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…
The bewildering penchant of recent American movies for glorifying the lovable naif, the perpetual adolescent and the village idiot takes a strange new turn in Miguel Arteta’s dark comedy Chuck & Buck. Arteta’s hero, Buck O’Brien (Mike White), is a 27-year-old manchild who eats lollipops all day long, takes refuge…
Rather than asking if this senseless and expensive new film from wunderkind entertainer Robert Zemeckis is devoid of merit (it is), or “worth seeing” (it isn’t), we should instead take the movie’s title — What Lies Beneath — as a direct question. Indeed, what does lie beneath? Possible answers include:…
French director Luc Besson’s underwater adventure The Big Blue has inspired ecstasy in fans around the world since 1988, and for the American contingent, the release this week of a “director’s cut” of the film will surely be cause for celebration. Besson (La Femme Nikita) has added almost an hour…
In Bryan Singer’s last movie, 1998’s Apt Pupil, Ian McKellen portrayed a Nazi war criminal hiding out in the suburbs, passing himself off as an ordinary old man crouching behind drawn blinds. In Singer’s new movie, X-Men, McKellen plays Erik Magnus Lehnsherr, the son of Jews who were murdered in…
Before home runs got as cheap as bubble gum, the great Detroit Tiger slugger Hank Greenberg stood out as one of just ten major-league players who had hit fifty or more dingers in a season. In that, the original Hammerin’ Hank’s company was rare: Ruth, Foxx, Wilson, Kiner, Mize, Mantle,…
t has taken moviemakers and, more crucially, foot-dragging movie investors almost a decade to catch up with rave culture — the heady mix of secret warehouses, electronic music, designer drugs and ecstatic dancing that has come to define the yearning and the restlessness of a generation. But now the 5…
or most Americans, the social and political issues underlying José Luis Cuerda’s Butterfly seem remote. The tensions between republicans and fascists in Spain after the fall of that nation’s monarchy in 1931, as well as dictator Francisco Franco’s victory in the bloody Spanish Civil War, may have stirred strong feelings…
In the new Jim Carrey farce, Me, Myself & Irene, the rubber-faced comedian plays a meek Rhode Island state trooper named Charlie whose aggressions are so pent-up that they finally have to break out in the form of a second personality called “Hank.” Where Charlie silently endures potty-mouthed curses from…
Istvan Szabo’s Sunshine, which he’s directed in English, aspires to epic sweep and Tolstoyan grandeur. It runs almost three hours. But there’s still a breathless, hurried quality that doesn’t suit its many tangled dramas very well. The impeccably literate Hungarian director (best known in the United States for his 1981…
About nine years ago, in a humble nightclub, urbane British folk singer Billy Bragg reappraised twentieth-century politics — as is often his Socialist wont — by means of an intriguing correlation. Might it be, he postulated, that contemporaries Leon Trotsky and Harlan Sanders were not merely striking doppelgangers, but, in…
Before we see anything in Croupier, the new film from director Mike Hodges and screenwriter Paul Mayersberg, we hear the grainy whir of the ball spinning around the rim of a roulette wheel. When the image of the wheel appears, the sound drops out, to be replaced by the affectless…
The title of the 1971 Gordon Parks detective movie Shaft worked as a double entendre; when it presented Richard Roundtree’s “black private dick,” John Shaft, as a superstud at whom women of every race threw themselves, it wasn’t hard to believe. The joke changes when the name is given to…
Kikujiro, the latest release from Japanese filmmaker Takeshi Kitano, will likely come as a surprise to his American fans — possibly even a disappointment — if they walk in unprepared. But in fact, the movie is altogether worthwhile, so just get yourselves prepared. Kitano initially attracted attention when his first…
It’s the year 3028, and man…is an endangered species! (Haven’t we heard that before — like, just last month?) This time around, though, the threat is a little more intimidating than those effeminate, Xenu-worshiping Conehead psychologists in platform boots. The villains in Fox’s new animated spectacular Titan A.E. are the…
Literary critics often call Hamlet “the first modern man” because he’s preoccupied with the nature of self and the consequences of action. But in a spellbinding new take on Shakespeare’s great tragedy by independent filmmaker Michael Almereyda, the melancholy prince also takes on the trappings and attitudes of postmodern man…
How does a film critic — or any film viewer — come to terms with Matthew Barney’s Cremaster films? The thirty-something Yale graduate has apparently been a major figure in the New York art scene for nearly a decade. I say “apparently,” because my aversion to the New York art…
