A Midsummer Night’s Dream came early in Shakespeare’s career. He had written it by at least 1598, in roughly the same period as another lyric-romantic masterpiece, Romeo and Juliet. Despite Samuel Pepys’ famous dismissal of Dream as “the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life,” it…
David Mamet, famous for his in-your-face characters, brutal and frequently raunchy dialogue, and deliberate, staccato prose, would seem an unlikely choice to write and direct a screen adaptation of British playwright Terence Rattigan’s genteel drama about injustice. But the Pulitzer Prize-winning author (for Glengarry Glen Ross), whose body of work…
The latest release from Paramount Pictures’ bouncing baby, MTV Films, is set in a high school and has been inoculated with the usual doses of teenage angst, teenage wit, and teenage lust. Here’s the surprise: It declines to get down on hands and knees to woo Generation Y to the…
Based on Julian Barnes’ debut novel, Metroland is essentially a dramatization of the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime”: “You may find yourself/In a beautiful house/With a beautiful wife/You may ask yourself/Well, how did I get here?” The hero of Metroland spends the movie asking himself that question; what…
We seem to be in the middle of one of those thematic blitzes that happen every now and then in the film world. Last year we had Dark City and The Truman Show; this year, so far, we have had EdTV, The Matrix, and David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ. Coming up in…
Sean Connery has always been a terse, minimalist actor, spitting out his lines in tight bursts of Scottish brogue. But in Entrapment, the kingly Scot goes beyond minimalism to the point where he’s practically semaphoring with his eyebrows. As the legendary art thief Robert “Mac” MacDougal, Connery isn’t just reserved,…
Just as David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) came off as an organic reaction to a terrible new wasting disease, his new movie crystallizes the confusions of an epoch that can’t decide whether it’s the Entertainment Era, the Information Age, or the Digital Millennium. Named for a fictional “game system,” eXistenZ…
When we first see Isa, the 21-year-old heroine of Erick Zonca’s The Dreamlife of Angels, she’s trudging under the weight of a huge backpack through the chill dawn of an almost featureless European city. With her close-cropped dark hair and street urchin’s sniffle, she seems to be carrying the burden…
Imagine, if you will, one of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s classic road movies that never leaves the terminal, and you have pretty much described Life, the strikingly uneventful new comedy starring Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence. It’s their Road to Nowhere. Life, which was directed by Ted Demme from…
Has any major American director had quite so many career swings as Robert Altman? Maybe not, but if there’s one thing the last 30 years have made clear, it is that it’s never safe to count Altman out. The mid- and late ’90s have been particularly unfriendly to him. After…
Everybody in this walk-in closet of an editing room at the A.W. Dreyfoos School of the Arts in West Palm Beach is talking at once: Daniel Thomas, who’s queuing up Thicker Than Water, a ten-minute video, for viewing; Justin Connelly, the video’s writer, who says Thicker was originally inspired by…
Back in 1993 Disney released Swing Kids, a dead-earnest portrait of rebellious German jazz fans during the Third Reich. This bizarre hybrid — a blend of Footloose and Schindler’s List, of Dead Poets Society and The Diary of Anne Frank — pitted big bands versus arm bands; it was a…
Stuffed full of fantasy comics, addicted to action, and steeped in digital technology, the frenetic moviemakers Andy and Larry Wachowski have done what they must — that is, to create an eye-popping, morph-mad, quasi-mythical sci-fi flick that will thrill computer nerds as it kicks serious ass. The Matrix also presumes…
Self-serving confessions are a mainstay of bestseller lists; now we’re doomed to see their ilk on screen. 20 Dates is the not-so-verite story of Myles Berkowitz, a tyro filmmaker in his mid thirties who tries to advance his career and up his happiness quotient by filming himself on a score…
“I hope it’s better than The Truman Show,” said the woman in line behind me at the publicized “sneak preview” of EDtv. Afterward, a man in my row declared, “That was a lot better than The Truman Show.” Pretentious high-concept films like The Truman Show often garner accolades and let…
In the three decades that director Ken Loach has been a steadfast champion of the British working class, his films have lost none of their sting. Whether examining a brutal Belfast police incident in Hidden Agenda (1990) or the plight of an unemployed man struggling to buy his daughter a…
At the movies the fun-loving temptress has been liberating the buttoned-up clod ever since Katharine Hepburn’s leopard made off with Cary Grant’s dinosaur bone in Bringing Up Baby 61 years ago. Maybe even longer, if you count pioneer vamp Theda Bara’s effect on a long succession of speechless men. In…
The Deep End of the Ocean starts out as a maternal horror movie and ends up as a family therapy session. Michelle Pfeiffer plays Beth Cappadora, the photographer wife of restaurateur Pat (Treat Williams) and mother of two sons and an infant daughter. While checking into a jammed hotel for…
When hit men wore hats and Cadillacs had running boards, the average Mafia don could knock off the Tattaglia brothers in midafternoon and sit down to a nice plate of chicken cacciatore that evening, content that he’d seen to the family business and blazed a path for his first-born son’s…
The independent production-distribution company the Shooting Gallery probably got a lot more attention when Monica Lewinsky showed up in Washington wearing a cap with its logo than it is likely to get from the release of The 24 Hour Woman, a modest, deserving film from writer-director Nancy Savoca. Savoca made…
The 16th Miami Film Festival continues this week with even more international fare. On the must-see list are Thursday’s presentation of a sublime offering from French newcomer Erick Zonca that created quite a stir at Cannes, The Dreamlife of Angels. Friday Buena Vista Social Club showcases famed German director Wim…
For film buffs, these are almost two weeks of sheer pleasure: the 16th annual Miami Film Festival, featuring 31 pictures from 15 countries. Naturally, Spanish-language features abound, from opening-night dance-fest Tango, courtesy of Argentine director Carlos Saura, to the kinky Spanish thriller Between Your Legs. There are also intimate looks…
