For better or worse, the father figure in Larry Clark’s ironically titled Another Day in Paradise turns out to be Mel, a foul-mouthed, 40-year-old junkie wearing a devil’s-red tennis shirt. His notion of good counsel is showing his surrogate son how to disable the burglar alarm at a medical clinic…
Short of nuclear holocaust, a major sale at Kmart, or a confirmed Clint Eastwood sighting back in rural Iowa, there’s probably no way to keep the movie version of Message in a Bottle from overwhelming the tender emotions of the hearts-and-flowers crowd. After all, this relentless assault on the tear…
Jimmy Cagney brought the same electric physicality to gangsters that he did to song-and-dance men. He gave a bright-eyed mug like his character in The Public Enemy extraordinary powers of attraction and repulsion. In The General, Brendan Gleeson enacts a real-life criminal chieftain — Dublin’s notorious Martin Cahill — with…
In the 1993 hit Groundhog Day, Bill Murray played a smart-ass Today show wannabe weatherman who grew into a human being. Murray added a core of warmth and romance to his comic arsenal without losing his zinging wit and crack-up irony, and he’s kept that progress going, even in piddling…
Between the current nostalgia for platform shoes and the epidemic of midlife crisis that has so many baby boomers in its grip, director Brian Gibson’s Still Crazy just might be able to find an audience among the disturbed, the deafened, and the disenchanted. It is, after all, the comic tale…
Genius can be a terrible, destructive gift. Jacqueline du Pre, the brilliant British cellist who enraptured audiences in the ’60s and ’70s with her musical passion and intensity, lived a life of great renown and acclamation but also one of harrowing loneliness and emotional turmoil. Her story is movingly told…
The cold-hearted among us have watched Camille die tragically on the late show and have seen Brian Piccolo run his last yard through the cancer ward often enough to understand the several hazards of Hollywood “disease movies” — false sentiment, synthetic emotion, and tears for tears’ sake. It is with…
“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” Kris Kristofferson sings in his most beguiling song, “Me and Bobby McGee.” Stephen Frears’ The Hi-Lo Country tries in vain to be just as lyrical about love and liberty. In this 20th-century Western, a cattle rancher named Pete (Billy Crudup) narrates…
Because it revealed the coke-snorting, ego-fueled corruption of Hollywood in the early ’80s with such acid wit, David Rabe’s play Hurlyburly became a huge audience hit when it burst onto Broadway in 1984. Here was the inside stuff from the Left Coast, gotten up in a frenetic new language combining…
Writer-director Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, the filmmaker’s adaptation of James Jones’ 1962 bestseller about the World War II battle for Guadalcanal, arrives in theaters with an almost unbearable weight of expectation. After graduating in the first class at the American Film Institute’s Advanced Film Studies program and working…
The relentless charm of Kirk Jones’ Waking Ned Devine lies in its embrace of two lovable Irish geezers who manage to work beautiful mischief on the world, in the raw beauty of their sun-splashed coastal village, and in the general notion that Ireland is the land of poetic conversations, enduring…
The great attorneys of our time — Tom Cruise, Susan Sarandon, Tom Hanks — must now make room in the firm for a new partner. John Travolta, who in past lives has been a disco king, a hip hit man, and a deep-fried presidential candidate, reinvents himself in A Civil…
Silver lining or slender thread? That question nags at me as I go over my best-of-the-year list. There were some terrific movies in 1998 — eight, according to my count. But the average film keeps on getting worse. If movies remain as synthetic and incompetent as they are for the…
The past year has been filled with good films… interesting films… worthwhile films. In fact there were many that I think of as being wonderful or droll or whatever. But 1998 failed to produce a single film to which the term “great” might be applied. Most years have at least…
Geniuses often come across unimpressively in the movies. Amadeus presented Mozart as a giggling fop. Both Kirk Douglas and Tim Roth gave us van Gogh as a pathetic head case. I.Q.’s Albert Einstein was a cupid-playing old duffer. Ken Russell’s freaky depictions of Liszt and Mahler speak for themselves. When…
The talents of Maya Angelou — she is or has been a teacher, memoirist, prize-winning poet, actress, civil rights activist, editor, playwright, composer, dancer, producer, theater and TV director, and advisor to three Presidents — range so far and deep that no feat she accomplishes could come as a surprise…
DreamWorks’ grandiose attempt at an animated feature for adults is a flimsy musical about Moses — a Sunday-school filmstrip written ultralarge and decked out with the spectacle of Hollywood Bible epics. Slender sermons nestle among flashy action sequences and diaphanous fashion statements from the more tasteful pages of the Nefertiti’s…
Old-fashioned romantic comedies are an endangered species, and in these generally unromantic days it’s always a pleasant surprise to find a decent one like Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail. Ephron, of course, made her bones five and a half years ago with the huge hit Sleepless in Seattle, but since…
Ultratough guy Jesse “The Body” Ventura says he means business as the new governor of Minnesota. But for now the nasty crime wave in that state continues unchecked — in the movies anyway. Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan, a psychological thriller that shows us how dangerous life can get after…
According to the sparse information available in standard reference books, Chilean expatriate director Raœl Ruiz, still in his late fifties, has made more than 100 films since 1960; apparently only 50 or so are features, but that’s still an impressive stat. He’s been a staple on the festival circuit for…
A third of the way through Home Fries, you may begin wondering if the filmmakers haven’t outsmarted themselves. Overloaded with oddities but a bit short on horse sense, this is one of those stubbornly defiant, attitude-driven movies that’s so busy scrambling genres, breaking rules, and dashing expectations on the road…
Surprise and pleasure come wrapped together in A Bug’s Life. This big adventure about tiny critters is the latest piece of robust whimsy from Pixar, the computer-animation studio that broke into features with the 1995 smash Toy Story. It should prove irresistible to children. Toy Story opened up the secret…
