When it comes to gamesmanship and the testosterone wars, no writer in America is more obsessed than David Mamet. Whether his combatants are duking it out in a seedy Chicago real estate office (Glengarry Glen Ross) or fighting for survival in the Arctic wastes (The Edge), the story remains the…
If nothing else, the current edition of Michael Moore’s continuing self-love fest does have a great subject: the desperation hidden inside a “thriving” U.S. economy. While politicians and financial wizards point to unemployment on the wane and profits on the rise, Moore notes that the largest employer in the country…
It has been thirty years since compulsive fussbudget Felix Unger began clearing away the moldy bread crusts, stale cigar butts and melted candy bars from the New York apartment of dedicated slob Oscar Madison, thirty years since Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau joined a battle of wills and a farce…
If American movie moguls really thought like Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, they’d probably spend more time blowing up Federal Reserve banks than calculating first-weekend grosses. As it is, instead of buying inflammable fertilizer and fuel oil, the moguls are selling it–in the form of satires about presidential misconduct and…
You are likely to take to The Real Blonde, a bittersweet farce about romantic yearning and delusional ambition in Manhattan, in direct proportion to your tolerance for self-absorbed 25-year-olds and the value you put on the advertising and theatrical trades. If, for instance, you can stomach the waiter who believes…
Lovers of American movies used to joke that foreign films wouldn’t look so good if you saw them without subtitles. John Sayles’s latest movie, Men With Guns, plays better than his other films because it has subtitles: Bald dialogue always sounds better in Spanish and Indian dialects. Set in an…
The great charm of Richard Linklater’s The Newton Boys derives from its quartet of matinee idols–Matthew McConaughey, Skeet Ulrich, Ethan Hawke and Vincent D’Onofrio–and its unbridled affection for the high-spirited gang of Texas country boys they portray, adventurers who rob banks with such sunny enthusiasm and impeccable yes-ma’am manners that…
When Denver’s own Donna Dewey won an Academy Award last week for her short documentary A Story of Healing, moviegoers here were reminded that not every example of the art cinematic springs full-grown from the city of Los Angeles. The notion arose again on Sunday night, when the Creative Film…
The John Grisham industry has claimed another heavyweight. A few months back, Francis Ford Coppola delivered up John Grisham’s The Rainmaker, and now Robert Altman sails into view with The Gingerbread Man, based on an original Grisham screen story–although it’s basically a recycling of other Grisham recyclings. Who would have…
The American reissues of Jackie Chan films have met with declining box-office success since Chan burst onto the scene in 1996 with Rumble in the Bronx. With any luck, the latest Chan opus to be recut and redubbed for Americans, the year-old Mr. Nice Guy, should reverse the trend. No…
In the course of an extraordinary acting career, Gary Oldman has portrayed, among other outcasts, the drug-addled punk rocker Sid Vicious, the possible presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and the notorious bloodsucker Count Dracula. They’re all choirboys compared to the barbarous South London blokes Oldman gives us in Nil by…
Still have your doubts that Western civilization has been conquered by sixth-grade dropouts snorting meth? No longer. Hollywood has just now released the first film noir for teenagers–a boiling stew of greed, betrayal, murder and three-way sex in which the female characters have not yet graduated from high school and…
If ever there was an “op-ed” movie–a movie destined to be written about in an “elevated” realm beyond just the movie pages–it’s Primary Colors. Thanks to Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones, the Hollywood/Washington nexus has lifted this new Mike Nichols picture, based on the 1996 bestseller by Joe Klein, into…
Takeshi Kitano, the reigning Renaissance man of Japanese pop culture, is a scriptwriter, movie actor and director, as well as the star of seven TV shows. He produces six different columns for national magazines and, it says here, has written 55 books. In his spare time, he makes outrageous public…
We should be thankful, I suppose, for the headlong assault by assorted filmmakers upon the dark castle of Great Literature. For one thing, it reduces the need for college students to squander their hard-earned beer money on Cliffs Notes. It also reminds patrons in the sports bars that iambic pentameter…
While Kate Winslet was having her diaper changed and Keanu Reeves was sneaking a joint into the prom, an extraordinary thing happened. A cast of actors who have nineteen Academy Award nominations (and five Oscars) to their credit and one of the most accomplished directors in America were making a…
How do you make a sequel to a film whose plot simply will not yield a logical successor? You can bet your bottom dollar that somewhere in Hollywood right now–hopefully not in the office of James Cameron–someone connected with Titanic is working on that question right now. Some things are…
Richard Kwietniowski’s first feature, Love and Death on Long Island, won’t be every surfer babe’s idea of a good time. But if you’ve got a taste for mordant wit, sharp observation and a whiff of personal liberation, step up and grab a ticket for this quirky, wonderfully surreal tale about…
At first glance, Jonathan Darby’s Hush appears to have a couple of things going for it. There’s some high-wattage star power in the persons of Jessica Lange and Emma’s Gwyneth Paltrow. There’s a possibly lethal power struggle between a possessive mother and the pretty daughter-in-law who’s snatched her sonny boy…
The new film Dangerous Beauty presents a sixteenth-century Venice filled with statesmen who hop from bed to bed without fear of “bimbo eruptions.” That’s because the courtesans aren’t bimbos and they aren’t hidden: Everyone from the admiralty to the bishopric patronizes them. Having developed their minds along with their erotic…
It won’t be easy for Joel and Ethan Coen to top Fargo anytime soon, because it was the culmination and pinnacle of a personal style they had been refining for years. The small-time greed, hilariously bungled deceptions and startling violence they brought to their tale of kidnapping-gone-wrong in icy Minnesota…
The science-fiction works of the late, great Philip K. Dick haven’t been served particularly well on screen. The most recent adaptation, Screamers, was junk; Total Recall had its moments but was less ingenious by half than the short story it was based upon. Blade Runner, of course, was brilliant, but…
