At the beginning of Gary Ross’s Pleasantville, fraternal twins who are unhappy suburban teenagers (is there any other kind?) fall down the rabbit hole of their television set and find themselves trapped in a parallel universe: a Fifties sitcom of the same name in which the family is more idealized…
The Jonathan Demme-directed Beloved runs nearly three hours, and it’s a long slog. This adaptation of the 1987 Toni Morrison novel bursts with ambition. On one hand it tries to get inside the fevers of the African-American slave experience, but it also wants to be an epic family saga and…
The hero of The Mighty — the title character, in fact — is an eighth-grader known by the nickname Freak (Kieran Culkin). His might isn’t physical; he’s a small, frail boy who suffers from a degenerative birth defect. His spine curves painfully, and he can walk only with crutches and…
Every year the Montreal World Film Festival runs for ten days (through Labor Day), and the Toronto Film Festival picks up a few days later and carries on for another ten. Twin colossi of the Great White North, they unspool some 300 movies each, and, for in the past three…
As a professional lamenter of how “they just don’t make ’em like they used to,” I am always thrilled on those rare occasions that someone even tries to make ’em that way. So I am doubly thrilled that, with The Impostors, writer-director Stanley Tucci has tried and richly succeeded. Those…
The ants in Antz show a lot of personality. The film is the best example yet of how a fully animated computer-generated feature can delineate facial movement. Toy Story (1995), the first such feature to be released, was brasher and more child-friendly, but Antz is more of a — how…
Have adultery, murder, and greed all moved to the sticks? Once firmly rooted in the big city, the seven deadly sins have taken on a distinct country-western twang in recent years, thanks to noirish, tough-minded scamfests such as John Dahl’s Red Rock West (1992) and The Last Seduction (1994), James…
Leelee Sobieski is a mouthful of a name (40 years ago studio moguls would have made her change it to something short and unassuming) but get used to it because the young actress behind it is going to be getting a lot of attention. She almost single-handedly carries A Soldier’s…
As a director of action thrillers, John Frankenheimer has been a peerless stylist for nearly four decades — without leaning on a pile of glitzy special effects. What’s more, his most memorable movies, from The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to The Birdman of Alcatraz (also 1962) to 1986’s wickedly entertaining, unappreciated…
Back in the early Seventies, when John Waters made his first splash with low-budget gross-outs such as Pink Flamingos and Multiple Maniacs, who would have guessed that someday he’d be making a Hollywood film as benevolent as Pecker? In retrospect, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. If any director has ever…
Adapted from a memoir of the same title, which was written by a guy named Jerry Stahl, it’s a guided tour through the Los Angeles television studios by day, various drug dens by night, and its protagonist’s troubled skull all of the time. To hear him tell it, Stahl was…
Slums of Beverly Hills is the first feature by the young writer-director Tamara Jenkins, and it has its mild amusements. It’s one of those movies that get bonus points for being “personal,” bopping along from episode to episode as if the filmmaker were discovering her subject as she proceeded. Jenkins…
One True Thing, directed by Carl Franklin, is trying to be the Terms of Endearment of the Nineties. Scripted by Karen Croner from the 1995 Anna Quindlen novel of the same name, One True Thing pushes the same high-gloss homilies about making peace with your family, and it caps everything…
Jackie Chan’s American fans (and I include myself among them) have suffered through a nervous 1998 so far. The momentum the star earned with the 1996 release of Rumble in the Bronx has seemed to dissipate steadily: An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, the first American production to employ…
The opening credits of Simon Birch assert that it was “suggested” by John Irving’s popular 1989 novel A Prayer for Owen Meany. Actually, it’s a thin but relatively faithful adaptation of the first few chapters of Irving’s comic ramble through the nature of religious faith, predestination, and heroism. Screenwriter Mark…
Matt Damon, the blond matinee idol, has apparently become Hollywood’s idea of a deep thinker. After playing a math whiz in last year’s Good Will Hunting, he has now been reinvented as a poker genius in John Dahl’s Rounders. So anybody who had doubts about the second coming of Albert…
Men don’t get it. Moms don’t get it. Sometimes even your roommate or best friend doesn’t get it. But if you bray and carp and vent long enough, someone will listen, someone will begin to understand the precious particulars of a young woman’s sexuality. Whether they’re interested or not. That’s…
Shane, the teenage hero of Mark Christopher’s 54, wears the petulant expression of a Raphaelite cherub, and he comes complete with a halo of thick blond hair. He’s played by a pretty newcomer with the exotic name Ryan Phillippe, but there’s nothing exotic about the voice that comes out of…
On the continuum of tragic black musicians, Frankie Lymon can’t hold a votive candle to, say, Charlie Parker or Billie Holiday. But now, like that pair, the late doo-wopper has his own movie — or, rather, he has his own space in a movie that, for better or worse, is…
In the bluish-green depths of the ocean, we see the deck of a sunken ship. Out of the murk, two pinpoints of light approach — humans, lured to the wreck by irresistible curiosity. It’s the beginning of a James Cameron movie, but it’s not that James Cameron movie. It’s the…
“That is known as the lowest point in my life, because I was basically a human barbell,” says Next Stop Wonderland star Hope Davis, referring to her role in the 1995 remake of Kiss of Death, in which she played Nicolas Cage’s girlfriend. “Big, big hair and really cheesy clothes,”…
The idea of destiny, especially the notion that two people are fated to meet and fall in love, is a load of crap, but a surprising number of people buy it. Probably for that reason it has proven to be a fairly popular component in movie romances, City of Angels…
