“Trust and friendship. These are the things that matter, that help you on your way,” declares conservative accountant David Stephens in a heartfelt voice-over that opens the dark, demented Scottish comedy Shallow Grave. The statement will prove remarkably ironic. Helping David on his way are Alex, a glib newspaper reporter,…
Okay, I admit it. Sometimes, just like you civilian moviegoers, I succumb to the hype and convince myself to see a flick when I really should know better. For example, take the new Sean Connery vehicle, Just Cause. I like Connery because A) he is, was, and always will be…
You can’t get much of a feel for any of the films in Polish auteur Krzysztof Kieslowski’s three-colors trilogy from an examination of their respective plots. It would be like trying to guess the color of a man’s eyes by looking at his skeleton. Red is the final installment in…
Somebody please shoot me the next time I decide to attend a Herbert Ross movie. It seems like a century ago that the veteran hack made his best film, 1971’s Play It Again, Sam. And even then the picture’s success was undoubtedly attributable in greater measure to Woody Allen’s contributions…
Last year, my first as the movie reviewer here at New Times, the Miami Film Festival almost drove me crazy. I went berserk running to last-minute critics’ previews of festival offerings and fretting over the films I had yet to screen as my deadlines loomed. The logistics of transporting a…
The twelfth annual Miami Film Festival opens this Friday with local resident David Frankel’s sleek and smart Miami Rhapsody. Second-guessing the festival’s opening and closing selections has become an annual rite. I already have heard grumbling that a “deeper” film should have kicked off the schedule, something less facile and…
It’s a measure of the success of Roman Polanski’s screen adaption of Ariel Dorfman’s suspenseful, provocative play Death and the Maiden that by the end of the film one is not as troubled by the concept of WASP-y Sigourney Weaver playing a Latin woman named Paulina Escobar as by the…
On September 29, 1992, presidential candidate Bill Clinton publicly announced his support of a repeal of the ban on gays and lesbians serving in the U.S. armed forces. The public outcry was immediate. Opinion polls revealed a nation split fairly evenly on the subject. In January 1993, after taking office…
I have a number of bones to pick (sorry) with Demon Knight, a supposed horror movie from the perpetrators of HBO’s Tales From the Crypt anthology series. But the most damning criticism is the simplest: It just isn’t scary. Gross is another story. The filmmakers have trucked in barrels of…
One thing there’s no shortage of in this country is monitoring. Jesse Helms’s people monitor painters and photographers for homoerotic imagery or anti-Christian iconography. School boards monitor classic books for obscenity. There are even quasi-religious organizations out there that can tell you how many times Joe Pesci uttered variations on…
My momma always told me that year-end top-ten lists are like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get. A quick glance through other film critics’ nominations for the best and worst of 1994 confirms Momma’s wisdom. For example, Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers and Entertainment Weekly’s Owen…
“Welcome to Beston,” the sign reads, “Home of the Bulldogs.” It’s a safe bet that the folks residing in that sleepy little upstate New York town never met a bulldog like Bridget Gregory (a.k.a. Wendy Kroy). Bridget is a Manhattan girl from the top of her impenetrable black shades to…
Robert Altman is the most feared slugger in American cinema. When he really connects, as he has in the past with M*A*S*H, Nashville, and The Player, he knocks the ball out of the park. So powerful is his stroke that even when he’s just trying to make contact he’s still…
Any idiot can write a boffo opening to a movie. The hard part is sustaining the suspense, comedy, or action for 90 minutes and then wrapping it all up neatly into a satisfying conclusion. That is why so many movies start with a bang and end with a whimper. It’s…
If you’ve ever watched a junior high school theatrical production of a venerable, time-honored play in which no one gets anything quite right — not the acting, not the sets, not the direction — then you’ll recognize the discomfort caused by the off-pitch romantic comedy Speechless. Screenwriter Robert King (author…
Here we go again. Another painfully sincere filmmaker embraces the enduring myth of the noble savage. Jodie Foster, sweetheart of the Gap-and-Birkenstocks set, not only stars in Nell, she produced it as well. Foster is a talented, articulate actress with both brains and guts, two commodities in short supply in…
There’s something admirably gutsy about an independent filmmaker choosing mother-son incest as the subject of his first film, then making it on a shoestring with a cast of unknowns. No matter how good a picture it may be, a topic this disturbing and depressing is not the sort of thing…
If the life of filmmaker Edward D. Wood, Jr., were fiction, set down more or less as Wood’s cronies tell it, it would be hailed as the great Hollywood satire. It would seem like a creation of Nathanael West, had he survived until the Fifties, or of Tom Robbins, had…
On every level, Quiz Show is astonishing. It’s more than just a satisfying epic melodrama about the television scandals that rocked the broadcast industry almost 40 years ago; it’s the best American movie of 1994, and the most eloquent examination of the country’s contradictory sense of ethics since The Godfather…
Few movies pack as much potential for stirring up controversy as Cyril Collard’s Savage Nights. At heart it’s a traditional love story. But what sets Savage Nights (originally titled Les nuits fauves) apart is its topicality. Consider: Collard adapted the film (in French with English subtitles) from his autobiographical novel…
Redemption. Now there’s something I could use a little of. It’s been one of those weeks, man. Like any red-blooded American boy who ever played in little league, I experienced emotions I never thought were there when I heard about the cancellation of the baseball season. It was without a…
Quentin Tarantino and I have something in common: We’re both movie nuts who once worked behind the counter in video stores. I can’t speak for Tarantino, but most of my customers were couples (or one member of a couple renting something that both would see). And in nearly every case…
