Let’s hear it for sports movies! The most avid sports fan can occasionally be bored by lackluster games, but even the casual spectator can appreciate what the big screen can do for an athletic contest, even one played by actors rather than athletes: the closer-than-life closeups, the dramatic use of…
It is rare to find a movie that is as accomplished, multilayered, and rewarding as the novel from which it was adapted, but The Cider House Rules is such a film. Directed by Lasse Hallström (My Life as a Dog, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape), the film displays the kind of…
I sincerely hope that Jodie Foster gets a chance to relax and unwind this holiday season, because the lady has obviously worked like a horse to instill her latest role with humanity and significance. As intrepid British widow Anna Leonowens in the huge and poetic new Anna and the King,…
Have you ever endured a relationship in which your partner beat you up mercilessly, just so he or she could “heal” you and play the redeemer later on? Granted, that’s a weird question and perhaps one better explored via Akbar and Jeff in Matt Groening’s Life in Hell strip, but…
The hipster wisdom about America in the 1950s holds that the entire war-weary nation was at political and spiritual rest, straitjacketed by conformity and loathe to utter a peep of protest — not even when Joe McCarthy went hunting for communists from the bowels of Hollywood to the feed stores…
“A Joel Schumacher film.” Are there any four words more guaranteed to send shudders of revulsion down the spine of any Gen X film geek? Ever since he allegedly ruined the Batman film franchise, Schumacher’s name has become almost the equivalent of a swear word on many Internet film sites,…
There have been so many recent movies about modern gay teenage life that one would think a filmmaker would be hard-pressed to find a new wrinkle on what has become an increasingly familiar tale. But Head On isn’t a pro forma drama of self-discovery and self-acceptance. As directed by Ana…
How do you make a sequel to a nearly perfect film? Toy Story, the 1995 hit from Disney and Pixar, was not only the first fully computer-animated feature, it was also as brilliantly written and directed a film as any of the classic Disney releases. Pixar did nearly everything right…
Nobody is innocent in America, but there is one segment of the population that seems doggedly determined to deny its own ignorance, ugliness, and violence. So hands up now, who really likes rednecks? The sludge on the bottom of the melting pot, this embarrassing offshoot of European ancestry continues, to…
“The spectre is known at all the country firesides by the name of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow,” writes Washington Irving in his original fantasy. Thanks in large part to the silly, watered-down fun of the animated Disney version, the Horseman and his victim, the gangling and gallant Ichabod…
As the 20th Century grinds remorselessly to a close, Princess Diana, Monica Lewinsky, and Jon-Benet Ramsey continue to be held up by the media as signal figures of our time. Yet something tells me that, when future historians look back on this period, the bulimic socialite, the kneepad-ready intern, and…
Luc Besson, director of La Femme Nikita, The Professional, and The Fifth Element is not the first name that would leap to mind to helm a biopic of Joan of Arc. Sure, he’s French, and sure, most of his films have a woman or girl as protagonist or savior; but…
“Yesterday I wasn’t even sure God existed,” laments Bethany (Linda Fiorentino), the reluctant yet divinely touched heroine of Kevin Smith’s ambitious new film, Dogma. “Now I’m up to my ass in Christian mythology.” As it turns out, so are we. Strutting to a spiritually snappy groove not observed in mainstream…
After its customary “minifest” screenings of the past couple of weeks in neighboring Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties as well as in Broward, the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival begins the main portion of its 14th season this week. And as I indicated last week, the festival appears to be…
The first rule of Being John Malkovich is you do not look at the poster for Being John Malkovich! Sorry to crib from that inferior tale of incredible shrinking men (throw a rock at any multiplex marquee this season — please! — and you’ll hit several), but really, avoid that…
The Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival is upon us, once again promising “over 100 films from 30 countries worldwide,” unreeling at venues from Boca Raton to Coconut Grove and, oh yeah, Fort Lauderdale, over a period of three and a half weeks. Most of the movies have multiple showings, and…
Trust Allison Anders and her old running mate Kurt Voss to come up with a piquant, carefully observed movie about tarnished hope, overfed vanity, and half-baked scheming on the treacherous L.A. music scene. They know the territory. In 1988 the ex-UCLA Film School classmates wrote and directed Border Radio, one…
“That reminds me of the movies Marty made about New York,” stammered Lou Reed sometime in the mid-’80s. “All those frank and brutal movies that are so brillyunt.” It was a clumsy, rhyme-impaired album track (“Doing the Things That We Want To” from New Sensations), but as has often been…
Ever since the mid-’80s release of Emir Kusturica’s first two features — Do You Remember Dolly Bell? and When Father Was Away on Business (which was nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar) — Kusturica has been the most internationally visible figure in Yugoslavian cinema. (That includes all the former…
David Fincher needs a hug, the poor bastard. Or possibly a diaper change. Ever since 1992, when he ruined the Alien series with the excrescence of his pointless, senseless third installment, he’s been making the same bratty, obnoxious movie over and over again: gloom, doom, indestructible protagonist, bureaucratic evil, quasi-religious…
Steven Soderbergh may have had some rocky times after his 1989 breakthrough with sex, lies, & videotape, but these days he’s on a roll. Last year he produced Pleasantville and directed Out of Sight, two of the year’s most praised films. This year he has The Limey, a complex, introspective…
Insomniacs, rejoice! During the first several decades of Sydney Pollack’s bloated, interminable Random Hearts, your eyelids will droop, your pulse and respiration will slow, and you’ll get that $8 nap you’ve been craving. Once the credits roll and the lights come up, you’ll awaken refreshed, undisturbed by vague dreams about…
