One of the enduring curiosities of twentieth-century pop culture — and now 21st-century pop culture — is the tenacious hold The Rocky Horror Picture Show has exerted on audiences everywhere in America — and in some foreign countries, too — since its none-too-encouraging initial release in 1975. An outrageous spoof…
Neil LaBute is back to his old self again, and the cinematic world is a better place for it. Honestly, what was he thinking when he made Possession? Did the charges of misogyny, still lingering from In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors get to him so…
An Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film and winner of five Golden Lola Awards (the German Oscars), Nowhere in Africa recounts the true story of a Jewish family who fled Nazi Germany in 1938 and found refuge in Kenya. Although exquisitely shot and acted, the film is hampered…
Long ago, Eddie Murphy grew tired of Eddie Murphy parts: the fast-talking high-jiver, the preening put-on. Even before he began parodying himself in Bowfinger and Showtime and I Spy — the latter two perhaps accidentally — he accepted high-paying roles in low-rent movies that neutered and humiliated the character he…
What a strange enterprise, making a movie about reading a book. It’s the kind of paradox that philosophy students chew over at three in the morning — and a prospect any Hollywood producer would flee as fast as his Ferragamos could carry him. But for Mark Moskowitz, a lifelong bibliophile…
At some fast-approaching point in pop-culture evolution, we’re due to hit Total Outsider Saturation, wherein everybody is an outsider and therefore there is no longer an outside. In the fleeting meantime, we have scintillating reminders of the struggle, like X-2: X-Men United, the latest bid from comic-book land to increase…
If you have never heard of Lizzie McGuire, you are not a female child between the ages of six and fourteen, nor are you a parent with a female child between those ages. For the uninitiated, then, Lizzie is the eponymous heroine of the three-year-old, wildly popular Disney Channel TV…
Hooray for the altruists and art lovers at Madstone Theaters. Recognizing that distribution can be a nightmare for young and/or unknown indie filmmakers, the art-house chain is showing six promising new films, through May and June, that have played the festival circuit but haven’t yet attracted distributors. In Denver, Madstone’s…
The soundtrack of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s spare and beautiful new film, The Son (Le Fils) contains not a bar of music, not a tinkle of bell, not a whisper of breeze. Much of the film is set in the carpentry shop of a Belgium vocational school for troubled teenagers,…
You can’t be sure what to make of Identity for its first hour: Director James Mangold’s initial foray into the horror genre plays so much like a joke, it’s almost impossible to tell whether he’s making you laugh on purpose or because he is director James Mangold, maker of the…
Among Hollywood’s emerging directorial talents, Paul Thomas Anderson merits special notice for the boldness of his subject matter and the energy of his style. He is, after all, the fellow who vividly proposed, in Boogie Nights, that a houseful of variously drugged and deranged L.A. pornographers could be more devoted…
The Harry Potter phenomenon — on the page, in the movies, at the bank — has aroused in publishers and studio heads alike a sudden new appreciation for our children’s needs. These people understand that no consumer is more motivated than the parent of a kid in the heat of…
I’ll just admit this up front: My ideal concept of musical comedy involves Bryan Adams and Dave Matthews garroting each other on stage with their own damnable guitar strings. Nonetheless, even viewers with a more centrist appreciation of the genre may feel disappointed by this friendly new folk-music curiosity called…
Can we please, for the love of God, declare a moratorium on the use of Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music” on the soundtrack of any and all movies? (While we’re at it, “We Want the Funk” can go, too.) At the very least, if the plot of the movie…
I don’t know about you, but I love Billy Ray Valentine. Whenever Trading Places pops up on the boob tube, I tune in to watch the ebullient Eddie Murphy in one of his most uproarious performances and what could be his most deftly directed comedy. A penniless street hustler refurbished…
Imagine a large, dead Saint Bernard with its bones removed. Then visualize a hefty bellows inserted into it from behind with a gorilla hopping up and down on it, causing the huge dog’s bag-like corpse to twitch spasmodically, wheeze and croak. Voilà — this is today’s Nick Nolte. What’s amazing…
In 1997’s The Apostle, Robert Duvall took on a subject near and dear to his heart: Southern Pentecostal preachers. No one would make the film for him, so he went ahead and directed it himself, garnering much acclaim from media both secular and religious for his warts-and-all portrayal of a…
The powerful brand of political muckraking pioneered in the 1960s by the Greek filmmaker Constantin Costa-Gavras has largely fallen from favor, replaced by the sloppy, self-serving outbursts of oafs like Michael Moore. An opponent of tyranny in any form and under any flag, Costa-Gavras indicted right-wing Greek militarism in his…
Where in hell does all this stuff come from? That’s a question constantly posed by readers, movie-goers and half-soused nightclub audiences. What are the sources of an artist’s art? What weird compulsion enables a performer to stand naked before the prying eye of a camera, an empty canvas or a…
When you see a glamorous movie star like Kate Beckinsale tying her hair back and wearing glasses, it’s surefire shorthand that she’s an uptight soul. But just in case you aren’t familiar with the usual signals, writer-director Lisa Cholodenko gives a couple of even more obvious ones in her second…
You can be sure of one thing: None of the Hollywood glitterati who, on the advice of their agents, obscured their cleavages and kept their politics under their hats at this year’s supposedly war-dampened Academy Awards orgy have seen two minutes’ worth of the short films that were nominated for…
Lawrence Kasdan directs and co-writes (with William Goldman) Dreamcatcher, the latest addition to the Stephen King-adaptation genre, currently at 74 — including film and TV — and counting. According to the Internet Movie Database, this puts King handily ahead of Michael Crichton (23) and Bram Stoker (38); he’s closing in…
