In the rancid nightmare farce called Very Bad Things, Peter Berg, in his movie writing-directing debut, creates characters that you immediately want to see killed off. From the title to the ads to the Website (which features a Vegas stripper who will dance for you), Very Bad Things has been…
Even students of English history may have trouble sorting out the palace intrigues and intragovernmental conspiracies that fill Elizabeth, the handsome new production about Queen Elizabeth I’s ascension to the British throne in 1558. With the bewitching Australian actress Cate Blanchett (last year’s Oscar and Lucinda) in the title role,…
Holed up with his Sidney Bechet records, old flannel shirts, and dog-eared copy of War and Peace, Woody Allen has made a second career of shunning fad, fashion, and fame — and of ostensibly keeping to himself in the most populous city in the United States. No nouveau-grooveau glitz or…
For filmmaker Todd Solondz, it’s always midnight in suburbia. Life is lonely, and the natives can be hostile. In his daring second film, Happiness, the darkness engulfs victims of all ages: a boy in the throes of impending adolescence, three New Jersey sisters tormented by sex and love, an obscene…
American History X, a hard-edged look at American neo-Nazis, arrives in theaters with a lot of behind-the-scenes baggage: First-time director Tony Kaye has engaged in a protracted, high-profile battle with producer-distributor New Line Cinema over the film’s final form. While Kaye may have a justified grievance, this is not as…
After a flurry of preliminary “minifest” activity over the past couple of weeks in Boca Raton, Hollywood, Coconut Grove, and Fort Lauderdale, the 13th annual Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival goes into full swing this weekend, beginning with Friday’s official opening night presentation. As I indicated last week, the festival…
As it enters its 13th season, the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival continues to evolve far beyond its humble origins in the mid-’80s. Is that good or bad? A little of both, perhaps. The Greater Fort Lauderdale Film Festival, as it was called once upon a time, was primarily a…
A riveting but darkly disturbing thriller, Apt Pupil isn’t easy to sit through. The subject matter itself proves deeply unsettling, while two brief acts of sadism are so horrifying as to be unwatchable. And yet this brutal film borders on the brilliant. Beautifully structured and edited, with a chilling central…
The Jonathan Demme-directed Beloved runs nearly three hours, and it’s a long slog. This adaptation of the 1987 Toni Morrison novel bursts with ambition. On one hand it tries to get inside the fevers of the African-American slave experience, but it also wants to be an epic family saga and…
The hero of The Mighty — the title character, in fact — is an eighth grader known by the nickname Freak (Kieran Culkin). His might isn’t physical — he’s a small, frail boy who suffers from a degenerative birth defect. His spine curves painfully, and he’s able to walk only…
Every year the Montreal World Film Festival runs for ten days through Labor Day, and the Toronto Film Festival picks up a few days later and carries on for another ten. Twin colossi of the Great White North, they unspool some 300 movies each, and, as in the past three…
As a professional lamenter of how “they just don’t make ’em like they used to,” I am always thrilled on those rare occasions when someone even tries to make ’em that way. So I am doubly thrilled that, with The Impostors, writer-director Stanley Tucci has tried and richly succeeded. Those…
Have adultery, murder, and greed all moved to the sticks? Once firmly rooted in the big city, the seven deadly sins have taken on a distinct country-and-western twang in recent years, thanks to noirish, tough-minded scamfests such as John Dahl’s Red Rock West (1992) and The Last Seduction (1994), James…
The ants in Antz show a lot of personality. The film is the best example yet of how a fully animated computer-generated feature can delineate facial movement. Toy Story (1995), the first such feature to be released, was brasher and more child-friendly, but Antz is more of a — how…
Back in the early ’70s, when John Waters made his first splash with such low-budget gross-outs as Pink Flamingos and Multiple Maniacs, who would have guessed that someday he’d be making a Hollywood film as benevolent as Pecker? In retrospect maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. If any director has ever…
As a director of action thrillers, John Frankenheimer has been a peerless stylist for nearly four decades — without leaning on a pile of glitzy special effects. What’s more, his most memorable movies, from The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to Birdman of Alcatraz (also 1962) to 1986’s wickedly entertaining, unappreciated 52…
For better or worse, the confessional memoir has become the most popular literary form of our time, prompting ball players, Irish bartenders, prosecuting attorneys, and mothers of quadruplets everywhere to lay bare their deepest thoughts and secrets, all based on the presumption that their miserable lives are more interesting than…
Jackie Chan’s American fans — and I include myself among them — have suffered through a nervous 1998 so far. The momentum the star earned with the 1996 release of Rumble in the Bronx has seemed to dissipate steadily: An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, the first American production…
One True Thing, directed by Carl Franklin, is trying to be the Terms of Endearment of the ’90s. Scripted by Karen Croner from the 1995 Anna Quindlen novel of the same name, One True Thing pushes the same high-gloss homilies about making peace with your family, and it caps everything…
Men don’t get it. Moms don’t get it. Sometimes even your roommate or best friend doesn’t get it. But if you bray and carp and vent long enough, someone will listen, someone will begin to understand the precious particulars of a young woman’s sexuality. Whether they’re interested or not. That’s…
Matt Damon, the blond matinee idol, has apparently become Hollywood’s idea of a deep thinker. After playing a math whiz in last year’s Good Will Hunting, he’s now been reinvented as a poker genius in John Dahl’s Rounders. So anybody who had doubts about the second coming of Albert Einstein…
In the pecking order of tragic black musicians, Frankie Lymon can’t hold a votive candle to, say, Charlie Parker or Billie Holiday. But now, like that pair, the late doo-wopper has his own movie — or, rather, he has his own space in a movie that, for better or worse,…
