As the lights came up after a screening of the new Neil LaBute movie Your Friends & Neighbors, a colleague next to me growled disapprovingly, “That was a nasty movie.” For LaBute — whose divisive debut film In the Company of Men (1997) is probably the worst date movie ever…
After a summer filled with third-rate pulp, Blade arrives with a pedigree that suggests first-rate pulp: characters and situations lifted from Marvel Comics; a screenplay by David S. Goyer, who earlier this year gave us the transcendent pulp masterpiece Dark City; and the presence (as star and producer) of the…
The timing couldn’t be better for How Stella Got Her Groove Back. The dog days of summer are upon us, and few prospects could be more welcome to asteroid-weary moviegoers than a light romantic-comedy that includes a trip to Jamaica as part of the package. Director Kevin Rodney Sullivan may…
Nicolas Cage has never seemed more dazzling than he does in Brian De Palma’s new thriller Snake Eyes. Playing Rick Santoro, a corrupt Atlantic City cop who likes to think he’s “everybody’s friend,” Cage boogies to his own inner beat for almost two continuous hours. It’s like watching a great…
Objectively speaking, there isn’t all that much to be said about Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss. Written and directed by Tommy O’Haver, this very low-budget romantic comedy about gay photographer Billy (Sean P. Hayes) attracted to a model/actor/waiter (Brad Rowe) — whose sexual orientation Billy can’t quite fathom — should please…
Judging by the number of uninspired and derivative films we see these days, creating something truly fresh and imaginative on-screen is more difficult than turning a pumpkin into a carriage. But that’s exactly what director Andy Tennant and his marvelous cast and crew do in Ever After, the most magical…
Do we really need to see the great Kevin Spacey fuming and fussing in one of those we-do-things-my-way-or-we-don’t-do-them-at-all roles? In The Negotiator he plays Chris Sabian, an expert hostage negotiator for the Chicago police whose job it is to talk down Samuel L. Jackson’s Danny Roman, another expert police hostage…
Theresa Connelly’s feature directorial debut, Polish Wedding, is a complete misfire. What is meant to be a somewhat farcical — but also fairytale-like — midsummer night’s sex comedy ends up a tedious, uninvolving affair, burdened with a slim premise, grating characters, and poorly realized humor. The film concerns the various…
Walt Disney Pictures has a smart and highly profitable business strategy: Re-release the studio’s proven hits every seven years or so, thereby reaching a new generation of kids — and making another tidy bundle of dollars in the process. Well, this time around the Mouse House has decided to remake…
The last place you want to visit in midwinter is gray, freezing Buffalo, New York. The last people you want to see in the last place you want to visit are Jimmy and Janet Brown, a pair of comic demons so indifferent, so surreally out of touch, that they scarcely…
The first shot in Steven Spielberg’s remarkable World War II epic Saving Private Ryan is of an American flag with the sun behind it. The image is somewhat diaphanous, the fabric having the transparent delicacy of a chrysalis. This is the perfect introduction to a movie about the fragility –…
Unlike Hollywood fare such as Dances with Wolves (1990), the new Smoke Signals is that rare drama about modern Native Americans that was actually written and directed by Native Americans. It feels genuine and heartfelt, quirky and whimsical, with a deft understanding of the characters’ problems. But the film is…
In The Mask of Zorro, Anthony Hopkins plays the eponymous masked man as if he were doing Shakespeare. He’s trying to turn a kitsch hero into a real one, and his efforts are so weirdly off-key that you don’t know whether to cheer him on or titter. This dolorous Don…
High Art is a low-budget, American independent movie about junkie-lesbian photographer Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy), who spends most of her time looking romantically mournful. She’s famished and abrasive and oh-so-world-weary. When she smokes cigarettes, she exhales in a way that can best be described as existential; the smoke curls out…
The winds that sweep across the Sahara kick up ferocious sandstorms. Dunes change shape by the hour, flying particles blind the eye, and all reason and sense of direction can be lost. In such disorienting surroundings, reality and hallucination converge; the most inexplicable, unimaginable events can occur. Passion in the…
Michael Bay is the director of Bad Boys (1995) and The Rock (1996) and the new asteroid-attack movie Armageddon, which should be called The Very Big Rock. He has, I’m afraid, perfected a new form: His movies are trailers for themselves. Every scene is all climax and no foreplay. When…
Armed again with the comedy of despair but with far more focus than the last time out (1995’s Kicking and Screaming), director Noah Baumbach takes on perhaps the most coiled and resilient of the seven deadlies in his bright comedy of manners, Mr. Jealousy. The affable Lester (Eric Stoltz) has…
Too many post-Woody Allen movies have been made about “sex in the head.” The smart, engaging Out of Sight is an action comedy about love in the head. The real thing ignites between bank robber Jack Foley (George Clooney) and U.S. marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) when she stumbles into…
There will always be a Britain, and very likely there will always be movies about the pluck and sacrifice demonstrated by the little people during World War II. Not Billy Barty-type little people — though surely there must have been a few of them involved — but the simple, salt-of-the-earth…
The 1967 screen musical Doctor Dolittle, which starred Rex Harrison, was a commercial disaster for its studio, 20th Century Fox. The new nonmusical Fox version, starring Eddie Murphy, isn’t in the same overblown category as the original film — its disasters are more mundane. It’s a kiddie comedy that really…
The X-Files is a movie that answers questions…. No, wait a minute: The X-Files is a movie that asks questions…. All right, The X-Files is a movie that makes me wanna ask some questions, like: What the hell does “Fight the future” mean? Look, I can understand “The truth is…
Hurricane Streets comes on like a tough cookie but ends up just plain stale. First-time writer-director Morgan J. Freeman (no relation to actor Morgan Freeman) plies the kind of beat-up, trash-can naturalism that went out with Sal Mineo films like 1957’s Dino. Set in New York City’s Lower East Side,…
