Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! The repressed Irish Catholic schoolgirl who Molly Shannon plays on Saturday Night Live is certainly not everyone’s cup of glee. But there’s no denying the tug she exerts on anyone whose past is littered with the dry husks of Latin verbs and memories of nuns swinging…
There is something fairy tale-like but also deeply human about Twin Falls Idaho, a gentle, beautifully realized tale of love and intimacy that marks the feature-film debut of identical twin brothers Mark Polish and Michael Polish. Mark Polish wrote the script, Michael Polish cowrote and directed it, and both brothers…
The premise is preposterous, the final score inevitable, and the record reading on the feel-good-ometer is totally predictable. But Mystery, Alaska comes furnished with some winning quirks and charms — including a very funny bit concerning premature ejaculation at 20 degrees below zero. So even if you don’t really believe…
Grownups, take heart. Even if you misspent your summer at the movies pigging out on reheated space adventure, slob humor, and stubborn old ball players who won’t hang up their spikes, all is not lost. A powerful and intelligent film called American Beauty has volumes to say about the way…
The joke that opens Jakob the Liar, the new Holocaust comedy (talk about an oxymoron) starring Robin Williams, captures the bittersweet quality — the grim reality mixed with laughter — that the rest of the movie tries and fails to embody. The story takes place in an unidentified Jewish ghetto…
Since his TV show ended, Martin Lawrence has gotten more ink for his off-camera life than for his movie career. There’s nothing about Blue Streak that is likely to change that. It’s a shame, because the basic plot — which sounds like something from one of Donald E. Westlake’s Dortmunder…
Word processing has made life easier for screenwriters. No need to retype some old classic with your own little changes, nowadays you can just download the screenplay for, let’s say, The Exorcist, search for adolescent girl, replace with twentysomething single woman, and — voilà! — you have a brand new…
Whether it’s bad or good commercial luck that the thriller Stir of Echoes follows so closely on the heels of The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan’s wildly successful ghost-story sleeper, it’s bad critical luck. The film has some startling parallels with The Sixth Sense: Both concern psychic communication with the…
As a filmmaker, John Turturro clearly believes in drawing from personal experience: The actor’s directorial debut, the 1992 Mac (which won the Camera D’Or at Cannes), was avowedly based on his father’s life. For his second feature, Illuminata, Turturro takes a look at the theater, showing us the ambitions, fears,…
When last we encountered Peter and Bobby Farrelly, they were pelting movie houses with industrial-strength jokes about retarded kids, lost semen, found excrement, and exploding house pets. Good plan. There’s Something About Mary turned into last summer’s surprise hit and catapulted the brothers to the top of Hollywood’s A list…
What is it they say — that even a flea can reach Mount Olympus riding in Pegasus’ mane? Well, in the case of the new Albert Brooks comedy The Muse, Brooks is the flea and Pegasus is his delectable costar, Sharon Stone. But I get ahead of myself. In The…
It seems like only yesterday that movies dealing with gay and lesbian life were synonymous with extravagant displays of gloom and doom. From the suicides of The Children’s Hour (1961) and Advise & Consent (1962) to the serial killers of Cruising (1980) and Basic Instinct (1992), same-sexuality was no fun…
Lo and behold the plight of the American gangster. John Gotti, the Dapper Don, has been sent down the river. His bigtime heavy, Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, is famous and face-lifted for being a no-good-dirty-rat stool pigeon. And Robert De Niro, the reigning deity of hoodlum heavies in films such…
If Kevin Williamson has anything to say about it, the good works of noble movie schoolteachers like Mr. Chips and Miss Dove and Mr. Holland will be wiped out in one fell swoop. In their place the creator of TV’s hormonal Dawson’s Creek series proposes an unmitigated horror — a…
Filmmaker Bobby Bowfinger (Steve Martin), the lead character in the intermittently funny Hollywood satire Bowfinger, has a dream. Nothing so grand as an Academy Award, or even a table down front at the Golden Globes. No, when Bowfinger allows his fantasies to run wild, he sees a Federal Express truck…
Do not be fooled: Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley, and Peter Criss receive top billing in Detroit Rock City, but Kiss doesn’t actually appear in the film until its final three minutes. And when the band does show up, clad in its de rigueur leather-and-greasepaint getups, it’s simply to…
In the highly competitive, dog-eat-dog world of the modern-day superhero in Mystery Men, the members of the group that eventually becomes known by that name start out with a couple of strikes against them. First off, there’s the little matter of superpowers: They don’t have ’em. Or let’s say that…
One of our leading men’s fashion magazines runs a column every month titled “What Were We Thinking?” to present a ludicrous photograph of a famous person dressed in what the magazine had earlier decreed to be a style that every hip cat would soon be wearing. In a few short…
The Blair Witch Project, the bone-chilling indie by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, is easily the scariest horror picture of the ’90s, a movie that can take a place among the most potent and inexorable of modern shockers, like Night of the Living Dead or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre…
Runaway Bride, the long-anticipated reunion of Pretty Woman stars Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, isn’t a sequel, but it feels like one. In everything there is a distinct sense of predestination, of events occurring according to some irresistible force of the inevitable. This makes life especially easy for Garry Marshall,…
Feel like shooting lutefisk in a barrel? Pick on beleaguered Minnesota again as the epicenter of everything that’s square-headed and unhip in America. Want to let the world know that two plus two equals four? Take aim one more time at the vain stupidity of beauty contests. Drop Dead Gorgeous,…
You can tell the first wave of summer blockbusters has shot its wad when the studios start tossing out their second- and third-string films. Back in the old days, these would have been called “programmers” — thoroughly competent entries that reiterated all the conventions of their reliable, easy-to-market genres. Such…
