Simon West, the director of The General’s Daughter, the new thriller starring John Travolta and Madeleine Stowe, likes the kind of close-ups that bore into an actor’s face, exposing every clogged pore and mascara smudge. In the film, his camera also tracks in to capture the thick layer of sweat…
Disney departed from its usual practice of basing big, animated features on classic literature or myth when it made what has proved to be one of the studio’s most popular films ever, The Lion King. Yet just barely beneath its surface, that film had a streak of xenophobia carried almost…
There is, near the end of the spy-spoof sequel Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, a dick joke. It begins like many run-of-the-mill dick jokes, of which the rest of the film is almost entirely composed, but it blossoms into one stellar, protracted, deftly executed, masterful dick joke. It…
Pretentiousness masquerading as profundity; self-indulgence masquerading as art. The Loss of Sexual Innocence, the dreadful new film from writer/director Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas, One Night Stand), joins the ranks of the worst films ever made. On the surface, this statement may seem harsh and heartless–but it will strike anyone…
In John Sayles’s Limbo, which is set amid the rough-and-tumble of southeast Alaska, an ex-salmon fisherman with guilty memories (David Strathairn), an itinerant lounge singer with a lousy voice (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and the singer’s melancholy teenage daughter (newcomer Vanessa Martinez) become stranded, Robinson Crusoe-style, on a remote island. This…
Bernardo Bertolucci’s Besieged is a movie of enthralling visual poetry. Set almost entirely within a ravishing Roman villa, the film is a love story played out in furtive glances and stolen looks by characters on opposite sides of the ethnic divide. Culturally, Mr. Kinsky (David Thewlis) and Shandurai (Thandie Newton)…
The peerless Ethiopian distance runner Haile Gebrselassie is a tiny man–5’3″ and barely 115 pounds–but in his native country, his heroism looms large. Since 1994 he has set fifteen world records at five different distances, and at the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, he outdueled a trio of favored…
In an early scene in Instinct, released by Touchstone, a division of Disney’s Buena Vista Pictures, we’re told that a brilliant primatologist named Ethan Powell (played by Anthony Hopkins) is being brought back to the United States from Rwanda, where for several years he has been engaged in a close…
It has not been lost on the Quinn brothers–actor Aidan, cinematographer Declan and writer/director Paul–that in old Gaelic culture, the tribal bard, or storyteller, was held in the highest esteem. The Quinns want to be Irish storytellers, too, and to that end, they have loaded up This Is My Father,…
Maybe it’s the damned blinking thing, because it’s not simply the foppish hair and boyish face–or, for that matter, even the vaguely befuddled reticence and wry, self-abasing demeanor we Americans prefer to see in our Brits. It’s got to be the blinking. That’s what he does, almost all he does,…
If your poodle is decked out in the complete Captain Kirk uniform, you’ve taken Klingon language classes, or you once mailed DeForest Kelly a joint taped to a piece of cardboard just “to return the favor,” the 86-minute documentary called Trekkies is a must-view–love it or loathe it. In the…
Fans call it “that Star Wars feeling,” the raw emotional high achieved by watching or even just thinking about the films of George Lucas. It’s a sort of gut-swirling, swooning sensation, the effect of tripping on a fantasy world, a wonderland, a place unlike Earth or even the movies. And…
It’s been half a century since the maestro, Vittorio De Sica, created the undisputed masterpiece of Italian neo-realism in the chaotic streets of post-war Rome. The Bicycle Thief, which begins a fiftieth-anniversary revival this Friday at the Mayan, was made on a minuscule budget, using a pair of aging cameras,…
Australia, the land once stocked with convicts battling for a second chance, loves the scrappy underdog. Whether it’s a pig named Babe, who thinks he’s a dog, or an adventurer named Crocodile Dundee, exiled to callous New York City with a huge knife in his belt, the Aussie little guy…
A Midsummer Night’s Dream came early in Shakespeare’s career. He had written it by at least 1598, in roughly the same period as another lyric-romantic masterpiece, Romeo and Juliet. Despite Samuel Pepys’s famous dismissal of Dream as “the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life,” it…
David Mamet, famous for his in-your-face characters, brutal (and frequently raunchy) dialogue and deliberate, staccato prose, would seem an unlikely choice to write and direct a screen adaptation of British playwright Terence Rattigan’s genteel drama about injustice. But the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Glengarry Glen Ross–whose body of work is…
The latest release from Paramount Pictures’ bouncing baby, MTV Films, is set in a high school and has been inoculated with the usual doses of teenage angst, teenage wit and teenage lust. Here’s the surprise: It declines to get down on its hands and knees to woo Generation Y to…
When we first see Isa, the 21-year-old heroine of Erick Zonca’s The Dreamlife of Angels, she’s trudging under the weight of a huge backpack through the chill dawn of an almost featureless European city. With her close-cropped dark hair and street urchin’s sniffle, she seems to be carrying the burden…
Among minor works of late-twentieth-century art, something called the CityGrilleburger occupies a special place in our heart–and not just because of its fat count. A luscious beef patty of heroic proportion, it arrives cloaked in melted Swiss cheese, crisp bacon and–the coup de grace–a dollop of garlicky Caesar dressing. It’s…
A hand-wringing reassessment of the libertine 1960s has hit full stride–stirred as much, you can’t help thinking, by the transfiguration of former acidheads and ex-leftist firebrands into establishment powermongers as by the half-baked grumblings of their children. The anti-war and civil-rights movements were shot through with self-service and intolerance, the…
Just as David Cronenberg’s 1986 The Fly came off as an organic reaction to a terrible new wasting disease, his new movie crystallizes the confusions of an epoch that can’t decide whether it’s the Entertainment Era, the Information Age or the Digital Millennium. Named for a fictional “game system” also…
In Pushing Tin, the edgy new comedy from British director Mike Newell, the dominant image is a black screen pulsing with obscure fluorescent markings, like the characters on some early prototype of Pac-Man. In this case, though, nobody’s playing any games. The markings represent very real jet airliners filled with…
