When assessing the merits of Quills, the lusty new feature by director Philip Kaufman (Henry and June), you’re tempted to seek corresponding characters from popular movies in order to illustrate just how average this story is. In Kaufman’s film — affectionately constructed from a screenplay by Doug Wright, who adapts…
What Women Want could be the first movie to win a Clio Award for Advertisement of the Year. No fewer than two dozen products receive prominent placement in the film, from Federal Express to Foster’s Lager to Cutty Sark to L’eggs pantyhose to US Airways. After a while, you begin…
With luck, Yi Yi (A One and a Two), the seventh release from writer/director Edward Yang, one of Taiwan’s most respected filmmakers, will inspire interest in Taiwan’s cinema, but time isn’t on its side. While this is a rich and rewarding film, its pace is more leisurely than most American…
About halfway through the mega-budget mountain-climbing adventure Vertical Limit, even the most rugged, thrill-hungry disaster-movie fans may find themselves going numb. Not from the howling weather on the icy faces of K2 in the Himalayas, where the action supposedly takes place. Not from oxygen deprivation. Not even from stretches of…
Day 1: It was just part of the job, just another movie on another afternoon. This one promised to be no more special than any other, save for the casting of Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe. Proof of Life was the movie during which they fell in love, or whatever…
Fascinating and engrossing on every level, the beautifully constructed Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport opens with the mournful sound of a train and images of toys and books sitting untouched in what was once a child’s bedroom. As the credit sequence ends, an elderly woman addresses…
The grandpere of all jewel-heist movies, Jules Dassin’s Rififi hasn’t lost a thing since its initial release in 1955. Seeing it anew in revival, anyone who knows and loves this cinematic gem will be reminded that its descendants — which include everything from the old Mission Impossible TV series to…
You got your Good. You got your Evil. And you got your thirty-year-old multimillionaire moviemaker to explain the difference to you. Look out popcorn vendors. Here comes Unbreakable, the first film written and directed by young M. Night Shyamalan since he lit up the box office last year with a…
Have you heard? Beauty’s only skin deep. Pay attention, now: When it comes to love, experience is the best teacher. And just in case you didn’t know, youth is wasted on the young. Such are the banalities that director Tonie Marshall dispenses in Venus Beauty Institute, a French romantic comedy…
The moods of Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me are so artfully mingled that it’s difficult to get a fix on this highly personal independent feature. Set in a quiet little town in upstate New York’s lovely Catskill Mountains, it is at once a drama about the unresolved traumas…
The biggest wonder about the new Arnold Schwarzenegger ride is not that human cloning has become a reality, nor that the America of the future (“sooner than you think,” as an opening caption ominously suggests) very closely resembles present-day Vancouver. It’s not even that technological advances appear to have added…
Given the stress and emotional turmoil associated with family holidays, in the cinema as in life, it’s very peculiar that anyone feels obliged to entertain the notion of Thanksgiving anymore. Really, thanks for what, exactly? Jammed freeways? Delayed flights? Overcrowded supermarkets? Big, dead birds? Witch hunts? Territorial conquest and genocide?…
The subject — or rather, the object — of Christine Fugate’s unsettling and surprisingly poignant documentary The Girl Next Door is one Stacy Valentine, a pneumatic blonde from Oklahoma who recently concluded a brief but reasonably lucrative career as a porn star. The film spans two years, and for that…
November may mean Thanksgiving to most of us, but in the film biz it means a rush of “serious” films trying to gouge an impression into the short memories of Oscar voters. Men of Honor has Academy Award bait written all over it. If you were to use the latest…
At first glance, the new Japanese import Non-Stop seems to be a crude knockoff of German director Tom Tykwer’s wonderful Run Lola Run, but Non-Stop was released in Japan (under the title Dangan Runner) in 1996, two years before Lola was shot. Could Tykwer have seen the film at a…
The soon-to-be-talked-about sen-sations in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream include three or four flashing, near-subliminal montages that combine an eye’s iris and dilating pupil, an extreme closeup of heroin cooking in a teaspoon and a sucking hypodermic needle; a surpassingly frightening sequence in which Ellen Burstyn, in the midst…
The current release of French director Nicole Garcia’s Place Vendôme — which was nominated for eleven César Awards when it debuted in France two years ago — is yet another sign that the dropoff in French imports that plagued U.S. screens in recent years is reversing. This is roughly the…
The opening credits of Charlie¹s Angels hint at a movie that never appears in the film’s expurgated 94 minutes. The Mission: Impossible-style prelude suggests a live-action cartoon as directed by Robert Altman: A camera stalks the aisles of a jumbo jet, capturing snippets of scenery, from the bitchy, fey flight…
Any moviemaker who ventures into the sewers of New York City corruption will find Sidney Lumet’s wet footprints. In classics like The Pawnbroker, Serpico and Q&A, this streetwise film master has explored, among other things, individual morality in the face of big-city vice and individual transcendence of ethnic conflict. Other…
The stark simplicity of A Time for Drunken Horses, one of the few films that has slipped out of post-revolutionary Iran to the West, does nothing to obscure its emotional power or the complexity of the geopolitical issues underlying it. Filmed on location in wintry Kurdistan, it is the heartbreaking…
Italian-Americans may be glad to note that Two Family House, which centers on the Italian community in Staten Island, features not a single gangster, gun or ring to be kissed. They might be even happier if the film had also chosen not to depict the men as fat, pasta-eating, quick-tempered…
The setting of Stephen Daldry’s uplifting comedy Billy Elliot, about a working-class boy who wants to be a ballet dancer, is a beleaguered coal-mining town in the north of England, circa 1984. A coat of grime covers the squat brick row-houses, drying laundry flaps sadly in the breeze, and the…
