Sharon Stone doesn’t appear onscreen until halfway through this tale of three lives unraveling, but when she does, she makes quite an impression as Rosie, the third player in a horse-racing scam. Adapted from a play by Sam Shepard, Simpatico jumps back and forth in time between present day and…
The evening of March 14, 1885, was an auspicious one in the annals of musical theater. Less than four years had passed since the opening of London’s Savoy Theatre, built specifically for the productions of librettist William Schwenk Gilbert and composer Arthur Seymour Sullivan. The partners’ first six works had…
It’s easy to see how Play It to the Bone, writer-director Ron Shelton’s latest comedy-drama, got started. Shelton obviously wanted to do for boxing what he’d already done with baseball in Bull Durham, golf in Tin Cup, and pick-up basketball in White Men Can’t Jump. But somewhere along the way…
Alain Resnais is not only one of the most respected film directors from the French New Wave, but, in this writer’s opinion, he is the most important one. His film Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) showed us a different way to look at movies, and a completely revolutionary way to adapt…
In the past 30 years, Woody Allen has written and directed something like 28 movies (“something like” reflects the confusion of how to count his contribution to New York Stories), a remarkable productivity record for a major filmmaker, and one that’s even more impressive when you consider how high his…
Boo hoo! Frank McCourt had a miserable childhood! Honestly who can say their childhood wasn’t impoverished in some way … or in many ways? That Mr. McCourt survived and eventually published his inescapable memoir is nice, of course, and the book indeed is a poignant and crafty piece of work…
The world’s demand for minimally talented 30-year-old high school dropouts who believe they’re great poets or great musicians or great movie directors isn’t going to catch up with the supply anytime soon. That won’t keep the strivers from striving, of course, nor will it snuff out their dreams. Case in…
Some people really are crazy, but then crazy is a relative term. Does it apply to someone who thinks he might spin off into outer space and never be able to get back down to Earth? Or is it only crazy when you have to cling to the nearest table…
The War Zone opens with a black screen and the sound of waves gently crashing against the shore. The methodical ebb and flow of the water produces a soothing rhythm and a sense of tranquility. The film’s first visual image is equally evocative — a beautiful section of seashore, buttressed…
In The Allegory of Painting, seventeenth-century Dutch master Jan Vermeer paints a portrait of the artist painting a portrait. To the left of the canvas, a lavish curtain is drawn to reveal an empty chair, perhaps reserved for the viewer. Beyond the curtain a seated man has just begun the…
Andy’s Top 10Film critics are by nature a sour lot, so it is with truly great pleasure that I suggest that 1999 has been the best year for cinema — certainly for American cinema and even for the major studios — in my fifteen years on the beat. I’m at…
In the literary classic, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, photographer Walker Evans and journalist James Agee make heroes of three unknown families struggling to survive as tenant farmers in rural Alabama circa 1936. Evans and Agee’s praise for the poor but proud helped drum up support for President Franklin…
When Paul Thomas Anderson’s second feature, Boogie Nights, was released in 1997, critics and film industry types fell over themselves to designate Anderson the next big thing, an auteur in the footsteps of Scorsese and Coppola. His film turned Mark Wahlberg from a has-been underwear model and rapper into a…
“Hell is a sort of high-class nightclub,” wrote George Orwell, “entry to which is reserved for Catholics only.” This sentiment is on stark display in the work of novelist Graham Greene, whose adulterous relationship (with the very married Catherine Welston, a wealthy farmer’s wife) propelled him to scrutinize the mechanics…
Writer-director Anthony Minghella has chosen to follow up his Oscar-laden The English Patient with another literary adaptation — this time, of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. Highsmith is known to film buffs as the author of Strangers on a Train, the basis for one of Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers; but…
At first glance Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother seems uncharacteristically grim for a filmmaker with such a demonic sense of humor. Within ten minutes the heroine’s seventeen-year-old son is hit and killed by a car, which propels her and the events of the film into motion. In the next…
Let’s hear it for sports movies! The most avid sports fan occasionally can be bored by lackluster games, but the casual spectator also can appreciate what the big screen can do for an athletic contest, even one played by actors rather than athletes: the closer-than-life closeups, the dramatic use of…
Ah, what a miracle that Andy Kaufman was. So sublime his wit, so pioneering his spirit. Astonishing! A hero to be loved, adored, and emulated by all artists and performers for the rest of eternity. An opener of doors, a smasher down of barriers, a glorious, luminous, intrepid spirit without…
The heroines of Gavin O’Connor’s offbeat road movie Tumbleweeds are a struggling single mother named Mary Jo Walker (Janet McTeer) and her feisty twelve-year-old daughter Ava (Kimberly J. Brown), who set out together from a back hollow in West Virginia to make a new life, or something like one, in…
It is rare to find a movie that is as accomplished, multilayered, and rewarding as the novel from which it was adapted, but The Cider House Rules is such a film. Directed by Lasse Hallström (My Life as a Dog, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?), the film displays the kind of…
Harmony Korine’s directorial debut, Gummo, was like a hard smack to the face of contemporary cinema. Relentlessly nonlinear, filled with disturbing imagery and impossible to synopsize, it caused many viewers to wince in pain, and persuaded even more to walk quickly past its poster of a slightly misshapen child’s head…
Viscerally exciting, dramatically riveting, emotionally overwhelming, Patrice Chéreau’s Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train definitely is one of the finest works of modern French cinema. That’s easily said. The hard part is citing the fact that it’s also the greatest gay film ever made. We all know the…
