If you’re looking for a spark of life in Team Merchant-Ivory’s fatal collision with American history, Jefferson in Paris, skip right past the hotly disputed moment at which the author of the Declaration of Independence beds a fourteen-year-old slave girl from Old Virginny. That’s this straight-faced movie’s lone comic moment–and…
The unholy furor that assorted Roman Catholics and sundry conservatives are raising over Priest should be just enough to ensure its success at the box office. But no infusion of scandal can deliver it from TV-movie mediocrity. British director Antonia Bird, who’s making her feature-film debut, and writer Jimmy McGovern,…
The son of a poet, Bernardo Bertolucci was a prize-winning poet himself by the age of 21. Then came a turn in the road, and he spent the next two decades making a powerful case that, to use his words, “cinema is the true poetic language.” In 1961 he dropped…
Those glimpses of wounded babies, desolate old women and bombed buildings on the evening news pass through most Americans like air: The war in Bosnia remains a meaningless abstraction located somewhere between Judge Ito’s latest pronouncement and Chelsea’s latest camel ride. Milcho Manchevski’s beautiful and disturbing Before the Rain probably…
As a boy, Samuel Goldwyn was an apprentice glovemaker, not a reader, and in the Thirties the late Hollywood mogul had a famously loose acquaintance with the obscure French novels and half-forgotten Italian plays he was always buying in hopes of giving selected MGM talkies a touch of class. So…
The over-the-top comic strip Tank Girl became an instant cult sensation when it hit the streets of London in 1988, and it wasn’t long until kids on this side of the Atlantic started eating it up, too. No surprise. The futuristic action heroine created by self-proclaimed layabouts Jamie Hewlett and…
Between the uptight harangues of the New Right and the P.C. nitpicking of gay activists, it’s a wonder that anyone can get a mainstream movie involving homosexual life past the popcorn stand. To hear all the noise surrounding Philadelphia, you’d have thought the entire cast of characters had half the…
The most talented young filmmaker in Canada may never attract mass audiences, but he gets under the skin in ways almost no one else can. If you’ve seen Atom Egoyan’s Speaking Parts or The Adjustor, you know his territory is a psychosexual mindscape where people act out personal rituals, where…
Some fans of Stephen King’s horror fiction–stuff he cranks out at a frightening rate–will probably see Dolores Claiborne as another serving of King Lite. The novel, and Taylor Hackford’s radically altered movie version of it, are decidedly non-supernatural and non-gory. Here, in fact, we behold the bestselling Mr. King in…
By now, most people beyond the age of reason have noticed that Oprah and Geraldo and the rest of the TV blabbermouth shows are not really about child abuse or stockbrokers who cross-dress on weekends or teenagers who have sex with their parakeets. They’re about reaction. The day’s topic is…
The period of Honore de Balzac’s Colonel Chabert is the second decade of the nineteenth century, when the French bourgeoisie was rising on tides of post-revolutionary democracy, material desire and disillusionment with war. Against this background, the great novelist wrote the tale of a slain hero of the Napoleonic Wars…
I once spent a morning in Los Angeles with Sam Peckinpah, watching him breathe fire. On the table in his hotel suite lay a stack of dirty dishes, an unkempt pile of movie scripts and a huge, unsheathed knife. There was also a .45 automatic the size of a toaster…
For decades social psychologists, campus film historians and other pests have been cooking up elaborate theories about how the Z-grade giant insect flicks of the 1950s were really reflections of our deepest Cold War fears, or that the disaster-movie cycle of the 1970s, with its swarms of killer bees and…
There are plenty of good reasons Once Were Warriors has become the most successful film in New Zealand’s history, outgrossing The Piano and the Spielberg blockbuster Jurassic Park. Shock value is only one of them. Lee Tamahori’s searing examination of a contemporary Maori family facing extinction in the brutal urban…
How’s this for a comic premise? A Jewish American princess finally gets engaged to her longtime boyfriend. While everyone pushes to set the date, her nagging questions about marriage in the Nineties all come to a head with the discovery that every member of her family is having an extramarital…
The pleasures of Shallow Grave, a stylish black comedy disguised as a bloody thriller, are strewn so playfully about that they feel effortless. The characters, a trio of twentysomethings sharing a roomy flat in Edinburgh, Scotland, are so snotty and amoral that we’re never burdened by any pretense of liking…
That Irish charm school the movies have been conducting of late is still in session. The Secret of Roan Inish, an innocuous bit of Hibernian whimsy featuring a little girl’s vivid imagination, a kindly fisherman/grandfather who likes to pass on the family myths and a boy who’s mysteriously floated out…
At the movies, it’s open season on literary figures. In Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, we got an earful of cult heroine Dorothy Parker’s mordant one-liners, which was to be expected, and an eyeful of her alcoholic self-pity, which was not. Tom & Viv is an even rougher piece…
Want to foul up your next crime thriller? It’s easy. First, go down to the Florida Everglades at midnight and find some alligators. Next, reheat a big, dangerous slab of Cape Fear, add a humid chunk of In the Heat of the Night and a racially motivated miscarriage of justice…
Trying to revive the Western may be a fool’s errand. As revisionist historians will be happy to tell you, Manifest Destiny is as dead as John Wayne, and any hombre crazy enough to say otherwise will get the bellyful of hot lead he deserves. The real problem is that while…
That major-league enigma lying ninety miles off the Florida coast doesn’t often come into clear focus–not for North Americans. Aside from our occasional whiffs of its embargoed cigars and its stubborn, last-ditch socialism, Cuba remains terra incognita almost four decades after Fidel Castro and his band of revolutionaries shook the…
The pioneer trail blazed by Thelma & Louise several winters back is developing into a superhighway. Boys on the Side is Hollywood’s latest plunge into female bonding, and it confronts every meaningful women’s issue you can think of with such single-minded fervor that you start to wonder if the whole…
