Old-fashioned romantic comedies are an endangered species, and in these generally unromantic days it’s always a pleasant surprise to find a decent one like Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail. Ephron, of course, made her bones five and a half years ago with the huge hit Sleepless in Seattle, but since…
Ultratough guy Jesse “The Body” Ventura says he means business as the new governor of Minnesota. But for now the nasty crime wave in that state continues unchecked — in the movies anyway. Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan, a psychological thriller that shows us how dangerous life can get after…
Here we go again. Enemy of the State is Fascism in America 1998, Chapter Four … or Five … or whatever we’re up to. It readily invites comparison to The Siege, but for better or worse its goals are more mundane. While The Siege seems like an ideological agenda driving…
First of all, if you’re among the benighted who’ve never seen Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 shocker Psycho, stop reading at the end of this paragraph. A movie review, even one as incisive and elegant as this, is no way to be introduced to Hitchcock’s horror masterpiece. Your assignment is to rush…
“I just find it all so bizarre,” notes John Maybury, popping a cigarette in his mouth and lighting it in what appears to be one quick flip of the wrist. “All those issues of ‘being out’ and, ‘Are you in?’ We should have gone beyond that by now. I know…
JUMP INFORMATION APPENDED FROM FILE C:NEP32DAYS1203199812030101.NVT According to the sparse information available in standard reference books, Chilean expatriate director Raul Ruiz, still in his late fifties, has made more than 100 films since 1960; apparently only 50 or so are features, but that’s still an impressive stat. Although he’s been…
Surprise and pleasure come wrapped together in A Bug’s Life. This big adventure about tiny critters is the latest piece of robust whimsy from Pixar, the computer-animation studio that broke into features with the 1995 smash Toy Story. It should prove irresistible to children. Toy Story opened up the secret…
A third of the way through Home Fries you may begin wondering if the filmmakers haven’t outsmarted themselves. Overloaded with oddities but a bit short on horse sense, this is one of those stubbornly defiant, attitude-driven movies that’s so busy scrambling genres, breaking rules, and dashing expectations on the road…
In the rancid nightmare farce called Very Bad Things, Peter Berg, in his writing-directing debut, creates characters that you immediately want to see killed off. From the title to the ads to the Website (which features a Vegas stripper who will dance for you), Very Bad Things has been positioned…
Holed up with his Sidney Bechet records, old flannel shirts, and dog-eared copy of War and Peace, Woody Allen has made a second career of shunning fad, fashion, and fame — and of ostensibly keeping to himself in the most populous city in the United States. No nouveau-grooveau glitz or…
Even students of English history may have trouble sorting out the palace intrigues and intragovernmental conspiracies that fill Elizabeth, the handsome new production about Queen Elizabeth I’s ascension to the British throne in 1558. With the bewitching Australian actress Cate Blanchett in the title role, the film follows Elizabeth’s transformation…
For filmmaker Todd Solondz, it’s always midnight in suburbia. Life is lonely, and the natives can be hostile. In Happiness, his daring second film, the darkness engulfs victims of all ages: a boy in the throes of impending adolescence, three New Jersey sisters tormented by sex and love, an obscene…
Well, now we know why the term “bored to death” was invented. Meet Joe Black takes an interesting idea — Death assumes human form and comes to Earth to learn about human existence — and reduces it to a flat, uninspired, interminable, slow movie. Not only slow but long, a…
First, a disclaimer: Having missed last year’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, I deliberately put off seeing it until I had seen the the sequel, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. That way I could view part two without prejudice, and be able to judge whether…
American History X, a hard-edged look at American neo-Nazis, arrives in theaters with a lot of behind-the-scenes baggage: First-time director Tony Kaye engaged in a protracted, high-profile battle with distributor-producer New Line Cinema over the film’s final form. While Kaye may have a justified grievance, this is not as clear-cut…
In 1994’s The Monster (Il Mostro), Roberto Benigni’s most recent film to gain wide American release, the Italian writer/director/star puts himself at the center of a mistaken-identity farce about a serial killer. In Life Is Beautiful (La Vita e Bella), Benigni plays a wacky, high-spirited man who convinces his young…
Fifteen minutes into Velvet Goldmine, director Todd Haynes’s love letter to England’s glam-rock scene of the late Sixties/early Seventies, the film already promises to be many things: a missing-person mystery, a meticulous period piece, an essay on sexually liberated dandyism, a quasi-musical, a portrait of a Machiavellian as aspiring pop…
Fascism is in the air. Well, at least it’s on movie screens. In a two-week stretch we’ve seen old Nazis (Life Is Beautiful), old Nazis training neo-Nazis (Apt Pupil), book burning (Pleasantville), and now, with The Siege, a story of full-blown military rule on American soil. Still in the wings:…
You don’t have to give a damn about sports to find Without Limits engrossing. Like all the best films, it is really about character. In this case the character is that of Steve Prefontaine, the legendary track star of the 1970s who held every American running record between 2000 and…
When Montoya, one of the fearless vampire killers in John Carpenter’s Vampires, tells another character that nobody believes in the title creatures because nobody wants to, there’s no mistaking the ancestry of the line. It comes down, through two generations of horror films, from the moment in the original Dracula…
A riveting but darkly disturbing thriller, Apt Pupil isn’t easy to sit through. The subject matter itself proves deeply unsettling, while two brief acts of sadism are so horrifying as to be unwatchable. And yet this brutal film borders on the brilliant. Beautifully structured and edited, with a chilling central…
The first time we see Ray Joshua, the young black hero of director Marc Levin’s impressive feature debut Slam, we get a vivid taste of the conflicting forces that rule him. His olive-drab pants, so hip-hop baggy that you could fit two rail-thin Rays inside, are stuffed with bags of…
