Maybe it’s the damn blinking thing, because it’s not simply the foppish hair and boyish face, or, for that matter, even the vaguely befuddled reticence and wry, self-abasing demeanor we Americans prefer to see in our Brits. It’s got to be the blinking. That’s what he does, almost all he…
Fans call it “that Star Wars feeling,” the raw emotional high achieved by watching or even just thinking about the films of George Lucas. It’s a sort of gut-swirling, swooning sensation, the effect of tripping on a fantasy world, a wonderland, a place unlike Earth or even the movies. And…
Even English actresses of a certain age have a difficult time finding good roles, so it’s understandable that Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, and Joan Plowright might jump at the chance to star in Tea with Mussolini, Franco Zeffirelli’s new film about a group of English expatriates living in Florence during…
No other filmmaker in movie history has immersed himself more completely in his art than the great French director François Truffaut. Nor was there ever a director who in his work would blur the line between fiction and autobiography, or who would advocate more passionately that the art of film…
David Mamet, famous for his in-your-face characters, brutal and frequently raunchy dialogue, and deliberate, staccato prose, would seem an unlikely choice to write and direct a screen adaptation of British playwright Terence Rattigan’s genteel drama about injustice. But the Pulitzer Prize-winning author (for Glengarry Glen Ross), whose body of work…
The Castle is a modest little comedy from Australia that falls into the subgenre of Capraesque idealism, in the little-guy-triumphs-over-evil-powers-that-be division. The story revolves around the unpretentious Kerrigan clan. Darryl (Michael Caton), the father, has his own towing business. Sal (Anne Tenney), the mother, is the family cook and a…
The most surprising thing about the new teensploitation horror film Idle Hands is the lack of masturbation jokes. It is a movie about a seventeen-year-old boy who loses control of his right hand to an evil demon, yet there’s only one such obvious crack. As the gloriously lazy hero Anton…
In Pushing Tin, the edgy new comedy from British director Mike Newell, the dominant image is a black screen pulsing with obscure florescent markings, like the characters on some early prototype of Pac-Man. But in this case, nobody’s playing games. The markings represent very real jet airliners filled with very…
The latest release from MTV Films, Paramount Pictures’ bouncing baby, is set in a high school and has been inoculated with the usual doses of teenage angst, teenage wit, and teenage lust. Here’s the surprise: It declines to get down on hands and knees to woo Generation Y to the…
We seem to be in the middle of one of those thematic blitzes that happen every now and then in the film world. This past year it was Dark City and The Truman Show; so far this year we’ve had EDtv, The Matrix, and eXistenZ. Coming up in the next…
An appealing hybrid of fiction and documentary, The Apple joins a small group of contemporary films (1988’s The Thin Blue Line, 1992’s Brother’s Keeper) that depart from the insular universe of movies to reach out and affect the real world. It tells the story of Massoumeh and Zahra, real-life twelve-year-old…
Sean Connery has always been a terse, minimalist actor, spitting out his lines in tight bursts of Scottish brogue. But in Entrapment the kingly Scot goes beyond minimalism to the point where he’s practically doing semaphore with his eyebrows. As the legendary art thief Robert “Mac” MacDougal, Connery isn’t just…
Imagine, if you will, one of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s classic road movies that never leaves the terminal, and you have pretty much described Life, the strikingly uneventful new comedy starring Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence. It’s their Road to Nowhere. Life, which was directed by Ted Demme from…
The SLC in SLC Punk! stands for Salt Lake City, but it might as well stand for Some Lucky Chump. The filmmaker, James Merendino, has stated that this tale of two punk buddies trying to spread anarchy through the Utah capital in 1985 reflects his own rebellious teenage years there…
Just as David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) came off as an organic reaction to a terrible new wasting disease, his new movie crystallizes the confusions of an epoch that can’t decide whether it’s the Entertainment Era, the Information Age, or the Digital Millennium. Named for a fictional game system also…
When we first see Isa, the 21-year-old heroine of Erick Zonca’s The Dreamlife of Angels, she is trudging under the weight of a huge backpack through the chilly dawn of an almost featureless European city. With her close-cropped dark hair and street urchin’s sniffle, she seems to be carrying the…
Courage comes in an infinite variety of forms and faces, but who among us would be brave enough to relive our high school years, face the horrors of homeroom, and confront hallways so fraught with danger that the most treacherous battlefield would look as placid as a meadow? It is…
Steve Martin says he doesn’t want audiences to expect the same old Steve Martin whenever he stars in a comedy. But that means one thing when he’s referring to Roxanne and L.A. Story, two inspired flights of romantic farce (based on his own scripts), and another when he’s talking about…
Six Ways to Sunday is only director Adam Bernstein’s second theatrical film, so it’s a little early to attempt a coherent analysis of his career. On the surface this young-mobster story couldn’t be more different from his earlier effort, the egregiously unfunny It’s Pat, which foolishly bloated Julia Sweeney’s one-gag…
Has any major American director had quite as many career swings as Robert Altman has? Maybe not, but if there’s one thing the past 30 years have made clear, it is that it’s never safe to count Altman out. The mid- and late Nineties have been particularly unfriendly to him…
Ginger and Fred. Shirley Temple and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds. To the list of unforgettable movie dance partnerships, we may now add Omar Epps, the trim, handsome young man who stars as one-third of The Mod Squad, and Michael Lerner, the heavyset middle-age actor who played…
Stuffed full of fantasy comics, addicted to action, and steeped in digital technology, the frenetic moviemakers Andy and Larry Wachowski have done what they must: create an eye-popping, morph-mad, quasi-mythical sci-fi flick that will thrill computer nerds as it kicks serious ass. The Matrix also presumes to (ahem) think deeply,…
