Frankie Starlight strives mightily (and succeeds intermittently) to couch itself in the warm, magical glow of a fairy tale. The story doesn’t start out much like a fantasy, though: Beautiful young Bernadette (Anne Parillaud) watches four of her friends get blown to bits by a mine that washes ashore on…
While Quentin Tarantino is no stranger to American audiences, one of his contemporary idols — Hong Kong noir director John Woo — is far less known on these shores. Woo’s unfortunate decision to team up with Brussels muscleman Jean-Claude Van Damme for the director’s big shot at crossover success, 1993’s…
If you took 1978’s California Suite, replaced screenwriter Neil Simon and director Herbert Ross with four of Hollywood’s hottest young filmmaking guns, each writing and directing his or her own twenty-minute segment, and then coated the whole thing with a fizzy, retro Love, American Style vibe, the end result would…
I hate compiling year-end top-ten movie lists. No, I don’t have a Woody Allen-esque objection to the concept of ranking works of art in a competitive fashion. Nor am I one of those haughty nose-in-the-air types who tell anyone within earshot that there weren’t ten films worthy of approval this…
When was the last time you saw a decent pirate movie? In recent years screen buccaneers have had better luck sacking filmmakers’ careers than they have a-pillagin’ and a-plunderin’. In 1980 Michael Ritchie’s The Island managed the extraordinary feat of out-dumbing the imbecilic Peter Benchley novel from which it was…
A young woman named Sabrina Fair, the daughter of the chauffeur for Long Island’s obscenely wealthy Larrabee family, misspends much of her youth perched in a tree spying on the dashing playboy David Larrabee as he seduces (and presumably abandons, although we never see the ugly part) a succession of…
“He loves her but she loves him And he loves somebody else, you just can’t win.” — J. Geils Band, “Love Stinks” The leap from Jane Austen novel to J. Geils Band song is not as great as you might think. In Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, dignified Colonel Brandon yearns…
Sometimes I wish these guys would just fuck and be done with it. When you blow away the cloud of steam generated by the generic cops, robbers, and one-last-heist-that-goes-bad plot line, Michael Mann’s new film Heat boils down to a love story between two men. But because this is a…
Jennifer Montgomery’s semiautobiographical Art for Teachers of Children positions itself as a dispassionate, disquietingly original take on underage sex and the line between child pornography and art. From the get-go the film assails your notions of exactly what the age of consent is — or ought to be — as…
In 1991’s Father of the Bride, doting suburban white-bread proto-papa George Banks (Steve Martin) went deeply into debt to stage a perfect wedding for his suddenly all-growed-up little girl Annie (Kimberly Williams). Nina Banks (Diane Keaton) sighed a lot and tried to allay her husband’s anxieties. In the newly released…
La Dolce Vita meets the Magic City with the arrival of Cinema Italiano Oggi (Miami’s Italian Film Festival). A five-day orgy of new movies, restored classics, elegant parties, and hobnobbing with the leading lights of modern Italian cinema, the festival kicked off yesterday, November 29, with the screening of Michele…
Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant was an overwrought but distinctively stylish variation on an overworked cinematic genre — the corrupt cop movie. His latest release, The Addiction, takes an unconventional bite into an even more played-out category: the vampire movie (or, to be more specific, the unhappy-vampire movie). After being accosted…
As the opening titles for White Man’s Burden unscroll, you know right away that you’ve entered a very different world. White lawn jockeys adorn the tidy estates of affluent black suburbanites. Caucasians slink furtively through the shadows of city streets at night, dealing drugs, selling their bodies, and looking for…
You don’t want to wager against Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro), a professional sports gambler whose handicapping prowess is so formidable that he can change the odds merely by placing his bet. Ace makes scads of money for a coterie of delighted Midwestern mob bosses, who eventually reward him…
Some of the finest movies of the past three years have been documentaries: Hoop Dreams, The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, and Crumb. Add Steven M. Martin’s thoroughly absorbing Theremin to that list. The movie is so fascinating, frightening, and hilariously funny that no one could have made it…
Memo to James Bond To: James Bond From: Todd Anthony Re: GoldenEye Welcome to the Nineties, 007. I thought you were dead, a victim of the changing times and the inability of the guardians of the Bond legacy to find a suitable actor to play you. Pierce Brosnan will never…
Just what the world needs — another girl-meets-girl movie. The chicks-who-dig-chicks love story minigenre has pretty much played itself out since go fish made a splash at the Sundance Film Festival nearly three years ago. Last year’s Heavenly Creatures was probably the category’s apogee; the new When Night Is Falling…
Horny commanders-in-chief are nothing new. Nor is the sight of Michael Douglas playing a WASPy Everyman whose dick gets him into trouble. However, the concept of a widowed president playing the dating game under the constant scrutiny of TV cameras, opportunistic political opponents, and religious zealots sounds like a fertile…
“It’s a date-rape movie,” declares first-time filmmaker Douglas Tirola. The 27-year-old writer-director of A Reason to Believe doesn’t beat around the bush; neither does his smart, well-intentioned movie. A Reason to Believe tells the story of Charlotte (Allison Smith, who played Jane Curtin’s daughter on Kate & Allie), a cute,…
Is the world ready for “a heterosexual film by Gregg Araki,” as the twentysomething writer-director-editor-producer’s new project, The Doom Generation, bills itself? Araki, already a pioneer of queer new-wave cinema (The Living End, Totally F**ked Up), moves into the world of big-time 35mm moviemaking with this, his fifth film. Those…
Movies about attractive twentysomethings sitting around talking about themselves have been all the rage lately. You could take everything that happens in Slacker, Reality Bites, Clerks, Before Sunrise, Bodies, Rest & Motion, Sleep With Me, and Barcelona and pack it into one movie and you still wouldn’t have as much…
Some nights you get lucky. Writer-director John Rubino’s debut film, Lotto Land, sneaked into town as quietly as a balsero. I attended the preview screening not because I particularly wanted to see the film — I knew nothing about it and the title didn’t make the movie sound promising –…
