A PRO’S AMATEUR

Hal Hartley’s Amateur flirts with pretension, but Hartley always pulls its head out of the clouds with dark humor. Consider: A French ex-nun named Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), who believes the Virgin Mary has appeared to her, is now living in New York, writing pornographic sketches for a skin magazine. A…

STAR DRECK (THE NEXT GENERATION)

Trying to squeeze the goo out of Robert James Waller’s romantic bestseller, The Bridges of Madison County, must have been like cleaning up the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Wherever you look, there’s another mess. Clint Eastwood, a man of few words, and screenwriter Richard LaGravenese, a man of patience, have…

YOUTH WANT TO KNOW

What does it say about Hollywood that it has taken a British writer, Paula Milne, and a British director, Antonia Bird, to come up with the most provocative movie in years about American first love and American teenage anxiety? Mad Love is a little rough around the edges, but there’s…

KILT IN ACTION

If we are to believe Mel Gibson’s version of thirteenth-century history–and there’s not much evidence that we should–the ragtag army led by Scottish patriot William Wallace gloried in goring onrushing Englishmen with deer antlers, in bludgeoning, spearing, crushing and dismembering them. But first they mooned them. Braveheart, Gibson’s bloody (and…

BLOWN OUT OF PROPORTION

The guards probably won’t be piping Die Hard With a Vengeance into Timothy McVeigh’s jail cell, but it might look awfully familiar to him if they did. As you might expect, the third installment of the Bruce Willis action series has but one dramatic goal–to blow things up–and even though…

FORGET CRYSTAL

Once they become “celebrities,” some Hollywood types like to hang around race-car drivers. Others prefer tennis players. Or boxers. Billy Crystal claims to have played a little hoop back in high school on Long Island, so the jocks he sniffs from one end of Tinseltown to the other are NBA…

SWEET AS JAM

Try to pick the moment when jazz reached its apogee in America, and the summer of 1958 is not a bad choice. In New York’s smokey Five Spot Cafe, pianist Thelonious Monk and his quartet were in the middle of an extended, overreaching engagement that would revolutionize the music forever…

LACK OF DEPTH

The crux of Crimson Tide is a mutiny aboard a U.S. nuclear submarine at the height of an international crisis–the stuff that huge underwater explosions and tiny ruminations on the future of the planet are made of. This is also standard naval-war movie material. If you let your attention wander…

OH, WHAT A LOVELY WAR

The Indian-born, Harvard-educated director Mira Nair knows a thing or two about culture shock, bigotry and the immigrant’s burdens of adjustment–three of melodrama’s classic subjects. But she is never content with merely yanking at our heartstrings. Unlike more straight-faced, straitlaced filmmakers, this independent thinker also has a healthy grasp of…

GO WEST, YOUNG MAN

The roughhouse political slapstick in Yuri Mamin’s Window to Paris makes for perfect counterpoint to the sweetness of its plea for cross-cultural exchange. The Russian peasant in Mamin is willing to wreck a government phone booth or overturn a snob’s piano to get a laugh, but beyond the mayhem, the…

SLICE OF LIFE

Ouch! Four centuries before Lorena Bobbitt fetched her paring knife from the kitchen drawer, the Italians began carving up assorted choirboys in the name of Art. Whether we like it or not, Gerard Corbiau’s Farinelli now tells the bittersweet tale of one Carlo Broschi, supposedly the most renowned of Italy’s…

FATAL DISTRACTION

If you choose to imagine that a woman can get pregnant by dreaming about it, or that the god of good fortune is really Quentin Tarantino and he lives on the bottom of the swimming pool at a fleabag motel in Las Vegas, then Destiny Turns on the Radio may…

SHOOTING AND MISSING

We probably have William S. Burroughs to thank for the unlikely inflation of heroin use into an American literary credential. Drug vogues come and go, but ever since Burroughs sanctified smack in Naked Lunch, the wannabes of tragic hipdom have been quick to embrace anyone who owns a ballpoint pen…

DOUBTFUL THOMAS

If you’re looking for a spark of life in Team Merchant-Ivory’s fatal collision with American history, Jefferson in Paris, skip right past the hotly disputed moment at which the author of the Declaration of Independence beds a fourteen-year-old slave girl from Old Virginny. That’s this straight-faced movie’s lone comic moment–and…

THE HELL OF ST. MARY’S

The unholy furor that assorted Roman Catholics and sundry conservatives are raising over Priest should be just enough to ensure its success at the box office. But no infusion of scandal can deliver it from TV-movie mediocrity. British director Antonia Bird, who’s making her feature-film debut, and writer Jimmy McGovern,…

THE BEST OF BERTOLUCCI

The son of a poet, Bernardo Bertolucci was a prize-winning poet himself by the age of 21. Then came a turn in the road, and he spent the next two decades making a powerful case that, to use his words, “cinema is the true poetic language.” In 1961 he dropped…

RAIN OF TERROR

Those glimpses of wounded babies, desolate old women and bombed buildings on the evening news pass through most Americans like air: The war in Bosnia remains a meaningless abstraction located somewhere between Judge Ito’s latest pronouncement and Chelsea’s latest camel ride. Milcho Manchevski’s beautiful and disturbing Before the Rain probably…

GIRLS JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN

As a boy, Samuel Goldwyn was an apprentice glovemaker, not a reader, and in the Thirties the late Hollywood mogul had a famously loose acquaintance with the obscure French novels and half-forgotten Italian plays he was always buying in hopes of giving selected MGM talkies a touch of class. So…

RAVAGING BEAUTY

The over-the-top comic strip Tank Girl became an instant cult sensation when it hit the streets of London in 1988, and it wasn’t long until kids on this side of the Atlantic started eating it up, too. No surprise. The futuristic action heroine created by self-proclaimed layabouts Jamie Hewlett and…

THEIR HEARTS WERE YOUNG AND GAY

Between the uptight harangues of the New Right and the P.C. nitpicking of gay activists, it’s a wonder that anyone can get a mainstream movie involving homosexual life past the popcorn stand. To hear all the noise surrounding Philadelphia, you’d have thought the entire cast of characters had half the…

STRIP SEARCH

The most talented young filmmaker in Canada may never attract mass audiences, but he gets under the skin in ways almost no one else can. If you’ve seen Atom Egoyan’s Speaking Parts or The Adjustor, you know his territory is a psychosexual mindscape where people act out personal rituals, where…

KING AND HIS QUEEN

Some fans of Stephen King’s horror fiction–stuff he cranks out at a frightening rate–will probably see Dolores Claiborne as another serving of King Lite. The novel, and Taylor Hackford’s radically altered movie version of it, are decidedly non-supernatural and non-gory. Here, in fact, we behold the bestselling Mr. King in…