Have adultery, murder and greed all moved to the sticks? Once firmly rooted in the big city, the seven deadly sins have taken on a distinct country-and-Western twang in recent years, thanks to noirish, tough-minded scamfests like John Dahl’s Red Rock West and The Last Seduction, James Foley’s After Dark,…
Insofar as filmmaker Tony Gatlif’s justly admired “gypsy trilogy” is an exploration of his roots and a search for his nature–he was born in Algeria to gypsy parents of Spanish origin but was later polished at Paris’s L’Ecole des Beaux Arts–it comprises one of the most passionate and telling self-examinations…
The hero of John Waters’s gently subversive new romp, Pecker, is a happy Baltimore teenager of the same name whose primary pleasure is shooting neighborhood snapshots with an old thrift-shop camera. Girls on the bus preen for him. He captures dancers in the local strip club through a back-alley window…
Jackie Chan’s American fans–and I’m one of them–have suffered through a nervous 1998 so far. The momentum the star earned with the 1996 release of Rumble in the Bronx has seemed to dissipate steadily: An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, the first American production to employ Chan since the…
Leelee Sobieski is a mouthful of a name (forty years ago, studio moguls would have made her change it to something short and unassuming)–but get used to it, because the young actress behind it is going to be getting a lot of attention. She almost single-handedly carries A Soldier’s Daughter…
As a director of action thrillers, John Frankenheimer has been a peerless stylist for nearly four decades–without leaning on a pile of glitzy special effects. What’s more, his most memorable movies, from The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to The Birdman of Alcatraz (also 1962) to 1986’s wickedly entertaining, unappreciated 52 Pick-Up…
For better or worse, the confessional memoir has become the most popular literary form of our time, prompting ballplayers, Irish bartenders, prosecuting attorneys and mothers of quadruplets everywhere to lay bare their deepest thoughts and secrets, all based on the presumption that their miserable lives are more interesting than anyone…
One True Thing, directed by Carl Franklin, is trying to be the Terms of Endearment of the Nineties. Scripted by Karen Croner from the 1995 Anna Quindlen novel of the same name, One True Thing pushes the same high-gloss homilies about making peace with your family, and it caps everything…
Who would have guessed that a movie called Firelight could give off so little warmth? William Nicholson, the screenwriter of Shadowlands (1993) who’s making his directorial debut here, isn’t attempting to be ironic. He wants to create a love story in which the ardor pours through the confines of upper-class…
You can’t keep a good ship down. No sooner have a billion or so Titanic videos hit the shelves than a little-known Spanish moviemaker complicates the issue with a French-language film called, in English, The Chambermaid on the Titanic. Cheap profiteering? An attempt to cash in? Absolutely not. In fact,…
The opening credits of Simon Birch assert that it was “suggested” by John Irving’s 1989 novel A Prayer for Owen Meany. Actually, it’s a thin but relatively faithful adaptation of the first few chapters of Irving’s comic ramble through the nature of religious faith, predestination and heroism. Screenwriter Mark Steven…
Matt Damon, the blond matinee idol, has apparently become Hollywood’s idea of a deep thinker. After playing a math whiz in last year’s Good Will Hunting, he’s now been reinvented as a poker genius in John Dahl’s Rounders. So anybody who had doubts about the second coming of Albert Einstein…
Men don’t get it. Moms don’t get it. Sometimes, even your roommate or best friend doesn’t get it. But if you bray and carp and vent long enough, someone will listen. Someone will begin to understand the precious particulars of a young woman’s sexuality. Whether they’re interested or not. That’s…
When the history of the republic in this century is written, a New York club owner named Steve Rubell might get his very own footnote. In the late 1970s, after all, this little rat-faced tyrant transformed an abandoned TV studio on West 54th Street into a laboratory for radical social…
In the pecking order of tragic black musicians, Frankie Lymon can’t hold a votive candle to, say, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday or Otis Redding. But now the late doo-wopper’s got his own movie, too–or, rather, he’s got his own space in a movie that, for better or worse, is really…
After a summer filled with third-rate pulp, Blade arrives with a pedigree that suggests first-rate pulp: characters and situations from Marvel Comics; a screenplay by David S. Goyer (who gave us this year’s transcendent pulp masterpiece, Dark City); and the presence (as star and producer) of Wesley Snipes, a terrific…
The idea of destiny–especially the notion that two people are fated to meet and fall in love–is a load of crap, but a surprising number of people buy into it. Probably for that reason, it has proved a popular element in movie romances, City of Angels and Sliding Doors being…
Slums of Beverly Hills is the first feature by the young writer-director Tamara Jenkins, and it has its mild amusements. It’s one of those movies that gets bonus points for being “personal,” bopping along from episode to episode as if the filmmaker were discovering her subject as she went along…
You have to love the way Terry McMillan does literary research. On a spur-of-the-moment vacation trip to Jamaica, the author of Disappearing Acts and Waiting to Exhale says, she indulged in a mad, revitalizing fling with a man twenty years younger. Despite the rum punches and the hot and heavy,…
As the lights came up after a screening of the new Neil LaBute movie Your Friends and Neighbors, a colleague next to me growled disapprovingly, “That was a nasty movie.” For LaBute –whose debut film, In the Company of Men, is probably the worst date movie ever made–this comment would…
Seen one way, Manuel Pradal’s Marie Baie des Anges is a self-consciously artsy examination of teen anxiety and teen violence done up with pretensions and gewgaws that the most self-absorbed auteur might disdain. Seen in another light, it’s a disturbing vision that manages to capture, through bizarre editing, fractured narrative…
John Hamburg’s independent comedy Safe Men, which got a look and a distributor at Sundance, trades on one of the oldest comic devices in moviedom: Innocence collides with corruption and changes both of them for the better. From the great silent comedian Harry Langdon, who made a high art of…
