What’s entertaining about October Sky is the unlikely but true spectacle of backwater West Virginia teens teaching themselves rocket science in the Eisenhower Fifties. They progress from a glorified cherry bomb to sophisticated missiles through trial and error and error. Their inner rocket fuel is the desire to avoid getting…
Stalking the crucial puberty-to-prom-night demographic can be a hazardous business, leading studio bankers and unwary moviemakers into some gruesomely familiar dead ends. That’s just what’s happened in the case of a sleep-inducing teen melodrama called Jawbreaker. Billed as the inevitable result of all the suburban slasher flicks and high-school comedies…
Between the current nostalgia for platform shoes and the epidemic of midlife crisis that has so many baby boomers in its grip, director Brian Gibson’s Still Crazy just might be able to find an audience among the disturbed, the deafened and the disenchanted. It is, after all, the comic tale…
Short of nuclear holocaust, a major sale at Kmart or a confirmed Clint Eastwood sighting back in rural Iowa, there’s probably no way to keep the movie version of Message in a Bottle from overwhelming the tender emotions of the hearts-and-flowers crowd. After all, this relentless assault on the tear…
The new Mel Gibson vehicle, Payback, is arguably the first major-studio release this year to have even a modicum of aesthetic ambition. For his directorial debut, Brian Helgeland–who won an Oscar for his screenplay for 1997’s L.A. Confidential (co-written with director Curtis Hanson)–has chosen to adapt The Hunter, the first…
Directed by Walter Salles (1995’s Foreign Land), the Brazilian Central Station concerns the relationship between a homeless nine-year-old boy and the insensitive, acerbic woman who reluctantly agrees to help him find his father. Winner of the Golden Bear award for Best Film at the 1998 Berlin Film Festival (along with…
For better or worse, the father figure in Larry Clark’s ironically titled Another Day in Paradise turns out to be Mel, a foul-mouthed forty-year-old junkie wearing a devil’s-red tennis shirt. His notion of good counsel is showing his surrogate son how to disable the burglar alarm at a medical clinic…
In the 1993 hit Groundhog Day, Bill Murray played a show-biz smartass who grew into a human being. Murray added a core of warmth and romance to his comic arsenal without losing his zinging wit and crack-up irony, and he’s kept that progress going, even in piddling vehicles such as…
“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” Kris Kristofferson sings in his most beguiling song, “Me and Bobby McGee.” Stephen Frears’s The Hi-Lo Country tries in vain to be just as lyrical about love and liberty. In this twentieth-century Western, a cattle rancher named Pete (Billy Crudup) narrates…
Genius can be a terrible, destructive gift. Jacqueline du Pre, the brilliant British cellist who enraptured audiences in the Sixties and Seventies with her musical passion and intensity, lived a life of great renown and acclamation but also one of harrowing loneliness and emotional turmoil. Her story is movingly told…
Elevate The Jerry Springer Show a notch or two–in other words, dispense with the one-legged serial killers who are having sex with their blind mothers and other such nonsense–and you’ve got Willard Carroll’s Playing by Heart. Too harsh a judgment, some will say. After all, this well-meaning, relentlessly sincere ensemble…
In the archetypal dead-end town of Lawford, New Hampshire, cold-eyed men looking for trouble prowl the streets in 4-x-4s with chrome spotlights and loaded gun racks. The gloomy barrooms are not gathering places so much as solitary-confinement cells, and the most popular local sport is macho posturing. In wintry Lawford,…
The coldhearted among us have watched Camille die tragically on the late show and have seen Brian Piccolo run his last yard through the cancer ward often enough to understand the several hazards of Hollywood “disease movies”–false sentiment, synthetic emotion and tears for tears’ sake. It is with wariness, then,…
Somewhere under the glossy imbecility of Varsity Blues lurks an idea that could make a great American movie: a coming-of-age story in a setting where no one else has come of age, a place where the hero must find his way to maturity without a mentor. The setting, in this…
Because it revealed the coke-snorting, ego-fueled corruption of Hollywood in the early 1980s with such acid wit, David Rabe’s play Hurlyburly became a huge audience hit when it burst onto Broadway in 1984. Here was the inside stuff from the Left Coast, gotten up in a frenetic new language combining…
The great attorneys of our time–Tom Cruise, Susan Sarandon, Tom Hanks–must now make room in the firm for a new partner. John Travolta, who in past lives has been a disco king, a hip hitman and a deep-fried presidential candidate, reinvents himself in A Civil Action as a greedy personal-injury…
Writer-director Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, the filmmaker’s adaptation of James Jones’s 1962 bestseller about the World War II battle for Guadalcanal, arrives in theaters with an almost unbearable weight of expectation. After graduating in the first class at AFI’s Advanced Film Studies program and working briefly as a…
Geniuses often come across unimpressively in the movies. Amadeus presented Mozart as a giggling fop. Both Kirk Douglas and Tim Roth gave us Van Gogh as a pathetic head case. I.Q.’s Albert Einstein was a cupid-playing old duffer. Ken Russell’s freaky depictions of Liszt and Mahler speak for themselves. When…
Best Ten Movies of 1998: 1. Saving Private Ryan. Steven Spielberg’s magnificent, harrowing D day epic is one of the great war movies ever made–and the most disturbing. Can The Thin Red Line match up? 2. Happiness. Director Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse) returns to his native New Jersey,…
In 1933, producer Merian C. Cooper, director Ernest B. Schoedsack, and pioneering animator Willis O’Brien created one of this century’s most indelible and powerful archetypes: King Kong. Then they did a peculiar thing: As if appalled at what they had wrought–but also delighted at the money it made them–they spent…
DreamWorks’ grandiose attempt at an animated feature for adults is a flimsy musical about Moses–a Sunday-school filmstrip writ ultra-large and decked out with the spectacle of Hollywood Bible epics. Slender sermons nestle among flashy action sequences and diaphanous fashion statements from the more tasteful pages of the Nefertiti’s Secret catalogue…
At the heart of Pat O’Connor’s rich, bittersweet Dancing at Lughnasa lies the quaint notion that once upon a time, people–especially women–whose youthful dreams were dashed, even those who lived entire lives of quiet desperation, might attain a state of grace, a kind of ascetic nobility to which the rest…
