When the history of the republic in this century is written, a New York club owner named Steve Rubell might get his very own footnote. In the late 1970s, after all, this little rat-faced tyrant transformed an abandoned TV studio on West 54th Street into a laboratory for radical social…
In the pecking order of tragic black musicians, Frankie Lymon can’t hold a votive candle to, say, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday or Otis Redding. But now the late doo-wopper’s got his own movie, too–or, rather, he’s got his own space in a movie that, for better or worse, is really…
After a summer filled with third-rate pulp, Blade arrives with a pedigree that suggests first-rate pulp: characters and situations from Marvel Comics; a screenplay by David S. Goyer (who gave us this year’s transcendent pulp masterpiece, Dark City); and the presence (as star and producer) of Wesley Snipes, a terrific…
The idea of destiny–especially the notion that two people are fated to meet and fall in love–is a load of crap, but a surprising number of people buy into it. Probably for that reason, it has proved a popular element in movie romances, City of Angels and Sliding Doors being…
Slums of Beverly Hills is the first feature by the young writer-director Tamara Jenkins, and it has its mild amusements. It’s one of those movies that gets bonus points for being “personal,” bopping along from episode to episode as if the filmmaker were discovering her subject as she went along…
You have to love the way Terry McMillan does literary research. On a spur-of-the-moment vacation trip to Jamaica, the author of Disappearing Acts and Waiting to Exhale says, she indulged in a mad, revitalizing fling with a man twenty years younger. Despite the rum punches and the hot and heavy,…
As the lights came up after a screening of the new Neil LaBute movie Your Friends and Neighbors, a colleague next to me growled disapprovingly, “That was a nasty movie.” For LaBute –whose debut film, In the Company of Men, is probably the worst date movie ever made–this comment would…
Seen one way, Manuel Pradal’s Marie Baie des Anges is a self-consciously artsy examination of teen anxiety and teen violence done up with pretensions and gewgaws that the most self-absorbed auteur might disdain. Seen in another light, it’s a disturbing vision that manages to capture, through bizarre editing, fractured narrative…
John Hamburg’s independent comedy Safe Men, which got a look and a distributor at Sundance, trades on one of the oldest comic devices in moviedom: Innocence collides with corruption and changes both of them for the better. From the great silent comedian Harry Langdon, who made a high art of…
If you need new evidence of Hollywood’s current impoverishment of thought and deed, look no further than the ongoing siege against European movies. Not content to crank out sequels and recycle old TV shows into the multiplexes, the safety-first moguls have “remade” (translation: filched and dumbed-down), among others, the Godard…
Nicolas Cage has never seemed more dazzling than he does in the new Brian De Palma thriller Snake Eyes. Playing Rick Santoro, a corrupt Atlantic City cop who likes to think he’s “everybody’s friend,” Cage for almost two continuous hours boogies to his own inner beat. It’s like watching a…
Anna Stockard, the high school senior facing the abyss in Susan Skoog’s Whatever, comes straight out of the dazed-and-confused school of anxiety that now dominates movies about adolescence. Anna’s father has long since vanished. Her mother is a frowzy desperado who rolls home to their suburban split-level at 7 a.m…
As tyrants of the twentieth century go, it’s hard to top Josef Stalin in the mass-murder department. He was pretty nimble with the Big Lie, too. These facts have not been lost on post-Soviet Russian filmmakers, of course: In the dawn of the free marketplace, it’s open season on Communist…
It has taken twenty-six years for some smart aleck to come up with a fullscale parody of The Godfather, so the question now is: Who wants to see it? Many of the 16- to 24-year-olds who flock to movie theaters in the summertime may not know Michael Corleone from Michael…
Can you make a satisfying high-tech thriller for $60,000? You can if you’re 28-year-old Darren Aronofsky, late of Harvard and the American Film Institute’s directing program, and you get everyone you know to chip in a hundred bucks on the prospect that if the picture makes a profit you’ll be…
Do we really need to see the great Kevin Spacey fuming and fussing in one of those we-do-things-my-way-or-we-don’t-do-them-at-all roles? In The Negotiator, he’s playing Chris Sabian, an expert hostage negotiator for the Chicago police, whose job it is to talk down Samuel L. Jackson’s Danny Roman, another police expert who…
The first half-hour of Steven Spielberg’s magnificent and terrifying war epic Saving Private Ryan unfolds at bloody Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944, and is likely the most graphic re-creation of men in battle ever committed to film. Petrified GIs huddling in the wave-bashed landing craft vomit into their…
Hal Hartley’s gallery of troubled eccentrics already features two bickering brothers in search of their lost father (Simple Men), three mix-and-match couples afflicted by identical love woes in three far-flung cities (Flirt) and the unlikely triptych of sexually obsessed virgin, bewildered amnesiac and ex-porn star (Amateur). How do you top…
Billed as the first commercial film written, directed and co-produced by American Indians, Smoke Signals could be a sign of the truth-telling breakthrough they have deserved ever since John Wayne’s cavalry undertook to slaughter the “savages,” Jay Silverheels played sidekick, and Jeff Chandler was cast as Cochise. With the possible…
The last place you want to visit in mid-winter is gray, freezing Buffalo, New York. The last people you want to see in the last place you want to visit are Jimmy and Janet Brown, a pair of comic demons so indifferent, so surreally out of touch, that they scarcely…
In The Mask of Zorro, Anthony Hopkins plays the eponymous masked hero as if he were doing Shakespeare. He’s trying to turn a kitsch hero into a real one, and his efforts are so weirdly off-key that you don’t know whether to applaud or titter. This dolorous Don Diego de…
Michael Bay is the director of Bad Boys and The Rock and the new asteroid-attack movie Armageddon–which should be called The Very Big Rock. Bay has, I’m afraid, perfected a new form: His movies are trailers for themselves. Every scene is all climax and no foreplay. When it’s all over,…
