The premise is preposterous, the final score inevitable and the record reading on the feelgood-o-meter totally predictable. But Mystery, Alaska comes furnished with some winning quirks and charms — including a very funny bit concerning premature ejaculation at twenty degrees below zero. So even if you don’t really believe that…
In general, period films are not what you would call a commercial sure shot in the current marketplace — unless, of course, the period in question is the 22nd century or some “long, long ago” that resembles the 22nd century. In Plunkett and Macleane, director Jake Scott — son of…
There is nothing gratifying about watching a bullet blast through a woman’s skull. Exploding helicopters and splattered cattle are utterly indefensible. And few would smile at the image of a little boy being obliterated by a flashy missile. So why is David O. Russell’s Three Kings such rousing entertainment? This…
Grownups, take heart. Even if you misspent your summer at the movies pigging out on reheated space adventure, slob humor and stubborn old ballplayers who won’t hang up their spikes, all is not lost. A powerful and intelligent film called American Beauty has volumes to say about the way people…
Trust Allison Anders and her old running mate Kurt Voss to come up with a piquant, carefully observed movie about tarnished hope, overfed vanity and half-baked scheming on the treacherous L.A. music scene. They know the territory. In 1988, the ex-UCLA Film School classmates wrote and directed Border Radio, one…
Have you heard? The only tools a nice fellow needs to repair the damaged psyches of an entire town are a guilty conscience and a dash of insight. That, at least, is the premise of Lawrence Kasdan’s silly new social parable, Mumford, in which the eponymous hero poses as a…
As American film has increasingly dominated the world’s cinemas and once-healthy European film industries have grown unable to sustain themselves, the idea of multi-national co-productions, with funds supplied by producers from a variety of countries, has become the norm. This trend was well-established in the ’80s, making it tough to…
Since his TV show ended, Martin Lawrence has gotten more ink for his off-camera life than for his movie career. There’s nothing about Blue Streak that is likely to change that. And it’s a shame, because the basic plot — which sounds like something from one of Donald E. Westlake’s…
Joan Chen, director and co-writer of Xiu Xiu the Sent Down Girl, is best known as an actress: American audiences probably identify her most readily as the doomed wife in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor or as Josie Packard, the alternately evil and innocent character in David Lynch’s weird-o-rama Twin…
Whether it’s bad or good commercial luck that the thriller Stir of Echoes follows so closely on the heels of The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan’s wildly successful ghost-story sleeper, it’s bad critical luck. This film has some startling parallels with The Sixth Sense: Both concern psychic communication with the…
When last we encountered Peter and Bobby Farrelly, they were pelting moviehouses with industrial-strength jokes about retarded kids, lost semen, found excrement and exploding house pets. Good plan. There’s Something About Mary turned into last summer’s surprise hit and catapulted the brothers to the top of Hollywood’s A List –…
It seems like only yesterday that movies dealing with gay and lesbian life were synonymous with extravagant displays of gloom and doom. From the suicides of The Children’s Hour and Advise and Consent to the serial killers of Cruising and Basic Instinct, same-sex sexuality was no fun — in the…
What is it they say? That even a flea can reach Mount Olympus riding in Pegasus’s mane? Well, in the case of the new Albert Brooks comedy The Muse, Brooks is the flea and Pegasus is his delectable co-star, Sharon Stone. But I get ahead of myself. In The Muse,…
There is something fairy-tale-like, but also deeply human, about Twin Falls Idaho, a gentle, beautifully realized tale of love and intimacy that marks the feature-film debut of identical twins Mark and Michael Polish. Michael directed the film, and both brothers wrote the script and star in it. It is what…
If Kevin Williamson has anything to say about it, the good works of noble movie schoolteachers like Mr. Chips and Miss Dove and Mr. Holland will be wiped out in one fell swoop. In their place, the creator of TV’s hormonal Dawson’s Creek series proposes an unmitigated horror: a high…
As a filmmaker, actor John Turturro clearly believes in drawing from personal experience: His directorial debut, the 1992 Mac (which won the Camera D’Or at Cannes), was avowedly based on his father’s life. For his second feature, Illuminata, Turturro takes a look at the theater, showing us the ambitions, fears…
Lo and behold the plight of the American gangster. John Gotti, the Dapper Don, has been sent down the river. His big-time heavy, Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, is famous and face-lifted for being a no-good dirty-rat stool pigeon. And Robert De Niro, the reigning deity of hoodlum heavies in films…
Do not be fooled: Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley and Peter Criss receive top billing in Detroit Rock City, but KISS doesn’t actually appear in the film until its final three minutes. And when the band does show up, its members clad in their de rigueur leather-and-greasepaint getups, it’s…
Filmmaker Bobby Bowfinger, the lead character in the intermittently funny Hollywood satire Bowfinger, starring Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy, has a dream. Nothing so grand as an Academy Award or even a table down front at the Golden Globes. No, when Bowfinger (Steve Martin) allows his fantasies to run wild,…
It has been almost forty years since Eric Rohmer, riding the crest of the French New Wave, embarked on the first of his Six Moral Tales. The series would eventually include at least two classics–My Night at Maud’s (1969) and Chloe in the Afternoon (1972). Linked by theme and style…
First published under the title The Iron Man in Great Britain in 1968, The Iron Giant is a minor classic of twentieth-century children’s literature. The slim volume by the English poet laureate Ted Hughes is a pacifist parable in the guise of a sci-fi hero fantasy. Hughes spun his yarn…
One of our leading men’s fashion magazines runs a column every month titled “What Were We Thinking?” in which it presents a ludicrous photograph of a famous person dressed in what the magazine had earlier decreed a style that every hip cat would soon be wearing. It’s my guess that…
