Even in the best of his movies, like that clever play on deja vu, Groundhog Day, Bill Murray never quite escapes the role of sketch artist–a comic built for short attention spans whose TV shtick is never quite big enough for the big screen, whose caricatures never quite grow into…
When last we glimpsed the ruthless international assassin known as the Jackal, 24 years ago, he was a dead ringer for the suave British actor Edward Fox and he was hot on the trail of Charles de Gaulle, armed only with cunning and a sniper’s rifle concealed in a suitcase…
Andy MacKenzie, lean, blond and 23, goes back a long way. At 17 he was a fearless Vermonter ripping down the double-black-diamond steeps of Mount Snow with Nirvana blasting through his headphones. At 21 he was a streak of blue and white Gore-Tex bombing the scariest precipices of Vail and…
The rebellious heroines of Deepa Mehta’s Fire have gotten viewers in the filmmaker’s native India a lot more worked up than Thelma and Louise ever dreamed of doing here. While women are applauding, hundreds of thousands of Indian husbands apparently see the picture as a threat to their happy homes…
For those of us living here in the Colonies, British slapstick has always been an acquired taste, and the Mother Country’s ever-so-popular TV character “Mr. Bean” takes more acquiring than most. Meanwhile, the producers of Bean, which marks the goggle-eyed buffoon’s first appearance on the big screen, have collected more…
Let’s hear it for Don Baylor. The Rockies skipper has signed up for another two years’ worth of 15-13 games at Coors Field. He’s ready to endure another two years’ worth of ulcers whenever he looks down at the bullpen and sees the reluctant warriors huddled there, praying they won’t…
The quirky documentarian Errol Morris finds human drama in strange places. His most renowned film, 1988’s The Thin Blue Line, made such a compelling case for the innocence of a convicted Dallas cop-killer that the prisoner eventually walked off death row. Morris has also examined the genius physicist Stephen Hawking…
The Joe Eszterhas who wrote the screenplay for Telling Lies in America is a kinder, gentler soul than the hard-nosed hipster who got a couple million bucks for turning Sharon Stone into the lethal temptress of Basic Instinct or conceived that masterpiece of the cinematic arts, Showgirls. This new Joe…
Don’t worry about a thing, Oklahoma. That 69-7 thumping Dr. Tom’s hard-running Cornhuskers laid on you Saturday afternoon was child’s play. Don’t sweat it, Central Michigan. Steve Spurrier’s Florida Gators may have chomped on you 82-6 earlier this year, but that ain’t nothing. Don’t get too upset, East Carolina, Rutgers,…
In Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca, the cleverest (if not quite the most convincing) science-fiction movie of the year, the near future is inhabited by designer humans whose DNA codes have been rigged down at the lab for conformist perfection and by “in-valids,” the inferior products of parents who’ve relied on mere…
The ongoing anxieties and agonies of the American family don’t make for a pretty picture. Divorce and disorder have replaced macaroni and cheese as the domestic commonplace, but most people can give little credence to either the self-righteous prescriptions of the fundamentalist right or the ecstatic bleatings of the new-agers…
To hear the assorted hairdos on the boob tube tell it, you would have thought getting the Broncos onto that snowbound plane to balmy Buffalo Saturday night was a social imperative akin to feeding malnourished babies or keeping nuclear terrorists out of the Pentagon lunchroom. Forget about the sleepless expectant…
Here’s a wonder. The dirty little pleasures of Boogie Nights, which chronicles the follies and the fondest dreams of a group of L.A. porn stars in the late Seventies and early Eighties, have almost nothing to do with sex or debauchery. Instead, this sly and hugely entertaining flashback to the…
The twentieth edition of the Denver International Film Festival gets under way tonight, October 23, with a showing at the Continental Theatre of The Wings of a Dove, Iain Softley’s adaptation of the Henry James classic, and closes October 30 with The Ice Storm, novelist Rick Moody’s harrowing tale of…
Just when you thought you couldn’t stand to watch another movie about a household concealing a dark secret–or sit through another Thanksgiving reunion–along comes The House of Yes. Adapted from Wendy MacLeod’s award-winning play We Are Living in the House of Yes, it’s a black comedy of manners concerning a…
Denver baseball fans find themselves nailed to the couch again this October, watching a pair of teams from distant cities contest the World Series. This is the way it’s been for five seasons, and likely the way it will remain for five or ten or who knows how many more…
Jennifer Jason Leigh, who’s played everything from an acid-tongued Jazz Age sophisticate in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle to a drug-addled Nineties narc in Rush, has a lot to live up to as the heroine in the new adaptation of Henry James’s classic Washington Square. First there’s the literary…
Once again we are being bombarded by movies in which a new generation vents its anger at the sins, real and imagined, of the older one. The most eloquent of these outcries, I think, are David O. Russell’s vivid 1996 black comedy Flirting With Disaster, in which a baffled yuppie…
When I first knew Grissom–it seems like a century ago now–he was like a lot of other well-heeled jock wannabes. He wanted sporting goods. All kinds of sporting goods, and nothing but the best. When Wilson came out with its top-of-the-line A-2000 outfielder’s glove, Grissom (a pseudonym) was the first…
Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s La Promesse is that rare thing, a coming-of-age drama that carries real moral weight without seeming ponderous and transforms a hot political topic into flesh-and-bone drama. The story introduces us to Igor (Jeremie Renier), a fifteen-year-old Belgian boy who’s forced to live a double life in…
Now that Oliver Stone has explained to us (at some length) that the CIA killed JFK, that Nixon was a paranoid loser, but not quite the paranoid loser his enemies have always imagined, and that violence in America is really a conspiracy between the celebrity-hungry public and the cynical mass…
Baseball’s ghost of honor this season was Jackie Robinson, and the hundreds of uplifting things the scores of speechmakers said in ballparks from coast to coast about his courage were long overdue. But they told only part of the story. Half a century after Robinson broke baseball’s color line, he…
