Actor Frank Whaley has appeared in more than 30 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…
How can you tell it’s fall? Just as the hurricane season dissipates we get more things to do … indoors. This week the Alliance Cinema and the Absinthe House Cinematheque are unreeling film festivals with offerings for which it’s well worth marking your calendars. On the Beach the third annual…
The Limey.
Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Screenplay by Lem Dobbs. Starring Terence Stamp, Peter Fonda, Luis Guzman, Melissa George, and Barry Newman.
Welcome to Happy, Texas, the town without a frown. Yes, apparently there really is a Happy, Texas. No, they didn’t actually shoot the movie there. But director/co-writer Mark Illsley’s feature directorial debut is still a fun, funny way to spend an hour and a half of your time. Steve Zahn…
David Fincher needs a hug, the poor bastard. Or possibly a diaper change. Ever since 1992, when he ruined the Alien series with the excrescence of his pointless, senseless third installment, he’s been making the same bratty, obnoxious movie over and over again: gloom, doom, indestructible protagonist, bureaucratic evil, quasi-religious…
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! The repressed Irish-Catholic schoolgirl that Molly Shannon plays on Saturday Night Live is certainly not everyone’s cup of glee. But there’s no denying the tug she exerts on anyone whose past is littered with the dry husks of Latin verbs and memories of nuns swinging big…
Am I a traitor to my gender because I didn’t find this unabashed film about female sexuality erotic, brave, or even — can I say it — interesting? The ironically titled Romance, directed by the audacious French filmmaker Catherine Breillat (36 Fillette), has become something of a cause célèbre wherever…
The British-made Bedrooms and Hallways has all the makings of a break-out hit, even with straight audiences. The second feature from director Rose Troche, this comedy of gay male manners is radically different from her 1993 no-budget debut film about New York lesbian bohemia, Go Fish. And Troche more than…
Take pity on poor Sebastian (Adrian Grenier). As your typical teenager in a small town in upstate New York, circa 1983, he’s already got enough problems: His divorced parents have both remarried, his sister is leaving for college, and life seems meaningless. To top it all off, his stepfather, Hank…
On to the central character of this film, director Christopher Nolan has grafted his own obsessions. His film noir, the black-and-white 16mm Following, deals with a tortured young man’s uncontrollable addiction to following people around the streets of London. Indeed the entire movie is in itself obsessive. Supported by an…
There is something fairy-talelike, but also deeply human, about Twin Falls Idaho, a gentle, beautifully realized tale of love and intimacy that marks the feature-film debut of Mark Polish and Michael Polish. Identical twin brothers, Mark Polish wrote the script, Michael Polish directed it, and both brothers star. It is…
This work is winning audience awards at festivals all over the world, and it’s easy to see why. Although it’s not much more than an exuberant home movie, Roko Belic’s film Genghis Blues perfectly captures his subject’s motley, epic journey to the almost mythical republic of Tuva. Blind blues musician,…
Late August, Early September takes an intensely up-close look at its characters. French director Olivier Assayas broke through to American audiences two years ago with Irma Vep, his clever homage to and vehicle for the great Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung, whom he subsequently married. His new drama is much…
Ten-year-old Fraser Pettigrew leads an idyllic existence. He lives on a bucolic estate in Scotland with five siblings, four dogs, his gentle mother, Moira (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), eccentric inventor father, Edward (Colin Firth), and indomitable grandmother, Gamma Macintosh (Rosemary Harris). For Fraser (Robert Norman, making his professional acting debut), life…
Grownups, take heart. Even if you misspent your summer at the movies pigging out on reheated space adventure, slob humor, and stubborn, old ballplayers who won’t hang up their spikes, all is not lost. A powerful and intelligent film called American Beauty has volumes to say about the way people…
Since his TV show ended, Martin Lawrence has gotten more ink for his off-camera life than for his movie career. Nothing about Blue Streak is likely to change that. It’s a shame because the basic plot, which sounds like something from one of Donald E. Westlake’s Dortmunder novels, is promising…
“You and me?” asks catcher Gus Sinski (John C. Reilly) of his old friend, veteran pitcher Billy Chapel (Kevin Costner). “One more time?” It’s a poignant moment, the top of what may be the last game of Chapel’s career before he’s either traded or quits the game he has loved…
The six friends in When Love Comes hang on to music, drugs, and one another in search of that one intoxifier they don’t have: love. Middle-age pop diva Katie (Rena Owen) is trying to put her singing career on track; she was once a great star of late ’70s Americana…
Whether it’s bad or good commercial luck that the thriller Stir of Echoes follows so closely on the heels of The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan’s wildly successful ghost-story sleeper, it’s bad critical luck. The film has some startling parallels to The Sixth Sense: Both concern psychic communication with the…
Although the French-Canadian separatist movement of the 1970s and the production of a Noh play in Osaka, Japan, may seem like very disparate, not to mention esoteric, events to overlap in a film, Robert Lepage’s Nô is, in the end, a satire on the universal frailties of man and his…
There’s the low-budget film, and then there’s the no-budget film, the latter category of which The Following is a member. It’s a story of intrigue, the soul of darkness, and imagery shot with a hand-held camera in sixteen-millimeter black and white. The film loosely focuses on Bill (Jeremy Theobald), who…
Get ready for the sweet life. For seven nights starting September 10, the Absinthe House is running the greatest hits of Federico Fellini in a brief retrospective, ¡Fellinissimo! There are no majorly remastered versions with “missing half-hours” reinserted being shown, but it is a chance to see the best of…
