As a filmmaker, actor John Turturro clearly believes in drawing from personal experience: His directorial debut, 1992’s Mac (which won the Camera D’Or at Cannes), was avowedly based on his father’s life. For his second feature, Illuminata, Turturro takes a look at the theater, showing us the ambitions, fears, and…
In the opening scene of Leila, we’re shown, through an Iranian holy ceremony, the intimacy of a present-day Iranian family. But family ties are strained and the modern world is tested as Leila (Leila Hatami) and her husband, Reza (Mohamad Reza Sharifinia), discover that she will never be able to…
Of all the atrocities committed by the United States government, the internment of Japanese Americans in prison camps during World War II deserves a spot in the top ten. The legal and moral implications of this dark period in our history have been explored by civil libertarians. But what about…
It seems like only yesterday that movies dealing with gay and lesbian life were synonymous with extravagant displays of gloom and doom. From the suicides of The Children’s Hour and Advise and Consent to the serial killers of Cruising and Basic Instinct, same-sexuality was no fun — in the worst…
What is it they say — that even a flea can reach Mount Olympus riding in Pegasus’s mane? Well, in the case of the new Albert Brooks comedy The Muse, Brooks is the flea and Pegasus is his delectable costar, Sharon Stone. But I get ahead of myself. In The…
A somber, meditative film from the Greek master Theo Angelopoulos, Eternity and a Day tells the story of a terminally ill writer Alexandre (played with creaky eloquence by German star Bruno Ganz) as he moves out of his seaside home and begins to look back over his life on the…
It has been almost 40 years since Eric Rohmer, riding the crest of the French New Wave, embarked on the first of his Six Moral Tales. The series eventually would include at least two classics: My Night at Maud’s (1969) and Chloe in the Afternoon (1972). Linked by theme, style,…
If Kevin Williamson has anything to say about it, the good works of noble movie schoolteachers like Mr. Chips and Miss Dove and Mr. Holland will be wiped out in one fell swoop. In their place the creator of TV’s hormonal Dawson’s Creek series proposes an unmitigated horror: a high…
Filmmaker Bobby Bowfinger, the lead character in the intermittently funny Hollywood satire Bowfinger, starring Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy, has a dream: He sees a FedEx truck cruising down the street toward his office, but instead of driving by, as it does every day, the truck stops, and the driver…
Spike and Mike’s 1999 Classic Festival of Animation, Spike and Mike’s latest edition of their annual festival (which is definitely not to be confused with their grosser, inferior Sick and Twisted fests) is their best compilation yet. There’s not a single stiff in the batch. The material is all new…
Joan Chen, director and co-writer of Xiu Xiu the Sent Down Girl, is best known as an actress: American audiences probably identify her most readily as the doomed wife in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor or as Josie Packard, the alternately evil and innocent character in David Lynch’s weird-o-rama Twin…
London-born novelist-screenwriter Hanif Kureishi doesn’t have Margaret Thatcher to kick around anymore, as he did so incisively and effectively in My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, but his concerns have not wandered too far afield. Rather the hard edges merely have been softened. Universal issues still inspire…
Do not be fooled: Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley, and Peter Criss receive top billing in Detroit Rock City, but Kiss doesn’t actually appear in the film until its final three minutes. And when the band members do show up, clad in their de rigueur leather-and-greasepaint getups, it’s simply…
Dan Ireland’s impressive debut feature The Whole Wide World died quietly at the box office despite making many a critic’s ten-best list for 1996. His followup, The Velocity of Gary, may suffer the same fate, given its modest budget and a story line focused on male bisexuality. That would be…
First published under the title The Iron Man in Great Britain in 1968, The Iron Giant is a minor classic of twentieth-century children’s literature. The slim volume by the English poet laureate Ted Hughes is a pacifist parable in the guise of a sci-fi hero fantasy. Hughes spun his yarn…
It’s always amusing when the movie industry discovers its spiritual side. Profoundly secular institution that it is, Hollywood promotes, at its peril, the notion that teenagers spewing pea soup in Georgetown can be purged of their demons by Catholic priests, that angels from heaven intercede in the lives of ballplayers…
In the highly competitive, dog-eat-dog world of the modern-day superhero, the members of the group that eventually becomes known as the Mystery Men (they don’t really have a name through most of the movie) start out with a couple of strikes against them. First off there’s the little matter of…
Runaway Bride, the long-anticipated reunion of Pretty Woman-stars Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, isn’t a sequel, but it feels like one. In everything there is a distinct sense of predestination, of events occurring according to some irresistible force of the inevitable. This makes life especially easy for Garry Marshall, the…
For Morgan J. Freeman (a young writer-director, not the well-known actor), comic timing couldn’t get any worse — or better. That’s because one of the unhappy teenagers in Freeman’s second feature, Desert Blue, is a melancholy girl dressed in moody black who likes to detonate homemade bombs. The Columbine High…
Robert Wise’s 1963 version of The Haunting (from Shirley Jackson’s novel) has long been considered one of the milestones of the horror film. After 36 years, DreamWorks has bankrolled a new version under the direction of Jan de Bont (Speed, Twister) — an idea that should sound unpromising, even to…
Finally Miami gets a proper gay and lesbian film fest, running through Sunday at the Colony and Alliance theaters. The celluloid marathon kicks off with a gala and the latest from Rose Troche, Bedrooms and Hallways, and ends with another gala and the star-studded trick. In between Miami will be…
Roughly halfway through Edge of Seventeen (July 22 at 9:30 p.m. at the Colony Theater, 1040 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach), the hero of this romantic comedy-drama, a very likable kid named Eric (Chris Stafford), is confronted by his mother (Stephanie McVay) in the living room of their home. “Are you…
