It’s Christmas vacation, 1958. The movie my dad has chosen for a first-grade pal and me to see is the new Disney live-action adventure Tonka, starring Sal Mineo as a young Sioux named White Bull who traps and domesticates a clear-eyed, spirited wild horse named Tonka. Having seen The King…
Rule number one: When crafting a thriller, make sure the audience can relate to, identify with, or empathize with at least one of the characters. Rule number two: Make sure the characters’ motivations are clear. Fail in either area — or, worse, in both — and you end up with…
Most people associate the disco era with hedonism, homosexuality, a sense of community, tacky fashions, and awful music. But in his new The Last Days of Disco, writer-director Whit Stillman imagines the era as merely a singles bar for romantics in search of soulmates, mostly heterosexual and hardly debauchees. The…
The Truman Show, starring Jim Carrey, is the Zeitgeist movie of the hour. How could it not be? It’s all about the omnipotence of television and how our lives seem scripted by some unseen force — a TV producer, perhaps? Zeitgeist movies, almost by definition, are discussed not only by…
Only one week after lizards crawled across the country’s screens in Godzilla and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, along comes the bloated Hope Floats, toting a barge full of saccharine sentimentality and bogus emotions. Let’s start with the title, two words whose juxtaposition is neither evocative nor yielding of…
The “Size Does Matter” marketing campaign for Godzilla is far more ingenious than the actual movie. It’s also highly annoying, and has spawned a spinoff: The ads for a new film called Plump Fiction inform us that “Width matters too.” Perhaps the best thing about the much-ballyhooed arrival of Godzilla…
It’s the tail end of the 1996 California primary election campaign and incumbent Democratic senator Jay Bulworth (Warren Beatty) is having a nervous breakdown. Sleepless for days, famished, he channel-surfs aimlessly in the darkness of his office. In a rare moment of lucidity, he has an inspiration: He arranges to…
In director Barbara Kopple’s new documentary Wild Man Blues, we follow Woody Allen around Europe as he takes part in a whirlwind concert tour with the New Orleans-style jazz band with which he plays. He kvetches from the get-go. “I would rather be bitten by a dog than fly to…
Most disaster movies would be a lot better if they featured more disaster and less human drama. In Deep Impact the impending obliteration of much of the Earth by a pair of comets is merely the sideshow. The main event is a lot of goopy human-interest stuff: the daughter who…
The Horse Whisperer, the latest from Robert Redford — and the first of his directorial efforts in which he also stars — could almost serve as a compendium of Redford’s best and worst filmmaking tendencies. It features his eye for gorgeous, pictorial vistas, his straightforward narrative approach, and, most important,…
Henry Jaglom offers everything that Americans hate about French cinema — the foppish characters, the glacial pace — but with little of their philosophical depth or visual daring. Additionally, he regurgitates the annoying qualities of Woody Allen’s films — the self-absorption, the feigned feminism, the pretentiousness — without remotely approaching…
The flimsiest hustle in movie promotion today is that independent films are starved for mainstream attention. The truth is that such films often have an open field when it comes to big-city media. Major studios are usually unable to deliver a finished print of a would-be blockbuster until two or…
In the production notes for Spike Lee’s new He Got Game, the filmmaker is quoted as saying, “I don’t think I’ve ever done a film that is just about one thing….” That’s true: Usually he’s able to cram in two or three things. In He Got Game, for example, there…
Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel Les Miserables, which he began in 1845, runs to around 1500 pages in most editions. The most recent film version — there have been five other adaptations for movies or television — runs a bit under two and a half hours. It’s an expert piece of…
With I Love You, Don’t Touch Me!, first-time filmmaker Julie Davis has made a low-budget movie about love and abstinence among under-30s that takes its cues less from the work of her generational peers — Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming (1995) or Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy (1997), for instance –…
Gwyneth Paltrow gets another chance to show off her letter-perfect English accent in Sliding Doors, an engaging romantic comedy that employs a rather novel narrative device: After introducing the main characters and setting up the basic story, the film splits into two separate but parallel plot lines. It’s a twist…
In writer-director James Toback’s quicksilver sex comedy Two Girls and a Guy, Robert Downey, Jr., plays Blake Allen, a struggling New York City actor who lives in a spacious loft in SoHo that he probably can’t afford. He’s a pampered prince who has worked out for himself a cozy romantic…
The John Grisham industry has claimed another heavyweight. Late in 1997 Francis Ford Coppola delivered up John Grisham’s The Rainmaker, and now Robert Altman sails into view with The Gingerbread Man, based on an “original” Grisham story, although it’s basically a recycling of other Grisham recyclings. Who would have guessed…
From its very first frame, Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy whooshes us inside the rollicking, deranged world of twelve-year-old Francie Brady (Eamonn Owens). Francie is a redheaded rascal who lives with his alcoholic “Da” (Stephen Rea) and screw-loose mother (Aisling O’Sullivan) in a small town in the north of Ireland…
If nothing else, The Big One, the current edition of Michael Moore’s continuing self-love fest, has a great subject: the desperation hidden inside a “thriving” U.S. economy. While politicians and financial wizards point to unemployment on the wane and profits on the rise, Moore notes that the largest employer in…
When you think about how some of the smartest, most surprising films about women have been made by men — and vice versa — you start to realize that directors should dare to speak for the other gender more often. Few filmmakers know the ritual bonds and betrayals of men…
Lovers of American movies used to joke that foreign films wouldn’t seem so good if you saw them without subtitles. John Sayles’s new movie Men with Guns plays better than his previous films because it does have subtitles. Bald dialogue always sounds better in Spanish or in Indian dialects. Set…
