Compiled in the cold light of day, the sum of Chuck Barris’s contributions to American culture are: the Top 40 ditty “Palisades Park,” which he wrote in 1962, and his discovery a few years later that many people are willing to make complete fools of themselves in front of a…
Once upon a time, in the town of Darkness Falls… “Wait,” you’re probably saying to yourself, “Darkness Falls is the name of the town?” Yes. Yes it is. And it’s haunted by an evil tooth fairy. Are you sure you want to know more? Okay, good. Because once you get…
It’s easy to see the subtle brilliance of Gene Hackman’s acting whenever we revisit modern classics such as The French Connection or The Conversation. This plain-faced master of character brings to the role of a grubby, dogged New York cop or a desolate surveillance expert all the low, discomfiting details…
Paul Morse (Jason Lee) has this terrible problem: He’s all set to marry take-charge, raven-haired beauty Karen (Selma Blair, thanklessly playing second fiddle as usual), but late in the game finds himself also falling for her free-spirited blond cousin, Becky (Julia Stiles). Gee, what’s a guy to do? It’s always…
It all begins with the word. “I believe I may have a first sentence,” murmurs Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman — yes, really) to her husband, Leonard (Stephen Dillane), commencing labor on her fourth novel, Mrs. Dalloway. The year is 1921, but skillfully intercut segments illustrate that the book’s heady emotional…
Nicolas Roeg’s wonderfully tricky horror movie Don’t Look Now, set amid the crumbling splendor of Venice, was made in 1973; for three decades, it has attracted an ever-expanding cult intrigued by its grown-up frights and relentless eroticism. Madstone Theaters will screen Roeg’s occult thriller Friday and Saturday night at 9:30…
Spike Lee’s adaptation of David Benioff’s 2001 novel The 25th Hour hews closely to the original tale, which the author has adapted in screenplay form. Montgomery Brogan, a working-class white boy who dreamed of being a New York City firefighter till he fell into the pile of easy money made…
Those who seek a polar opposite to Michael Caine’s kind-but-firm patriarch Dr. Wilbur Larch in The Cider House Rules will find it in Jim Broadbent’s horrid, one-eyed headmaster, Wackford Squeers, in the new adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby. Author John Irving cribbed extensively from Charles Dickens to create his delightful (and…
There have been a number of films dealing with the Jewish ghettos during the Nazi occupation of Poland — some very good — but The Pianist, the latest feature from Roman Polanski, may be the best. Of course, it starts out with a huge advantage: The 69-year-old Polanski is probably…
Francis Ford Coppola dreamed of doing an accurate Pinocchio film, but legal battles took that away from him. Walt Disney’s version is a classic, but it omits a huge amount of material from the original book and Disneyfies what remains. And although others have tried over the years, each tended…
They’re both gone now, Jack Lemmon and Billy Wilder, but they leave behind the bittersweet legacy of such Hollywood gems as Some Like It Hot and Fortune Cookie. The best of all their collaborations, perhaps, is The Apartment (1960), in revival Friday, January 3, at the Starz FilmCenter. It’s a…
Al Capone himself probably couldn’t kill Chicago. The ribald Kander and Ebb musical has been charming theater audiences since 1975 with its gleefully jaundiced view of life, and Rob Marshall’s inventive movie version is likely to win a lot of new friends for the stage-struck murderess Roxie Hart, her sharpie…
Based on the true story of three young aboriginal girls who walked 1,500 miles across the Australian Outback to be reunited with their mothers, Rabbit-Proof Fence might well be subtitled True Grit in recognition of the courage and single-minded determination that drove the trio to undertake such a perilous journey…
The long collaboration between the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa and his alter ego, actor Toshiro Mifune, was one of the most fruitful in all of film history: The ideal vessel for Kurosawa’s ideas and obsessions — from the definition of classic Samurai honor to modern man’s need for compassion…
Martin Scorsese’s latest epic of the streets, Gangs of New York, means to show us how a great metropolis was forged from the mid-nineteenth-century cauldron of unbridled greed, ethnic violence and the Civil War. It means to give us the city as wild frontier — without the usual cowboy hats…
Fantasy is at its best when it ennobles our reality, and at the movies this year no fantastic adventure towers above The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The second installment of J.R.R. Tolkien’s delightful yarn is adapted just as handily as last year’s The Fellowship of the Ring,…
The Rocky Horror Picture Show. A miracle in midnight-movie finery; a spot-on analysis of adolescent ambition, gender struggles and xenophobia; an eternal pop-culture time capsule: Richard O’Brien’s madcap musical, adapted with and directed by Jim Sharman, offers participation-primed audiences — who aren’t sounding their smartest these days — the secret…
Each of the beautifully made vignettes that make up Rebecca Miller’s Personal Velocity glimpses a young woman caught at a crossroads, faced with an important decision and about to experience one of those rare dilations of vision that can change an entire life. Now, this is a common ploy in…
Maid in Manhattan, in which Jennifer Lopez goes from pauper to princess, comes not from a screenplay, but from a handful of self-help books and fairy tales and fashion magazines cut and pasted together in a glossy montage committed to celluloid. Characters, made from the highest-grade cardboard and resplendent in…
The Italian film director Luchino Visconti once said that the only thing that really counts on the screen is “an expression of the burden of being human.” Of all his work, Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960), which is showing in revival Friday through December 19 at the Starz FilmCenter,…
Robert De Niro always did love an acting challenge, but lately those challenges have been less along the lines of “Can I convincingly play a boxer?” and more like “Can I alone be good enough to make this formulaic mess worth watching?” Yes, it was impressive that he played a…
Transcribed verbatim from the DVD commentary track of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, here’s an informative sci-fi concept from director George Lucas: “…as we go through the movie, there’s all little funny moments like Jango bumping his head because in Star Wars one of the Stormtroopers bumps…
