Fans of black comedy and fiendishly frisky film noir rejoice: The Coen brothers are back! The savagely funny Fargo is a vicious sidesplitter, easily the drollest, hippest, sweetest satire Joel and Ethan Coen have dreamed up since 1987’s Raising Arizona. The film marks a return to form for the sick…
A bottle rocket is little more than a glorified firecracker on a stick. You point one upward and light it, but you can never be sure that it’ll fly in the direction you want it to go. Sometimes bottle rockets just fizzle out. At best they sparkle, streak skyward, and…
Mutiny Aftershock 2005 (Black Arc/Rykodisc) Of all the spin-off satellites orbiting George Clinton’s Parliafunkadelicment mothership, Mutiny was arguably the best A and one of the few to distance itself from its former employer. The group was formed in the late Seventies by drummer Jerome “Bigfoot” Brailey, the coauthor of several…
At the risk of coming off like some stodgy codger bemoaning the passing of the good old days of American cinema, it really does seem to me that these days they don’t make quality American movies like they did in the Seventies. The Godfather (I and II), Five Easy Pieces,…
Belinda and Philip Haas’s (she produced; he directed; they both wrote the screenplay) slow but absorbing production of Angels & Insects reminded me of Peter Greenaway’s 1982 The Draughtsman’s Contract. Both films are English period pieces, although Greenaway’s film is set in the Seventeenth Century, while the Haases’ takes place…
Surely by now the cinematic love triangle has become one of France’s most enduring exports. Nobody plays more variations on the old three-part harmony than the French. Heck, most English-speaking countries don’t even have an equivalent for the phrase “menage a trois.” It’s kind of ironic then that while we…
Just as too many chefs spoil the broth, too many screenwriters spoil the script. In the case of the disappointing City Hall, a roster of four heavyweights — three from the world of movie writing and one from the world of high finance — contributes to a muddled screenplay that…
I have a confession to make: I haven’t watched the annual orgy of stupidity, vanity, and self-congratulation popularly known as the Academy Awards in years. The Oscars are a farce, an abomination, a laughingstock, a repugnant folly, an insult to the intelligence of any moviegoer with even a modicum of…
Like the world itself, world music can be a scary place. When you don’t know a djembe from a darbukah, when nothing ever sounds even remotely like “Hot Blooded,” it’s easy to give up and play Graceland again. As the curious titles of its pair of recent releases might hint,…
The dreaded date movie. Snotty critics such as myself hate the genre because real-life moviegoers tend to hold date movies to a different standard: “Did you like it?” “Well, there was no story, the jokes weren’t funny, and the characters talked like somebody lifted their dialogue straight out of Cosmo…
If cynicism breeds contempt, obscurity can often breed cynicism. This is common knowledge in the blues world, which for decades has been overpopulated with hard-bitten also-rans untouched by the hand of popularity. For all the B.B. Kings, Robert Crays, and Buddy Guys out there who have parlayed their years of…
That Shakespeare fellow is all the rage at the cineplex these days. But as more filmmakers translate the Bard’s plays to the screen, the adaptions stray further and further from their source. Kenneth Branagh broke into the movie biz with his faithful version of Henry V in 1989, but his…
Last year’s Miami Film Festival introduced Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami to Miami audiences, and what an introduction it was. Kiarostami’s three films — Where Is My Friend’s Home?, And Life Goes On . . . , and Through the Olive Trees — were like nothing seen around these parts before…
Justino opens with the unsentimental butchering of a bull that has just met its end in the ring. As hammers, axes, and long knives do their dirty work in portentous grainy black-and-white footage, co-writers/co-directors Luis Guridi and Santiago Aguilar (they call themselves “La Cuadrilla” — “The Team”) let viewers know…
While each year the general public awaits the unveiling of a colorful poster heralding the arrival of the Miami Film Festival (February 2-11), I await the annual unveiling of an equally colorful excuse for not being able to preview festival films in time to meet my deadline. This year I…
Profiles of Kenneth Anger often express surprise that the legendary avant-garde filmmaker and author of the Hollywood tell-all books Hollywood Babylon and Hollywood Babylon II is, to quote Betsy Sherman of the Boston Globe, “cordial and soft-spoken in conversation, with no fangs in evidence.” After all, Fireworks, Anger’s first film…
Dead Man Walking offers many surprises, but none more astonishing than the mere fact that writer-director Tim Robbins — a man who has not been shy about stating his liberal political ideas in interviews — could avoid preaching, and present such a balanced take on a subject as emotionally charged…
You say you always wanted to go to film school but you couldn’t afford the tuition? You panic when some pompous cineaste such as me expounds upon the parallels between Pauly Shore’s work in Bio-Dome and Charlie Chaplin’s in Modern Times? You wouldn’t know Meliäs from Mayles, or Battleship Potemkin…
What a deliriously twisted opening to a wondrous flight of fancy called The City of Lost Children: Like millions of other children around the world, young Denree stays awake late on Christmas Eve awaiting Santa’s arrival. Suddenly the tail end of a rope appears at the bottom of the fireplace…
Last year one husband-wife/director-star team — Renny Harlin and Geena Davis — ran off to Malta to make a movie with some 70 million dollars of studio funds, then returned with nothing to show for it but an insipid little bit of derivative drivel entitled Cutthroat Island. Meanwhile, another husband-wife/director-star…
Finally, director Terry Gilliam (Brazil, The Fisher King) and screenwriters David Peoples (Blade Runner, Unforgiven) and Janet Peoples (The Day After Trinity) have managed to address the complaints of moviegoers upset by the quantity of gratuitous female nudity and the corresponding dearth of male nekkidness on display in modern U.S…
If you thought Anthony Hopkins made a convincing psychopath in Silence of the Lambs, just wait until you see Nixon. Hopkins doesn’t so much imitate the vile, vindictive little megalomaniac as reconstruct him from the ground up. From the browbeaten face poking out turtlelike from between hunched shoulders to the…
