For those who don’t already know that Pablo Picasso was a great artist and a cruel son of a bitch, filmdom’s beacons of good taste, Merchant, Ivory and Jhabvala, now step forward, shoes all shined, to oh-so-gently kick him in the derriere. In Surviving Picasso, they have once again chosen…
The emotion in a Mike Leigh film is as plain as dirt and as valuable as gold. This most gifted of all British moviemakers may, in fact, be a kind of miracle worker: He takes the stuff of ordinary working- and middle-class life–trying and failing, the terrors of aging, small…
Think Ross Perot is a long shot to win the White House a week from Tuesday? How about the Green Party candidate for president? Or the Libertarian? How about Mrs. Grundy of the Civic Purity League? Well, to tell the truth, they’ve all got a lot better chance in their…
Lovely Geena Davis doesn’t look much like Arnold Schwarzenegger. But once the prop department for The Long Kiss Goodnight outfits her with enough high-tech assault rifles, .45 automatics and shark-fin hunting knives to take out a fair-sized army, it’s pretty hard to tell the difference. Like Big Arnie on a…
In a land most Americans associate with single-malt whiskey, four-putt greens and the lyrics of Robert Burns, a major literary and cinematic revival continues apace–and the Scottish tourist office is probably still hiding its head. No sooner has the dark and brilliant Trainspotting painted Edinburgh as a nest of roving…
In the Acme Oyster House on Iberville Street, three big fellows wearing muddy aprons and yellow rubber gloves were shucking as fast as they could. The Sunday afternoon hangover crowd was packed cheek-to-jowl inside the Acme, harbored now from a steady, gulf-blown rain, but not from the whips and jangles…
In Larry and Andy Wachowski’s Bound, film noir gets one helluva gender-bending. But when the scamming and shooting stop, the genre looks healthier than ever. Envision Double Indemnity with two Barbara Stanwycks, no Fred MacMurray and a couple of enflamed lesbian love scenes. Throw in a briefcase stuffed with 2…
With six straight hit movies in the bank and a pair of Oscars on the mantel, Tom Hanks has inflated into a major Hollywood power. So when he tells the guys in suits he wants to write and direct a film all his own, the suits start nodding vigorously into…
That sound you hear deep in the night is the Titanic hitting an iceberg. The passengers don’t know it yet, and the crew isn’t talking, but she’s going to the bottom. The worst-case scenario for major-league baseball is that the fans are finally so fed up with the loudmouthed martinets…
Imagine a Quentin Tarantino movie made by a grownup. A movie fueled by Tarantino’s brand of daredevil adrenaline but with none of his schoolboy nihilism. A movie drenched in blood that also understands loss. A swaggering black comedy stuffed with betrayals that still takes time to glimpse the soul of…
The best movie of the year has nothing to do with space aliens blowing up the White House. Or the durability of the Klan in Mississippi. Or shooting heroin in Scotland. The best movie of the year is about a couple of Italian immigrant brothers struggling to keep a restaurant…
To the immutable rules of life mandating romantic fidelity, high-quality whiskey and early knowledge of the multiplication tables, it might be wise to attach the following: The moment you turn twelve, stop seeking autographs. This comes to mind in the wake of an announcement last week that Michael Lasky, founder…
In the final scene of The First Wives Club, a comic fantasy in which three middle-aged women take revenge on the husbands who have traded them in for newer models, the triumphant heroines, all dressed in stylish, sinless white, link arms in the glistening dawn streets of lower Manhattan and…
All right, buffs, let’s see if we can get this straight. In 1961 the great director Akira Kurosawa made a lightly veiled homage to American Westerns called Yojimbo, starring Toshiro Mifune as a cold-eyed samurai-for-hire who teaches an overdue lesson to both warring factions in a lawless town–now located in…
How about a nice hand for Hideo Nomo? Better yet, how about skipping the usual courtesies and immediately installing Hideo Nomo in the Hall of Fame? On September 17 the Dodgers’ high-kicking, skyward-gazing right-hander waited out a two-hour pre-game rain delay, then threw the third no-hitter of the 1996 baseball…
If Cameron Diaz knows what’s good for her, she’ll settle down with a nice, stable insurance salesman in rural South Dakota, have five kids and vote Republican forevermore. Hey, it could happen. For now, though, the spectacular blonde who helped transform Jim Carrey from geeky bank clerk to strutting superstud…
Characters in soap operas have phony first names like Blake and Krystle and Fallon and Caress–names no one else has. Real people have real names like Sandis and Uwe and Sylvain–you know, everyday names. The characters in soap operas are always trying to screw other characters in the bedroom or…
When movie actors talk in reverent tones about David Mamet, Team Hollywood’s designated thinker, it’s probably not because they regard him as the nation’s leading playwright. Or because of his famous insights into the emptiness of the American Dream and the casual cruelties of the business world. Or even because…
Look out below. Here’s another movie about a child’s grief, a hard-shelled grownup’s loneliness, and the healing power of imagination. It unfolds in Las Vegas (the city of illusions) and Newark, New Jersey (Harsh Reality, U.S.A.), and features Gerard Depardieu in, roughly speaking, the role of Harvey the invisible rabbit…
Salt this name away, Rockies fans: Scott Randall. As the club’s fourth season winds down with an ineffectual bang (four Bombers with a hundred RBIs each–first time in the National League since 1929) and a resounding whimper (8 million bucks’ worth of Saberhagen and Swift still on the shelf), you…
If you’re going to spoof a movie genre, it’s probably best to reproduce the old plots and characters and cliches to near-perfection, then give the mannerisms a hard, deviant twist. The keenest humor, after all, always lies close to the truth. In The Big Squeeze–a mutant take on Forties film…
While Republicans and Democrats spend the summer wrangling over custody of the American family, our most thoughtful filmmakers continue to address the burning issue with less bombast, but in far greater depth. Case in point: Lisa Krueger’s Manny & Lo. In a swift hour and a half, this promising new…
