The youngish filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen might do well to come out into the light once in a while. As it is, their parochial, stubbornly adolescent view of life seems thrown together entirely from the bits and pieces of the old movies floating around in their heads, cemented by…
In Barry Levinson’s Jimmy Hollywood, an unemployed actor finally gets his shot at five minutes of TV fame by casting himself as a real-life anticrime vigilante. Sound familiar? Hero at Large, a lukewarm 1980 comedy with John Ritter, played the same hand. The feisty protagonist this time around is Joe…
Like most soap operas, Claude Miller’s The Accompanist covers familiar ground. It is the winter of 1942-1943. The Nazis occupy Paris. And the ethical tug-of-war between the French Resistance fighters and the Vichy collaborationists is taking on ever darker tones. Still, director Miller wants us to believe that the problems…
You’ll never take Lieutenant Frank Drebin, the bumbling flatfoot of the Naked Gun movies, for one of the major thinkers of the twentieth century. Combining the cold solemnity of Joe Friday with the ineptitude of Inspector Clouseau, he scatters dumb non sequiturs like confetti in the streets of Los Angeles,…
For the oglers in the crowd, the attraction of John Duigan’s Sirens will be the movie debut of statuesque swimsuit model Elle MacPherson–sans swimsuit. For everyone else, there is no attraction, unless it comes as news to you that a straitlaced Anglican priest of the 1930s and his prim wife…
Well-heeled suburbia on Christmas Eve is not the most dangerous venue on the planet, but in The Ref it becomes “the fifth circle of hell” for a brainy burglar on the lam. Ted Demme’s bawdy domestic comedy fairly shouts “high concept,” and there’s no point in arguing with witty writers…
Shirley MacLaine may believe she was Dolly Madison or Mary Todd Lincoln in a previous life, but right now her only shot at First Ladyhood comes in a hot-and-cold comedy called Guarding Tess. The widow of a beloved president, Tess Carlisle is regarded by all America as a living monument…
Vietnam’s nascent film industry does not yet command the world’s attention, but in this country an amazing first feature by 32-year-old Tran Anh Hung may catch the eye of Oliver North as well as that of Oliver Stone. The Scent of Green Papaya has already won the Camera d’Or prize…
John Bailey, who makes his directorial debut with a sex thriller called China Moon, has been the cinematographer on such beautifully photographed movies as Ordinary People, Accidental Tourist and In the Line of Fire. It’s a good thing, too. The strength of this conventional Nineties film noir is its dark,…
You can romanticize the rodeo, as Cliff Robertson did 23 years ago in J.W. Coop, or you can use it to show how modern life has trivialized the mythic skills of cowboys, as Sam Peckinpah did in Junior Bonner and Sydney Pollack did in The Electric Horseman. But you can’t…
From the dark mirth of Mark Twain, to the domestic chaos of Kurt Vonnegut and Edward Albee, to the everyday dysfunction of The Simpsons, satirists have gotten under the placid surface of American life to find the demons lurking below–the idiot uncles and poisoners of pot roast, the third-generation addicts…
For thirty years Hollywood considered sports movies box-office poison–even after Rocky Balboa went the distance with Apollo Creed. The American sports mania didn’t hit the movie industry until the mid-Eighties–about the time Resume Speed, Texas, got wired for cable–but right now the white men who run the show can’t jump…
It’s ironic, isn’t it, that filmmakers keep trying to reinvent Don Siegel’s 1956 horror classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Philip Kaufman did it in 1978, and Abel Ferrara is taking his shot this year. Let’s hope that each of them grasps the implications of cloning a movie about the…
The late Sam Peckinpah’s lively chase movie The Getaway is unlikely to catch The Wild Bunch or Major Dundee on the all-time Peckinpah hit parade. For one thing, the acting skills of ex-model Ali McGraw, who co-starred with Steve McQueen 22 years ago, will never be the stuff of cult…
Johnny, the sardonic young drifter at the center of Mike Leigh’s startling new film Naked, is a kind of serial killer, but he carries no gun, rope or knife. A street-tough British bloke from Manchester, he can be physically brutal with women, but he specializes in maiming his victims emotionally–by…
In Peter Medak’s Romeo Is Bleeding, Sergeant Jack Grimaldi is a crooked New York cop firmly in the pocket of a Mafia don. He’s also cheating on his wife with a cocktail waitress, and when he’s assigned to hole up with a beautiful killer who’s turned state’s evidence, she seduces…
Given the gruesome effects of German mysticism on the twentieth century, it’s wise to regard any new form of it with suspicion. That includes the films of Wim Wenders, a thoroughly postwar German who seems to embrace both pacifist Euro-modernism and traditional Catholic theology. To be a German filmmaker in…
The limousine liberals John Guare satirized in his Broadway hit Six Degrees of Separation are the same kind of New Yorkers Woody Allen seems so genuinely fond of…and so profoundly incapable of understanding. Installed in lavish Park Avenue apartments, these posers have a passing acquaintance with both intellectual fashions and…
John Madden’s Golden Gate, a romantic soap opera badly disguised as a fable of McCarthyite bigotry and good-guy guilt, features Matt Dillon as an eager-beaver FBI agent assigned to root out supposed communists in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1952, and Joan Chen as the beautiful daughter of an innocent Chinese…
The messages you get from the presidential campaign documentary The War Room are multiplying at an alarming rate. Clearly, the husband and wife team of D.A. Pennebaker (Don’t Look Back, Monterey Pop) and Chris Hegedus meant it as a valentine to the efforts of candidate Bill Clinton’s smart-mouthed chief handler,…
Director Michael Apted has range. He’s made two dozen films for British television, the political documentary Incident at Oglala and five installments of his continuing 7 Up series, which has followed a group of disparate children, at seven-year intervals, to adulthood. Apted has also ventured into Hollywood features–notably the 1980…
Civil liberties remain in short supply for the beleaguered Catholics of Northern Ireland, but filmmaker Jim Sheridan has taken the liberty of vividly dramatizing one of the most notorious instances of recent British tyranny. Let’s hope Prime Minister John Major and Parliament are watching–red-faced and thoughtful. With a passion reminiscent…
