notion of Thanksgiving anymore. Really, thanks for what, exactly? Jammed freeways? Delayed flights? Overcrowded supermarkets? Big, dead birds? Witch hunts? Territorial conquest and genocide?…
The subject — or rather, the object — of Christine Fugate’s unsettling and surprisingly poignant documentary The Girl Next Door is one Stacy Valentine, a pneumatic blonde from Oklahoma who recently concluded a brief but reasonably lucrative career as a porn star. The film spans two years, and for that…
