Based on the true story of how a football team brought together the segregated town of Alexandria, Virginia, in the early 1970s, Remember the Titans is the first film from producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s Technical Black production company, which is meant to offer more contemplative and slower-paced films than his hollow,…
In The Opportunists, the debut feature by writer/director Myles Connell, the stakes are low, the relationships are subtle, and Christopher Walken hardly raises his voice, barking only a single syllable in a fleeting moment of anguish. Of course, one of the many pleasures of Walken is watching him lose his…
Much has changed for urban gays in the two decades since William Friedkin’s Cruising. That controversial serial-killer thriller — set in the leather bars and after-hours sex clubs of New York’s West Village — was derided by gay-rights activists as a piece of cheapjack sensationalism leading only to trouble, seemingly…
Aimée & Jaguar tells the true story of a love affair between two women: one a Jew passing as a Gentile while working for the underground, the other a German housewife honored by the Third Reich as an “exemplar of Nazi motherhood.” Felice Schragenheim was a German Jew who, unlike…
Some may find reason to embrace the romantic comedy Woman on Top as the nonsensical, sweet-tempered fantasy of two South American filmmakers who don’t understand life in this country very well but grasp all the magical powers of Brazil. After all, Brazil ranks second only to fashionable Tibet on every…
This song explains why I’m leaving home and becoming a stewardess,” says Anita Miller (Zooey Deschanel) to her well-meaning, overbearing mother as the soundtrack begins to swell with the low hums of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. Just a few seconds earlier, Elaine Miller (Frances McDormand) had insisted she wouldn’t…
In recent years, the fabulous Chilean expatriate director Raoul (sometimes Raul) Ruiz has moved from shoestring-budgeted features that could qualify as avant-garde to increasingly opulent movies with major art-house stars and a shot at mainstream success. Not yet sixty, he has made more than sixty films since his 1968 debut…
There’s a trio of duets in Duets. The film is set in the world of karaoke singing, but the title really refers to three sets of paired-off actors performing pas de deux to the tune of John Byrum’s Golden-Age-of-Television-ish dialogue. Only one of the three duos shakes fully to life,…
Humans and their stories, my, oh my. Somehow, the familiar themes just keep coming around, again and again, ad infinitum. Of course, most of them have already been captured and processed by Shakespeare. From the bitter young man to the crazy old king, from the flirty young thing to the…
Here’s the beginning of The Way of the Gun that you will not see, because it was written but never filmed: Two men, Parker and Longbaugh, urinate in an open grave in front of mourners, beat up a priest, steal organs meant for transplant and shoot a dog. The introduction,…
The strange love affair that rules Patrice Leconte’s Girl on the Bridge is full of old-fashioned European art-movie attractions. The young heroine, Adele (pop singer and Chanel model Vanessa Paradis), is a delicate, doe-eyed woman-child who can’t tell love from sex and is so melancholy that she wants to leap…
Amanda Peet has some really large teeth. Seriously. Even given the fact that it’s in vogue for a hot, young, would-be sex symbol to have a set of brightly polished choppers prominent for all to see (think Neve Campbell, Casper Van Dien or Denise Richards), Amanda’s impressive ivories take the…
Honestly, of late have you found yourself enthralled by pleasing stimuli? Please, no nauseating responses like “Aromatherapy shifts my reality” or “After I get Rolfed, my heart is more open to love.” Instead, think of the good, serendipitous stuff, the random intoxicants that bombard your subcutaneous organs. For example, has…
Despite its late-summer release date — usually a sign of studio jitters — The Art of War is a mostly well-constructed action flick with a number of flashy, well-choreographed fight and chase scenes. Wesley Snipes stars as Neil Shaw, a super-secret operative of a super-secret “dirty tricks” agency, whose methods…
As any Klump family member can tell you, this has been a hot summer for black comedians. New movies starring Martin Lawrence, the Wayans brothers and Eddie Murphy have already pulled down more than $300 million at the box office, and by the time Chris Rock’s remake of Heaven Can…
When John Waters is at his best, as he is in his latest, Cecil B. Demented, he can grab you in a way few filmmakers have ever managed to do. But recognizing that fact can sometimes be difficult in today’s market-driven context. In fact, for the first half-hour or so…
In the view of documentarians Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey, fallen ’80s televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker — she of the pink feather boas and the streetwalker mascara — was the misunderstood victim of right-wing religious zealots, unscrupulous reporters and a corrupt judicial system. Now living “in exile” (also known as…
There’s no explicable reason for the existence of The Replacements, which is to the football-film genre what Major League was to the baseball movie: sports rendered as sitcom (or Police Academy sequel). The Replacements, which takes as its cue the 1987 National Football League players’ strike, is stocked with every…
Irish charm and British eccentricity are hot properties on this side of the pond, especially among U.S. moviegoers. Witness the phenomenal success of The Secret of Roan Inish, in which a ten-year-old Irish girl finds her lost brother living among seals off the rugged western coast, or of The Full…
It’s a pleasure to say that Clint Eastwood reverses his recent downward slide — A Perfect World (1993), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Absolute Power (1997) and True Crime (1999), each of which has seemed less satisfying than its predecessor — with Space Cowboys, his latest. It isn’t an…
Murphy and Pryor. Skywalker and Kenobi. Amos and Zeppelin. Regardless of the creative universe, the maverick apprentice tends to stride off into territory beyond the edges of the master’s map. So it is with Alan Rudolph, whose career blossomed after he served as assistant director to Robert Altman on Nashville…
It would be the easiest thing in the world to write off But I’m a Cheerleader — the story of a teenager discovering her sexual identity through a program designed to repress it — as a Saturday Night Live sketch somewhat awkwardly inflated to feature length. But when you start…
