Benjamin Ross’s black comedy The Young Poisoner’s Handbook is a relentlessly nasty piece of goods that never hesitates to make a kind of existential antihero out of its protagonist–a brilliant, psychopathic fourteen-year-old who poisons his stepmother with stuff from his chemistry set and the local drugstore, gets caught, cons the…
It could be worse. This could be Boston. Or Cincinnati. Or Detroit. Or Kansas City. As it is, Denver, the Rocky Mountain West and assorted cornfields in Nebraska probably now have the ballclub they expected to have long before they got it. A club whose two most talented and expensive…
That old growing-up-and-moving-out thing is the coldest of dead horses, and anyone who can actually shoot a little life into the carcass deserves a round of applause from kids of all ages in the balcony. Enter Matt Reeves, born on Long Island, raised in Santa Monica and a moviemaker since…
The supposed intrigue in Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon is that it gives Western audiences a rare, sympathetic glimpse of contemporary Iran–a country and a society demonized here since the late ayatollah took those hostages and the evening news started showing demonstrators stomping on the American flag in the public…
To hear Ernie Paragallo tell it, he owns the fastest three-year-old on the face of the earth–maybe in the history of the universe. “I don’t think he’ll be beaten again,” Ernie boasted last week. “Ever?” a reporter asked. “Ever,” the owner said. Now, if you’d like to take that to…
The unlikely heroes of our story are a human geek named Mike and two wisecracking robots, all condemned by a mad scientist, Dr. Clayton Forrester, to watching really awful Hollywood movies in outer space. Under the circumstances, you’d talk back to the screen, too–loudly and often. Still, that doesn’t quite…
For those of us who didn’t grow up black in the segregated rural South, it’s hard to tell how much of Once Upon a Time…When We Were Colored is real-life inspiration and how much is nostalgia tinted by wishful thinking. In any event, this is the black feel-good movie of…
It’s July. You return to the office after a little vacation. Well, not a vacation, exactly–more like another trip to the welding shop. They cemented fourteen new bones into your body and bolted an Erector Set to your right elbow. Without making a big fuss about it, they also fulfilled…
The assumption by conservatives that Hollywood is some kind of decadent liberal underworld has never been supported by the facts. On the contrary, this hidebound old institution has always been fueled by one thing only–sheer profit motive–and it has never hesitated to buckle under pressure from outside powers that be…
The confirmed sentimentalist Franco Zeffirelli could probably tenderize a side of horse meat by pointing his camera at it–a gift the political advertisers might envy. But that makes him the wrong man for the job when it comes to a new version of Jane Eyre. Charlotte Bronte’s oft-filmed high school…
Most of America didn’t want Jackie Robinson to reach Daytona Beach, much less Brooklyn. In February 1946–half a century ago–Robinson and his new bride, Rachel, began one of the most important journeys in the nation’s sports and social history by boarding an airplane in Los Angeles. Everything went well until…
The martyred teenager Anne Frank has been memorialized by playwrights, filmmakers and historians, and her famous diary, perhaps the most extraordinary single document of the Holocaust, has sold 25 million copies since 1947 and has been translated into 54 languages. But Jon Blair’s poignant Anne Frank Remembered, which just won…
When the Republicans bellow for family films, they probably aren’t thinking of David O. Russell’s stuff. But moviegoers wondering if they’ll ever get to laugh again in the yuk-free zone of the Nineties need only catch Russell’s Flirting With Disaster to have their faith restored. Two years ago this bright…
Regular starting catcher Jayhawk Owens struggled to pull on his pants, his sprained left thumb encased in a wad of Ace bandage big enough to gift-wrap a Cadillac. Most of the prematurely weary relief pitchers had their shoulders packed in ice, like flounder headed for market. Roger Bailey, who sprained…
When Exorcist director William Friedkin remade Henri-Georges Clouzot’s great existential thriller The Wages of Fear in 1977, he dedicated Sorcerer to Clouzot, as a respectful student might. By contrast, the perpetrators of a new version of Diabolique, which is the late M. Clouzot’s most famous film, don’t even bother acknowledging…
Girl 6 has slipped into the theaters without the fanfare that ordinarily accompanies a new Spike Lee movie. That may be just as well, because this tart little comedy about a struggling actress who makes ends meet by serving up phone sex has none of Lee’s usual in-your-face rhetoric or…
At first glance, the morning mail holds few surprises. Two spring seed catalogues. The April issue of American Assassin. Hefty bills from the fishmonger, the liquor store and our regular supplier of badminton birdies. There’s a postcard from Elvis (vacationing in Grand Forks this week), a Republican flier recommending the…
Anyone who saw Marleen Gorris’s militant fantasy A Question of Silence in the mid-1980s immediately understood the Dutch filmmaker’s no-holds-barred feminism. In a clever twist on Death Wish and four decades of male-dominated revenge Westerns, Gorris had three ordinary women–a housewife, a waitress and a secretary–heap their pent-up resentment and…
Giuseppe Tornatore’s reputation on this side of the Atlantic rests on the 1989 Academy Award winner Cinema Paradiso, his engaging but sticky-sweet valentine to movie memory. That nostalgic box-office success sought to recapture a bygone filmmaking style, and it endorsed the prevailing American view of Italians as mushy sentimentalists who…
Now that America’s TV sets have had a few days to cool down and spouses everywhere are finally off the phone with their divorce lawyers, we can pause to consider what we’ve learned from the first two rounds of this year’s Big Dance: 1. Earl Boykins, the tiny point guard…
To hear Ethan and Joel Coen talk these days, they’re a couple of plain-spoken, rock-ribbed Midwesterners whose simple hearts remain in their home state of Minnesota. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course: The dominant qualities of the brothers’ work–from Raising Arizona to Barton Fink to The Hudsucker…
In these days of mindless Hollywood conformity and obscene movie budgets set aside for the destruction of cars and helicopters, the career of the magisterial Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray should be a lesson to us. In 1952, when the former economist and advertising man was working on Pather Panchali, the…
