By their very nature, fundamentalist religions demand conformity. Original thought and personal aspirations are subordinated to duty and ritual as prescribed by scripture — be it the Bible, the Koran or the Torah. Members who do not strictly adhere to the precepts of the faith are ostracized, shunned, even expelled…
What’s your pick for the most ridiculous movie ever made? The Conqueror, starring John Wayne as Mongol emperor Ghengis Khan? How about The Manitou, in which the grizzled head of an Indian medicine man sprouts from Susan Strasberg’s neck? The musical remake of Lost Horizon surely deserves a couple of…
Titus, Julie Taymor’s gorgeous film version of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, may be the most lavish release of last year…and also the most perverse, on nearly every front. It’s easy to see why there has never been a feature version of this tragedy. Of the most commonly mounted Shakespearean plays, at…
In Stephen Frears’s new comedy High Fidelity, leading man John Cusack is forever looking the camera (and us) in the eye and explaining what’s wrong with him today, or why he was unhappy yesterday, or how his first girlfriend dumped him back in the seventh grade. Gazing into the lens,…
Not so long ago, The Skulls would have starred Tom Cruise — but in which role? He could have been either lead; the one he didn’t choose could have landed in the lap of, say, James Spader or Rob Lowe. One can easily imagine Cruise as Luke McNamara, the beefy,…
The screen is Jim Jarmusch’s playground. Or so it appears. The quirky director of Down by Law and Mystery Train has attracted a following as loyal as the Quentin Tarantino cult, because his stuff, too, is hip, ironic and resolutely contrary. Jarmusch seems to take a kid’s unqualified pleasure from…
Is America ready for Hong Kong’s action style? Certainly there are many fans of the more balletic, guns-and-martial-arts, fly-through-the-air movies that have inspired everyone from Quentin Tarantino to the Wachowski brothers. And yet Hollywood seems to have had trouble marketing the concept. Yes, John Woo gets high-profile projects, but the…
O! Sweet vulture of love! Picking through the bones and sinew of doe-eyed fools the world around! How exquisite is thy rending, how blissful the release! Spirits in crimson rivulets swirled, souls as carrion shredded! Two vibrant hearts made still as one, to sate thy gnashing beak! Blessed bloody bird,…
Even the press kit is up front about it: Whatever It Takes is less a film than a product of marketing research and demographic considerations. It might as well have been written on a bar graph, so fetishistic is it about making sure it appeals to teens and their parents…
Among the qualities that make Fred A. Leuchter Jr. a buffoon who’s also an accomplice to evil, his desperate hunger for attention is the most obvious. He’s like the hick-town wallflower who’s always getting lured into the visiting hustler’s backseat for a quickie. When the state of Tennessee asked Leuchter…
It’s okay. You can say it. Just five little words. Don’t be shy. “I…am…a…wrestling fan.” You certainly wouldn’t be alone if you said it. Recent surveys show that as many as one in four Americans watch professional wrestling, and the World Wrestling Federation routinely has the number-one rated program on…
The film is called Erin Brockovich, but it might as well be titled Julia Roberts. Never before in the actress’s erratic career has a film been so custom-made for her; it’s as though a screenwriter has been replaced by a seamstress who knows Roberts’s every curve. No matter that she…
The creationists are going to have a field day with this one. Since the trailers for Mission to Mars reveal everything but the end credits, it would be near impossible to set foot into the theater without knowing the story, which is that three astronauts discover the true origin of…
The first thought you have while watching The Next Best Thing is “Was Madonna always this bad an actress?” It’s a question that soon fades from consciousness to be replaced by “Was Rupert Everett always this bad an actor?” and “Was John Schlesinger always this bad a director?” Since the…
In the closing years of the twentieth century, lowbrow white America finally learned to enjoy an ironic laugh at itself, led by Hollywood’s cheerful mockery of the culturally challenged working class. Outside the system, John Waters had this stuff pegged from the get-go, but the American grotesqueries of the original,…
Three decades after Rosemary’s Baby, two decades after The Tenant, and after a series of five non-horror films, Roman Polanski returns to the supernatural thriller with The Ninth Gate. What could be more promising? Regardless of what one thinks about Polanski’s personal life or legal status, the man is clearly…
Garry Shandling does not have a face for the big screen. He has a mug that seems to spread to the edges of the theater; it’s like an approaching storm front, a sky full of billowing clouds roaring in from the north. And it’s a face built for two emotions:…
If you think the prevailing attitude toward sex in the United States is somewhat backward, consider that of late 1960s Ireland, as depicted in Agnes Browne, the new movie directed by Anjelica Huston. When asked by her best friend Marion (Marion O’Dwyer) if she misses “it,” the recently widowed Agnes…
Director John Frankenheimer has been putting bad guys on the street since Luca Brazzi slept with a teddy bear, and he shows no sign of letting up at age seventy. In Reindeer Games, a relentless, and relentlessly witty, crime thriller set in the frozen wastes of northern Michigan, a sleazy…
In the early ’90s, British actor Tim Roth made his bones with American audiences as one of Quentin Tarantino’s anointed hipsters: After getting gruesomely shot to pieces in Reservoir Dogs and sticking up a pancake house with batty Amanda Plummer in Pulp Fiction, Roth’s credentials as a bad cat were…
Step right up, youth of the world, and receive the boomer inoculation that is Wonder Boys, the first feature from director Curtis Hanson since his much-lauded adaptation of James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential. Then marvel at Michael Douglas showing off his wide spectrum of inert doldrums and tedious self-pity. Thrill to…
Twenty-seven-year-old Ben Younger delivers the message of his first feature, Boiler Room, with all the subtlety of a car bomb. To wit: Greed is alive and well in the new century, fueled by the material dreams of a generation bent on instant gratification and the distorted expectations of neophyte investors…
