I sincerely hope that Jodie Foster gets a chance to relax and unwind this holiday season, because the lady has obviously worked like a horse to instill her latest role with humanity and significance. As intrepid British widow Anna Leonowens, in the huge and poetic new Anna and the King,…
The heroines of Gavin O’Connor’s offbeat road movie Tumbleweeds are a struggling single mother named Mary Jo Walker (Janet McTeer) and her feisty twelve-year-old daughter, Ava (Kimberly J. Brown), who set out together from a back hollow in West Virginia to make a new life — or something like one…
Have you ever endured a relationship in which your partner beat you up mercilessly just so he could “heal” you and play the redeemer later on? Granted, that’s a weird question perhaps better explored via Akbar and Jeff in Matt Groening’s “Life in Hell” comic strip, but it relates closely…
The last half-decade has been very good to Jane Austen: Besides Ang Lee’s estimable 1995 version of Sense and Sensibility, we’ve been given film or TV adaptations of Emma, Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice, not to mention Clueless, Amy Heckerling’s remarkably apt updating of Emma. Now Miramax and the BBC…
A tangible sense of sadness and longing hangs over The Legend of 1900, the mesmerizingly beautiful and poetic new film from Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore, best known in the United States for his Academy Award-winning Cinema Paradiso. Based on a dramatic monologue by contemporary Italian novelist Alessandro Baricco but filmed…
The last time Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in an apocalypse-themed action movie with a Guns N’ Roses theme song, it was Terminator 2, the biggest and loudest action movie that had thus far ever been seen. Since that time, he’s produced one bona fide balls-to-the-wall action flick (True Lies), one pale…
How do you make a sequel to a nearly perfect film? Toy Story, the 1995 hit from Disney and Pixar, not only was the first fully computer-animated feature, it was also as brilliantly written and directed a film as any of the classic Disney releases. Pixar did nearly everything right,…
The world’s demand for minimally talented thirty-year-old high-school dropouts who believe they’re great poets or great musicians or great movie directors isn’t going to catch up with the supply anytime soon. That won’t keep the strivers from striving, of course; nor will it snuff out their dreams. Case in point:…
The engaging and delightful low-budget feature Where’s Marlowe? began life as an unaired one-hour TV pilot. Somehow director Daniel Pyne and John Mankiewicz, his co-writer, have managed to expand their footage to roughly an hour and forty minutes without any of the seams showing. That would be an accomplishment in…
“Yesterday I wasn’t even sure God existed,” laments Bethany (Linda Fiorentino), the reluctant yet divinely touched heroine of Kevin Smith’s ambitious new film, Dogma. “Now I’m up to my ass in Christian mythology.” As it turns out, so are we. Strutting to a spiritually snappy groove not observed in mainstream…
The mutant children of Dr. Hannibal Lecter and his star pupil, agent Clarice Starling, remain doggedly at large in moviedom. There’s no serial killer (and no gruesome method of dispatch) that Hollywood now refuses to indulge, and no detective, no matter how hackneyed, who cannot be assigned to the case…
Luc Besson, director of La Femme Nikita, The Professional and The Fifth Element, is not the first name that would leap to mind to helm a biopic of Joan of Arc. Sure, he’s French, and sure, most of his films have women/girls as the protagonist or savior, but this is…
Much like the religion that has swirled around the Star Wars trilogy for twenty-some years, the fanaticism evidenced among American fans of Japanese anime remains a mystery to some of us. Writer-director Hayao Miyazaki’s megahit Princess Mononoke does very little to cast light on this obsession. And more’s the pity,…
Susan Sarandon is one of the screen’s most gifted actresses, a fiercely intelligent artist who invests her roles with depth, compassion, wit and humor. She has the ability to elevate even mediocre material, taking a potentially schmaltzy part, as in Stepmom, and making it totally believable. In her best films…
Actor Frank Whaley has appeared in more than thirty movies, including Swimming With Sharks and Pulp Fiction. But none of them cuts as close to the bone, I suspect, as Whaley’s debut in the writer-director ranks, Joe the King. Set in the Seventies and carefully described by its maker as…
The first rule of Being John Malkovich is, you do not look at the poster for Being John Malkovich! Plot-spoiling critics are harmless compared to what these filmmakers have opted to disclose in their own promotional art. (This package is second only to Kevin Smith’s Dogma for foolishly trotting out…
All hail. America is the seat of democracy and the world’s most mobile society — the place where a printer’s apprentice named Samuel Clemens can take a new name and remake himself as the country’s greatest satirist, where a geeky college dropout can become a software billionaire and shoeless boys…
Since there is no way to talk about The Best Man without eventually invoking the phrase “Spike Lee’s cousin,” let’s just get it out of the way: The Best Man is the directorial debut of Malcolm D. Lee, who is Spike Lee’s cousin. Having worked on various S. Lee films,…
“That reminds me of the movies Marty made about New York,” stammered Lou Reed somewhere in the mid-’80s. “All those frank and brutal movies that are so brillyunt.” It was a clumsy, rhyme-impaired album track (“Doing the Things That We Want To,” from New Sensations), but as has often been…
Wes Craven — purveyor of fine horror movies, including A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and the Scream trilogy — has apparently decided to go “legit.” And with Music of the Heart, he has done so with a vengeance. The film’s only death is the result of…
And now…a G-rated movie from David Lynch! No, Lynch hasn’t lost his mind. He hasn’t gone soft in the head. And he hasn’t sold out to the smiley-faced bean counters at Disney. While the notion of America’s King of Weird — the man who brought us Blue Velvet and Twin…
Steven Soderbergh may have had some rocky times after his 1989 breakthrough with sex, lies, & videotape, but these days he’s on a roll. Last year he produced Pleasantville and directed Out of Sight, two of the year’s most praised films. This year, he has The Limey, a complex, introspective…
