That confidence wafting up from Tucson, Arizona, that unmistakable whiff of spring hope, might be real this year. A lot of baseball folk believe the Colorado Rockies improved their roster in the off-season more than any other team in the National League, and it’s hard to argue with them. I…
One of the necessities of screwball comedy–an endangered, if not extinct, species–is that the practitioner be more sophisticated and aware than the batty socialites, pompous academics and blustering snobs he means to deflate. In the golden age of this fragile form, master satirists like Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges certainly…
The youngest member of the ubiquitous Wayans clan, 25-year-old Marlon, is emerging on the big screen as an eye- and soul-pleasing amalgam of Jim Carrey’s lunatic elasticity and Eddie Murphy’s faultless comic timing. We can probably expect great things of him. As evidenced by The Sixth Man, a lukewarm basketball…
Somewhere in there, in the dense limbo of the classified section, somewhere between “Beautiful Russian Ladies Want to Meet YOU!” and “Improve Your Sex Life With Penile Enlargement” and “Wendelstedt Umpire School,” you’ll almost always find the shimmering promise that you, too, can feel like a real major-leaguer. Or feel…
He doesn’t need much. Give the renowned Spanish black-humorist Pedro Almodovar the ex-junkie daughter of an Italian diplomat, a bitter ex-con who served six years for a crime he didn’t commit, a beautiful former dancer, a good cop and a bad cop, and he’ll come up with the most intriguing…
The odd Spaniard may choose to transplant film noir to Madrid (see review above), and the French came up with the name in the first place. But it’s essentially a Hollywood invention that has stood the test of time and darkness. Witness Palmetto, a pretty satisfying example of the genre,…
You know those moments when all your senses open like a flower? Picture this: West Palm Beach Municipal Stadium in mid-March, a tidy little ballpark, swept and green and balmy. Nolan Ryan is on the hill wearing that gruesome blaze of Astro orange and yellow across his chest, and he’s…
Despite the tides of government repression and suspected U.S. chicanery that have afflicted his country for the last 35 years, the Brazilian filmmaker Bruno Barreto claims he’s not much of a political animal. As if to underscore that, his only global success was 1978’s spirited erotic farce Dona Flor and…
With Zero Effect–an apt title if ever there was one–writer-director Jake Kasdan presumes to turn the hard-boiled detective movie on its head with Gen-X hipness. He winds up looking pretty empty-headed himself. Kasdan, the 22-year-old son of Big Chill/ Accidental Tourist director Lawrence Kasdan, would likely never have gotten his…
She’s loud. She’s brash. In the past, some of her teammates couldn’t stand her. While growing up poor in Triumph, Idaho, population fifty, she learned to scrap for the last pork chop on the platter. When the boys in town teased the freckle-faced girl with the funny name, her older…
For little Ludovic Fabre, the dreamy second-grader at the center of Ma Vie en Rose (My Life in Pink), everything would be fine if his childhood fantasies followed society’s orders. But nature has thrown him a curve. Ludovic doesn’t want to grow up to be a fireman, or a rough-and-tumble…
For better or worse, Barbet Schroeder is another one of those French directors who spent his youth watching Hollywood genre movies, over and over, in the smoky confines of the Paris Cinematheque. By the time he was big enough to find Jerry Lewis a genius, he had also absorbed everything…
When millionaire NHL celebrities like Adam Deadmarsh, Brett Hull and John Vanbiesbrouck take the ice this week wearing the colors of the United States, the media glare will be hot and the cheers deafening. But no U.S. Olympic hockey player will be prouder than an unknown, unpaid defenseman named Merz…
The driven, drawling Texas preacher Robert Duvall portrays in The Apostle is the latest in his long line of true believers, good and evil. Often taken for granted, this extraordinary actor has, on TV and in movies, played Nazi mass murderer Adolph Eichmann, Communist mass murderer Joseph Stalin, savior of…
There’s something curiously inanimate about Alan Rudolph’s Afterglow, but it’s certainly not the luminous and thoroughly engaging Julie Christie. Here’s a film that means to meditate on the pitfalls of marriage in the Nineties using slyness and dark wit, but it comes off as bloodless as a blueprint. Only the…
It seems impossible–doesn’t it?–that on the first day, he was terrible. Facing the Pittsburgh Steelers at Three Rivers Stadium, he completed just one of eight passes for a measly fourteen yards. He got sacked, hard, four times, and by game’s end looked like a deer in the headlights. Because those…
The superb British actor Alan Rickman, star of Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Sense and Sensibility, makes his directorial debut with The Winter Guest, a meditation on life, death and human relations that is as elusive as it is fascinating. It’s the kind of film that turns over in the mind,…
In the paranoid cosmology of Gregory Hoblit’s Fallen, satanic evil is transmitted from person to person by casual touching, like typhoid or some rampant strain of the flu. Almost no one is immune in this deadly game of tag. Not fry cooks on their cigarette breaks, not award-winning teachers walking…
How bad have things gotten for the Denver Nuggets? Well, the loudest cheer at any Nuggets home game in the last two miserable seasons, one bemused fan reports, erupted the time Rocky the Mascot, the red-sneakered mountain lion with the jagged lightning bolt shooting from his butt, yanked spectator John…
After watching Hard Rain, all but the most intrepid humans and whatever ducks are in the audience will probably feel like changing into dry clothes and curling up in front of the fire with a cup of hot bouillon. This has got to be the wettest movie in memory–wetter than…
Does Robert De Niro presume to play free safety for the Jets? Can Denzel Washington slam dunk over Dikembe Mutombo? Well, no. But if Dennis Rodman gets a notion to do King Lear, better break out the swords. Because ever since Sonja Henie and her skates signed with Darryl F…
Super Bowl, Stupor Bowl. I’m thinking ballpark. I’m thinking ballpark food. Baseball-park food. I’m thinking cornmeal-crusted red snapper on a pink plastic plate with the bulging eyes staring at you, and a huge heap of something unnamable piled next to him as a bonus. What are these things? Look like…
