Compiled in the cold light of day, the sum of Chuck Barris’s contributions to American culture are the top 40 ditty “Palisades Park,” which he wrote in 1962, and his discovery, a few years later, that many people are willing to make complete fools of themselves in front of a…
It all begins with the word. “I believe I may have a first sentence,” murmurs Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) to her husband, Leonard (Stephen Dillane), commencing labor on the author’s fourth novel, Mrs. Dalloway. The year is 1921, but skillfully intercut segments illustrate that the book’s heady emotional content will…
Small-town stud Tully (Anson Mount) works the family farm with his younger brother Earl (Glenn Fitzgerald) and their inexpressive, unsmiling widower Dad (Bob Burrus) in Tully. The sudden possibility that they might lose the farm opens up a trove of disturbing family secrets, challenging Tully’s heretofore shallow nature. Hilary Birmingham…
While filmgoers hungrily await this year’s Miami International Film Festival feast, there are several tasty cinematic hors d’oeuvres now being offered at the Cosford Cinema. George Capewell, the Cosford’s programmer, has scored a number of Miami premieres that should keep art cinema lovers happy in advance of the festivals yet…
Paul Morse (Jason Lee) has this terrible problem. He’s all set to marry the take-charge, raven-haired beauty Karen (Selma Blair, thanklessly playing second fiddle as usual), but late in the game finds himself also falling for her free-spirited blond cousin, Becky (Julia Stiles). Gee, what’s a guy to do? It’s…
Music industry insiders and audiophiles may be the only people who have heard of Tom Dowd, despite his work engineering and producing countless classic albums for five decades, and a 2002 Grammy Award. Miami-based director Mark Moormann spent the last seven years filming a documentary, Tom Dowd and the Language…
As far as he can remember, he always wanted to be an actor. To him, being an actor was better than being president of the United States. Even before he first wandered into the high school auditorium for an after-school audition, he wanted to be one of them. It was…
There have been other films dealing with the Jewish ghettos during the Nazi occupation of Poland — some very good — but The Pianist, the latest feature from Roman Polanski, may be the best. Of course it starts out with a huge advantage: The 69-year-old Polanski is probably the only…
There are myriad stories to tell in Miami. Two-bit fraud schemes, big-time drug smugglers, and quirky tales of immigrants in America add fodder to a screenwriter or director’s imagination. The city is, after all, a funky and cinematically appealing world to set a movie in. Add to that television shows…
In all, a far better year than any in recent memory, so much so it feels impolite and irresponsible to choose a mere ten best among the annum’s offerings. This list remained in flux till the last possible moment; five seconds ago it featured, among others, Signs, Full Frontal, Human…
Four of the top ten films I saw this year don’t actually open in the U.S. until 2003, but they played at various film festivals during the year. By listing them here I not only alert readers to films they should watch out for in ’03, but I also make…
Based on the true story of three young Aboriginal girls who walked 1500 miles across the Australian Outback to be reunited with their mothers, Rabbit-Proof Fence might well be subtitled True Grit in recognition of the courage and single-minded determination that drove the trio to undertake such a perilous journey…
It’s been nearly three years since Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother won the Oscar for best foreign language film. Perhaps it’s in the spirit of spreading things around that Spain has not nominated Almodóvar’s latest, Talk to Her, as its entry this year. Certainly it’s hard to imagine any…
Adaptation is the most overrated movie of the year (of all time?) by people who should know better. Film critics have either been suckered in by its gimmick (Being John Malkovich screenwriter Charlie Kaufman can’t adapt a book for the big screen and winds up writing himself into his screenplay,…
Martin Scorsese’s latest epic of the streets, Gangs of New York, means to show us how a great metropolis was forged in the mid-nineteenth-century cauldrons of unbridled greed, ethnic violence, and Civil War. It means to give us the city as wild frontier — without the usual cowboy hats. This…
Notes from a network executive’s forthcoming biography, pilfered from the desk of an editor at a major publishing house. This was hard to read, as it was scribbled in crayon on the back of a copy of Highlights taken from a pediatrician’s office. From page 412: “Last week, I met…
Maid in Manhattan, in which Jennifer Lopez goes from pauper to princess, comes not from a screenplay but from a handful of self-help books and fairy tales and fashion magazines cut and pasted together in a glossy montage committed to celluloid. Characters, made from the highest-grade cardboard and resplendent in…
The first image most of us had of music and the Third Reich was watching each von Trapp tyke sing “auf Wiedersehen, good night,” bow off the stage, slip into the night, surmount a few low hurdles, and climb a couple of mountains to freedom. Loosely based on a true…
Of all the movies you could be spending your December with — and there are many good choices, from Oscar-bait to better-than-expected sequels like The Santa Clause 2 — why would you want to end up at Drumline? “Hey dear, wanna go see the new Scorsese flick, or maybe one…
What is it about the theater that attracts so many filmmakers? The actor’s paradoxical task — to tell the truth while pretending to be someone else — is usually at the heart of this fascination. Not a year goes by without a movie about actors and live performance, from big-studio…
In this age of celebrity and relentless hype, it’s hard to recall a time when dedicated, internationally renowned artists often lived and worked apart from the media’s gaze. That certainly was the case of Maya Deren, an influential filmmaker whose dreams had a profound influence on experimental cinema in the…
The smart sci-fi fan knows that, technically speaking, Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris is not a remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film at all, but rather a newly filmed interpretation of a Polish novel penned by Stanislaw Lem. Nonetheless the new film stands in a mighty big shadow. If someone attempted to make…
