In Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca, the cleverest (if not quite the most convincing) science-fiction movie of the year, the near future is inhabited by designer humans whose DNA codes have been rigged down at the lab for conformist perfection and by “in-valids,” the inferior products of parents who’ve relied on mere…
Despite its muckraking pretensions, Red Corner is a rickety throwback to escapist adventures that featured beautiful foreign idealists spouting high-flown hooey to fighting Americans. The heroine, a scrappy Beijing defense lawyer, ends up whispering a whole succession of sweet somethings to the hero, a framed Yank. The banalities include (I…
Just when you thought you couldn’t stand to watch another movie about a household concealing a dark secret–or sit through another Thanksgiving reunion–along comes The House of Yes. Adapted from Wendy MacLeod’s award-winning play We Are Living in the House of Yes, it’s a black comedy of manners concerning a…
The twentieth edition of the Denver International Film Festival gets under way tonight, October 23, with a showing at the Continental Theatre of The Wings of a Dove, Iain Softley’s adaptation of the Henry James classic, and closes October 30 with The Ice Storm, novelist Rick Moody’s harrowing tale of…
Stylishness without substance can become wearying real fast. Twenty minutes into A Life Less Ordinary, the new movie from the producing-directing-writing team of Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, I was already into overload. It’s not that director Danny Boyle doesn’t have imagination. It’s just that sometimes imagination is all he has…
The true-life incident of the Cottingley fairies is so full of possibilities, so thought-provoking and hilarious at once, that it’s amazing it’s never been filmed before. Making up for lost time, the story has suddenly appeared (on its eightieth anniversary) simultaneously as the basis for two films. Photographing Fairies, with…
Here’s a wonder. The dirty little pleasures of Boogie Nights, which chronicles the follies and the fondest dreams of a group of L.A. porn stars in the late Seventies and early Eighties, have almost nothing to do with sex or debauchery. Instead, this sly and hugely entertaining flashback to the…
The Seventies were so awash in Fifties nostalgia that it’s surprising that Dan Wakefield’s 1970 bestseller Going All the Way is only now turning up in big-screen form. Of course, not all Fifties coming-of-age stories are the same: Unlike The Last Picture Show and American Graffiti–which pretty much dominated the…
Once again we are being bombarded by movies in which a new generation vents its anger at the sins, real and imagined, of the older one. The most eloquent of these outcries, I think, are David O. Russell’s vivid 1996 black comedy Flirting With Disaster, in which a baffled yuppie…
Jennifer Jason Leigh, who’s played everything from an acid-tongued Jazz Age sophisticate in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle to a drug-addled Nineties narc in Rush, has a lot to live up to as the heroine in the new adaptation of Henry James’s classic Washington Square. First there’s the literary…
Seven Years in Tibet feels more like Seven Days in the Movie Theater. It refuses to come to life–not even when Brad Pitt, as hirsute as a yak, wanders the frozen Himalayas with an Austrian accent that probably gave his dialogue coach the hives. It’s an epic about how an…
Now that Oliver Stone has explained to us (at some length) that the CIA killed JFK, that Nixon was a paranoid loser, but not quite the paranoid loser his enemies have always imagined, and that violence in America is really a conspiracy between the celebrity-hungry public and the cynical mass…
Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s La Promesse is that rare thing, a coming-of-age drama that carries real moral weight without seeming ponderous and transforms a hot political topic into flesh-and-bone drama. The story introduces us to Igor (Jeremie Renier), a fifteen-year-old Belgian boy who’s forced to live a double life in…
The fact that director Gary Fleder imposed the dismal Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead on Denver and the world is no good reason to kick his next movie in the butt. There are plenty of other reasons. For one, Kiss the Girls is a movie about a…
The adventurous moviegoer who doesn’t mind wrestling with a little bafflement will probably find many things to admire in Wim Wenders’s The End of Violence–not least its coolly ironic title, the Germanic vigor with which it seeks to whip the causes, effects and flagrant merchandising of violence into a heady…
Kevin Corrigan doesn’t act so much as he seems to stumble from scene to scene, like a guy who doesn’t follow a script as much as his own internal stage directions. He’s got skin so pale it’s almost translucent, and he wears the face of someone who’s always this far…
Small world, Hollywood. So damnably small (if not downright small-minded) that producers half-crazed by designer-brand seltzer and rampant profit motive are now starting to lift concepts for entire movies from the acceptance speeches of Academy Award winners. Case in point: The moment Scott Rudin, who’s downloaded truckloads of cash from…
Okay. Drop a billionaire know-it-all, a cocky fashion photographer and a slavering Kodiak bear into the Alaskan wilderness and tell ’em to fight it out. The smart money would be on the bear (he knows the territory), but because the perpetrators of The Edge profess to be more interested in…
The Peacemaker is the first feature from DreamWorks, the studio headed by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. It stars George Clooney and Nicole Kidman, and it’s about terrorists who steal Russian nukes. As an intelligence officer with the U.S. Army’s Special Forces, Clooney gets to model his jutting…
The 1950s-era Los Angeles of L.A. Confidential is Noir Central. Its denizens are tattooed in shadow; the play of light and dark in the streets, the police stations and the morgues, is fetishistic. The post-war L.A. touted in the travelogues and billboards is a boomtown, but what we actually see…
Every film adaptation of a pre-existing work has its own unique set of problems; in the case of Jocelyn Moorhouse’s A Thousand Acres, the problem is compounded. Not only was Jane Smiley’s 1991 novel a Pulitzer Prize-winning best-seller with a large number of (presumably) devoted fans, but the book was…
In Jonathan Nossiter’s brooding Sunday, the oft-maligned borough of Queens is seen as a snowy wasteland of crumbling warehouses and lonely subway stations through which the lame and the halt wander like zombies. Just the place, Nossiter reasons, to set a psychological mystery about loss of identity and the power…
