The Blair Witch Project, the bone-chilling indie by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, is easily the scariest horror picture of the ’90s, a movie that can take a place among the most potent and inexorable of modern shockers, like Night of the Living Dead or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Three…
Eyes Wide Shut, the final motion picture from the late, great Stanley Kubrick, is easily the most anticipated adult film of the year. It’s The Phantom Menace for grownups. Any film by the notoriously painstaking auteur would have achieved this status. Kubrick made only thirteen features in his 46-year career,…
It’s about time we had a talk. Yeah, you know, that talk. The one about how uncomfortable and strange it is to be a young human male, how raging and unforgiving the hormones, how fragile the ego, how mysterious the female form. You see, well, how do I say this?…
This is the third year the Consul General of France is putting on a film festival showcasing movies each coproduced by France and a Spanish-speaking nation. This time around the festival features eight films, two of which co-originate from Mexico, one from Argentina, and two from Spain — all in…
Do you feel snug and secure in your cozy suburban life? Are you happy with your picture-perfect home, your carefully manicured lawn, your kids and their soccer games, and your barbecues? Do you feel safe? Well, the creators of Arlington Road, the ponderous new thriller starring Jeff Bridges and Tim…
Run Lola Run is proof that the influence of MTV on feature filmmaking hasn’t been all bad. The jagged stylistic excess that dominates short-form music videos can be exhausting and irritating when drawn out to feature length: Michael Bay (The Rock, Armageddon) may be the worst offender, though far from…
To hear Spike Lee tell it, Summer of Sam means to be a panoramic view of the summer of 1977 in New York City, when temperatures shot into the high 90s and power blackouts set nerves on edge; when the party agenda included snorting coke at Studio 54 and copulating…
The animated TV show South Park was the big sensation of the 1997-98 season — or at least as big a hit as a cable channel like Comedy Central can manage. It was almost inevitable that creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone would take their batch of foul-mouthed eight-year-olds to…
Woe to the scribbler who presumes to rewrite a master, unless he is so deft that his invasion of privacy produces something new and exciting. Enter British writer-director Oliver Parker. He has the nerve to meddle with Oscar Wilde’s sublime farce An Ideal Husband and the skill to pull it…
Anthology films are an odd-duck genre: While at one time books of short stories were published almost as frequently as novels were, their cinematic equivalent has never amounted to even one percent of the fictional films released. You could argue that Pulp Fiction counts as an anthology, but its stories…
The new Adam Sandler comedy Big Daddy isn’t just the funniest movie of the summer; it’s also the most improbable feel-good movie of the season. It’s improbable because practically everything about Adam Sandler seems so unlikely, so strangely back-assward. His whole phenomenal career (from Billy Madison to Happy Gilmore, from…
Twice Upon a Yesterday seems almost too geared for the Sliding Doors crowd. By relying on the same kind of conceptual sleight of hand as that recent Brit hit (which owed a giant debt of its own to Groundhog Day), this romantic fable’s sense of originality and wit is greatly…
Pretentiousness masquerading as profundity; self-indulgence masquerading as art. The Loss of Sexual Innocence, the dreadful new film from writer/director Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas, One Night Stand), joins the ranks of the worst films ever made. A statement that may, on the surface, seem harsh and heartless but that will…
While Hong Kong movies have been invading Hollywood through the success of Jackie Chan, John Woo, Jet Li, and others, mainland Chinese cinema has invaded the classier neighborhoods of the film industry during the past decade or so. The latest contender is The King of Masks, an affecting melodrama from…
A fine line divides inspired silliness from out-and-out witlessness; it’s a short leap from grin from groan. In 1997’s Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Mike Myers took a thin premise — spoof the Sixties by transplanting a horny Matt Helm-like secret agent into the Nineties — and danced an…
In John Sayles’s Limbo, which is set amid the rough-and-tumble of southeast Alaska, an ex-salmon fisherman with guilty memories (David Strathairn), an itinerant lounge singer with a lousy voice (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), and the singer’s melancholy teenage daughter (newcomer Vanessa Martinez) become stranded, Robinson Crusoe-style, on a remote island. This…
In an early scene in Instinct, released by Touchstone, a division of Disney’s Buena Vista Pictures, we’re told that a brilliant primatologist named Ethan Powell (played by Anthony Hopkins) is being brought back to the United States from Rwanda, where for several years he has been engaged in a close…
It has not been lost on the Quinn brothers (actor Aidan, cinematographer Declan, and writer/director Paul) that in old Gaelic culture the tribal bard, or storyteller, was held in the highest esteem. The Quinns want to be Irish storytellers, too, and to that end they have loaded up This Is…
The peerless Ethiopian distance runner Haile Gebrselassie is a tiny man (five foot three and barely 115 pounds), but in his native country his heroism looms large. Since 1994 he has set fifteen world records at five different distances, and at the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, he outdueled…
In the desert outpost of Needles, California, two pathetic, near-bankrupt used-car salesmen (writer/editor/ director/producer Joe Carnahan and producer Dan Leis) are offered a quarter of a million bucks just to hide a 1963 Pontiac LeMans for two days … without looking in the trunk. They know the deal stinks, and…
If your poodle is decked out in the complete Captain Kirk uniform, you’ve taken Klingon language classes, or you once mailed DeForest Kelly a joint taped to a piece of cardboard just “to return the favor,” the 86-minute documentary called Trekkies is a must-see: love it or loathe it. In…
Relentlessly hip? You better be. Enjoy pretentious talk about the great god Art and the hidden meanings in old gangster movies? Couldn’t hurt. Like to sit up till dawn smoking black cigarettes and exchanging ironic barbs about the tragedy of life? Bingo. Amos Poe, an East Village-based avant-gardian since the…
