This epic poem of a baseball season is drawing to a close. But before Tino Martinez hangs up his spikes for the winter, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa settle into the history books and the game’s financial titans dare to believe that the game’s wronged fans have returned, there’s a…
In The Eel, which won the Palme D’Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, director Shohei Imamura once again demonstrates his empathy for the outsiders and aliens of Japanese society. In this case he muses on the tormented relationship between a paroled wife-murderer who’s struggling with his past after eight…
As witch movies go–even lighthearted, supposedly comic witch movies –Practical Magic is conspicuously lacking in supernatural phenomena. There are no ritual murders, resurrected warlocks or conventions of hags bent on turning the world’s children into mice. Director Griffin Dunne (1997’s Addicted to Love) can’t scare up a single bedeviled infant…
This just in: The National Basketball Association has canceled its 1998 exhibition games, the players and owners remain at each other’s throats over filthy lucre, and the entire regular season remains in grave jeopardy. Hello? Let’s try this again: The National Basketball Association has canceled its exhibition games, the players…
Go ahead. Drop a tab or two of windowpane before setting out to see Lance Mungia’s Six-String Samurai. A hit at Park City, Utah’s alternative Slamdance Film Festival this year, Mungia’s no-budget first feature is a trippy melange of many movies, everything from Mad Max to Star Wars to the…
Better call out the symbol police. And tell them to bring heavy weapons. Jesse Peretz’s First Love, Last Rites, a tale of young love and early disillusionment set in the overheated Louisiana bayou country, features an unseen rat gnawing away, all movie long, at the woodwork of a one-room house…
The 21st edition of the Denver International Film Festival gets under way at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the United Artists Colorado Center Theatre with an opening-night screening of The Theory of Flight, Paul Greenglass’s study of the friendship between a brooding artist (Kenneth Branagh) and a young woman with Lou…
Some wonderfully gaudy facts and feats have decorated this extraordinary baseball season. Mutual admirers Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa demolished home-run history, of course, going downtown a total of 136 times. Cal Ripken–he of the silver countenance and the iron constitution–finally decided to take a day off after seventeen years…
Insofar as filmmaker Tony Gatlif’s justly admired “gypsy trilogy” is an exploration of his roots and a search for his nature–he was born in Algeria to gypsy parents of Spanish origin but was later polished at Paris’s L’Ecole des Beaux Arts–it comprises one of the most passionate and telling self-examinations…
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 like John Dahl’s Red Rock West and The Last Seduction, James Foley’s After Dark,…
For Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and a stampede of horses called the New York Yankees, this has been the most glorious of baseball seasons. Not so for the 77-85 Colorado Rockies, who in the mists of April were thought to be solid contenders. But when the ax fell, as everyone…
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 The Birdman of Alcatraz (also 1962) to 1986’s wickedly entertaining, unappreciated 52 Pick-Up…
The hero of John Waters’s gently subversive new romp, Pecker, is a happy Baltimore teenager of the same name whose primary pleasure is shooting neighborhood snapshots with an old thrift-shop camera. Girls on the bus preen for him. He captures dancers in the local strip club through a back-alley window…
In the fight game, the fun never stops. On Friday night, welterweight Oscar De La Hoya, boxing’s undefeated “Golden Boy,” took eight rounds to dispose of a faded ex-champ, Julio Cesar Chavez, in Las Vegas. De La Hoya had so bloodied his old enemy that Chavez could not answer the…
You can’t keep a good ship down. No sooner have a billion or so Titanic videos hit the shelves than a little-known Spanish moviemaker complicates the issue with a French-language film called, in English, The Chambermaid on the Titanic. Cheap profiteering? An attempt to cash in? Absolutely not. In fact,…
For better or worse, the confessional memoir has become the most popular literary form of our time, prompting ballplayers, 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 anyone…
A vast right-wing conspiracy couldn’t get the job done. For that matter, neither could the left-handers. This summer’s hero hit five dozen dingers off 57 pitchers. And in the end, the Chicago Cubs’ Steve Trachsel–who gave up a league-high 32 long balls in 1997–yielded Cardinals slugger Mark McGwire’s historic 62nd…
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…
After sitting in hot traffic for an hour and coughing up $40 for a parking spot, some were looking for good omens Saturday night. Maybe this filled the bill–for CU fans, anyway. Following months of big-game hype and just five minutes before the kickoff, Cam the Ram, Colorado State’s galloping,…
In the pecking order of tragic black musicians, Frankie Lymon can’t hold a votive candle to, say, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday or Otis Redding. But now the late doo-wopper’s got his own movie, too–or, rather, he’s got his own space in a movie that, for better or worse, is really…
When the history of the republic in this century is written, a New York club owner named Steve Rubell might get his very own footnote. In the late 1970s, after all, this little rat-faced tyrant transformed an abandoned TV studio on West 54th Street into a laboratory for radical social…
