hanks to his justly lauded work as action choreographer on The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, director Yuen Wo Ping is among the most famous creators of Hong Kong action in the U.S. In the wake of the latter film’s astonishing success, Miramax, with a prod from Quentin Tarantino,…
Plot aside — way aside, as it’s almost a nonissue in a film that telegraphs its final scenes during its opening moments — Bandits is really about only one thing: Billy Bob Thornton and Bruce Willis’s bald heads. As Joe Blake (Willis) and Terry Collins (Thornton), two bank-robbing fugitives in…
Serendipity already feels archaic, like some dusty relic that’s been unearthed from an antiques store’s attic and polished for display. It reeks of quaint and cute, from its gauzy panoramas of Manhattan at Christmastime to its tattered plot of lovers bound by destiny to its scenes of travelers casually loitering…
A quarter-century after C.W. McCall’s smash novelty single “Convoy,” a generous spirit still exists out there for our 18-wheeled good buddies. But consider the less catchy flip side of that single, “Long, Lonesome Road,” and its lament of a maddeningly grim and endless horizon. It’s within this uniquely American wasteland…
Lacking the good taste to postpone the release of this silly thriller until a less volatile time in American history (assuming one ever comes), the producers of Don’t Say a Word have opted to foist upon us images of detonating New York City buildings, carefully calculated acts of violence, and…
The cynic may notice only how Hearts in Atlantis plays like a Stephen King best-of compilation, a reheating of familiar stories and favorite themes. At times, it feels so much like Stand By Me — with its nostalgic, flashback tale of cherubs and bullies accompanied by sad and weary narration…
The beautiful little conceit at the heart of Brad Anderson’s Happy Accidents is that audiences will sit still once more for the crackpot notion of time travel — and in a movie that’s not science fiction. To his credit, and with an implied bow to Back to the Future and…
When marching-band director Tyrone Brown asks his Jackie Robinson Steppers, “Are you motivated?” he’s not so much inquiring as presenting a challenge. In the middle of a sweltering summer in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, tensions, temptations, and distractions are omnipresent. Synchronizing 60 players (while diverting some of them from becoming…
Only committed horticulturists and compulsive readers of The New York Times obituaries (this writer falls into the latter category) likely noticed the recent passing of Rosemary Verey, an aristocratic Englishwoman whose sophisticated but egalitarian approach to gardening took some of the stuffiness out of what previously had been a rather…
A year after Cameron Crowe climbed back aboard the tour bus for one last spin through rock’s golden days of giddy hedonism and phony heroism comes a film set in the mid-1980s, when the parties got harder, the music louder, and the musicians prettier. The world of Rock Star is…
Festering somewhere between an after-school special and kiddie porn lies this frank but melodramatic open wound from veteran Canadian director Léa Pool (Emporte-moi). Adapted by Judith Thompson from Susan Swan’s novel The Wives of Bath, Lost and Delirious is about girl joy and girl sorrow, girl solidarity and girl insatiability…
What is it that people get from Shakespeare’s plays? Is it the flowery dialogue? The author’s ability to capture a time and place that is foreign to us yet familiar via the emotions of the protagonists? It probably isn’t the stories; Shakespeare often used preexisting ones. More likely the timeless…
Tran Anh Hung’s beautiful meditation on family ties and family traumas, The Vertical Ray of the Sun, marks a captivating new chapter in the career of the writer-director who gave Americans their first glimpse of Vietnamese filmmaking. In 1994 Tran’s The Scent of Green Papaya made its way here, and…
Cuddly outsider #63178D, please step forward. Well, my goodness, you are so alternative, so fringe, so punk! So artsy and alienated! So utterly aimless and oozing with angst! That’s one reaction a viewer might have to Thora Birch’s power-moping in Ghost World, the new collaboration between director Terry Zwigoff (Crumb,…
Anyone with any experience in sharing toys, attention, and uncomfortably long car rides on the way to dreaded family vacations will recognize some familiar personality types and situations in Tortilla Soup. Directed by the Spanish-born María Ripoll, who is best known in this country for her English-language film Twice upon…
The title Apocalypse Now Redux is fairly amusing. Think about it: Prophetic Disclosure Presently Shows Up Again Newfangled. Of course, in the ten years since the release of Hearts of Darkness, the documentary on the making of Apocalypse Now, we’ve been taught to revere the legend of Francis Ford Coppola…
hy is it that every time they make a movie about a nerd, the character in question is always white? Someone must have cried discrimination, for Jump Tomorrow gives us a black nerd and puts him front and center. In the time-honored movie tradition, of course, he’s actually a good-looking…
Actor-director “Beat” Takeshi Kitano has built an international reputation over the past decade, primarily through a series of ultra-hard-boiled crime films in which he plays either a cop or a felon. With the exception of Gonin (1995; released in the U.S. in 1998), which was directed by Takeshi Ishii, all…
During this cinematic Summer of Dumb, it would be all too easy to celebrate half-assed cleverness as a virtue, especially when proffered by Bobby and Peter Farrelly, who elevated the gross-out to an art form in Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary. Osmosis Jones is a film about the animated…
Times have certainly changed. Twenty years ago a musical about an East German transsexual rock singer would have premiered in one of New York’s off off-Broadway theaters or cabarets, run for a couple of weeks, and remained the pleasant memory of a select few. But when John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig…
The most telling scene in Rush Hour 2 comes during the closing-credits montage of outtakes that have become the most enjoyable part of Jackie Chan’s Hollywood outings. Chris Tucker, the poor man’s Eddie Murphy, and Chan have just pushed one of the film’s myriad baddies out of a window; the…
German filmmaker Tom Tykwer has a gift for fusing psychological complexity and crackling plot without forsaking the excitements of either. The success of Run Lola Run didn’t exactly turn Tykwer into a household name, but it earned him his props as a young lion of the art houses. Moviegoers hungry…
