Over nine days beginning Saturday, December 11, the Miami Jewish Film Festival, in its third year, will unspool 32 films, mostly at the Regal on South Beach. While the movies all have a Jewish connection, this year’s offerings are an impressively varied and top-quality lot. A few are familiar, such…
When Jacques Demy died in 1990, one might have thought his unique style of filmmaking died with him. For while the history of movie musicals is rich and multifaceted, Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Young Girls of Rochefort, and his lesser-known Room in Town and Three Seats for the…
Much like the religion that has swirled around the Star Wars trilogy for twentysome years, the fanaticism of 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. More’s the pity, because Lupin…
Writer-director-star Daphna Kastner seems to have designed her second feature, Spanish Fly, primarily to make out with as many attractive Spanish men as she can. Male actor-directors do this sort of thing all the time, usually with a lot less flair. Perhaps it’s the female touch, but Kastner has a…
The last time Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in an apocalypse-theme action movie featuring a Guns N’ Roses song, it was Terminator 2, the biggest and loudest action picture that had ever been seen. Since then he’s produced one bona fide balls-to-the-wall action flick (True Lies), one pale imitation (Eraser), and a…
How do you make a sequel to a nearly perfect film? Toy Story, the 1995 hit from Disney and Pixar, was not only 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 30-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…
“The spectre is known at all the country firesides by the name of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow,” writes Washington Irving in his original fantasy. Thanks in large part to the silly, watered-down fun of the animated Disney version, the Horseman and his victim, the gangling and gallant Ichabod…
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 Barrico but filmed…
Although he couldn’t have known it at the time, growing up in Baltimore during the 1950s would prove to be filmmaker Barry Levinson’s smartest career move. First in Diner, then in Tin Men, Avalon, and now Liberty Heights, he has drawn on the specific time, place, and culture of his…
Earth, an Indian Gone with the Wind, is set against the backdrop of India in 1947, when the British moved out shortly after dividing their colony into India and Pakistan. The movie examines the ensuing violent turmoil through the eyes of seven-year-old Lenny-Baby (Maia Sethna, making an impressive acting debut),…
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 protagonist or savior, but this is a…
The spirit of Fellini hovers over Train of Life, the third so-called Holocaust comedy to come down the pike. Far superior to either Life Is Beautiful or Jakob the Liar, the French-language production has a silliness and a buffoonish humor reminiscent of Fellini’s Amarcord and Roma, yet somehow it feels…
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 40 minutes without any of the seams showing. That would be an accomplishment in…
The first rule of Being John Malkovich is you do not look at the poster for Being John Malkovich! Sorry to crib from that inferior tale of incredible shrinking men (throw a rock at any multiplex marquee this season — please! — and you’ll hit several), but really, avoid that…
As the Twentieth Century grinds remorselessly to a close, Princess Diana, Monica Lewinsky, and JonBenet Ramsey continue to be held up by the media as signal figures of our time. Yet something tells me that when future historians look back on this period, the bulimic socialite, the kneepad-ready intern, and…
Scotsman Irvine Welsh became a literary sensation in Britain with the publication of his first novel, Trainspotting; and Danny Boyle’s film version of this depressing look at the underbelly of Edinburgh brought Welsh fame in America as well. Now director Paul McGuigan makes his feature debut with an adaption of…
Less a documentary than a memoir, the absolutely enchanting film Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember features Mastroianni reminiscing about his life and career, his extensive travels, the people with whom he worked (directors Fellini, Visconte, De Sica) and, above all, his love for the cinema. You don’t have to be terribly…
Trust Allison Anders and her old running mate Kurt Voss to come up with a piquant, carefully observed movie about tarnished hope, overfed vanity, and half-baked scheming on the treacherous L.A. music scene. They know the territory. In 1988 the ex-UCLA film school classmates wrote and directed Border Radio, one…
Based on his directorial debut, there are three things we can safely say about Antonio Banderas: 1) He’s an actor’s director — he can pick a good cast and coax great performances from them; 2) he knows how to make a good image and where to point the camera; and…
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…
Ever since the mid-’80s release of Emir Kusturica’s first two features — Do You Remember Dolly Bell? and When Father Was Away on Business (which was nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar) — Kusturica has been the most internationally visible figure in Yugoslavian cinema (that includes all the former…
