Though critics often compared Virginia Woolf’s nonlinear, almost Cubist narratives to the then burgeoning cinema’s use of montage, closeups, flashbacks, tracking shots, and rapid cuts, the strength of Woolf’s novels lies in the rhythm of her arresting style, and in her heroines’ poignant and melancholic musings, which insidiously seep through…
Probably every film director itches to make a Western, so let’s be thankful that, with The Newton Boys, Richard Linklater has scratched his itch. Now he can go back to making movies about subjects he has some genuine feeling for. Linklater should not be begrudged his chance to “stretch.” But…
In his 1993 book Sarajevo: A War Journal, the Bosnian journalist Zlatko Dizdarevic reported about an eleven-year-old child who was waiting in line for water when snipers killed his mother and father: “After the shooting, this boy started to fetch and pour water over the bodies of his dead parents…
If ever there was a movie destined to be written about in an “elevated” realm beyond the movie pages, it’s Primary Colors. Thanks to Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones, the Hollywood-Washington nexus has lifted director Mike Nichols’s picture, based on the 1996 bestseller by Joe Klein, into a higher stratosphere…
Dangerous Beauty presents a sixteenth-century Venice filled with statesmen who hop from bed to bed without fear of “bimbo eruptions.” That’s because the courtesans aren’t bimbos, and they aren’t hidden: Everyone from the admiralty to the bishopric patronizes them. Having developed their minds along with their erotic skills, they’re boon…
British actor Gary Oldman, who made his mark playing a punk in 1986’s Sid and Nancy and a playwright in 1987’s Prick Up Your Ears, wrote and directed Nil By Mouth, which has already drawn comparisons to the class-conscious dramas of Mike Leigh (Naked, Secrets & Lies). The film, which…
Jeff Bridges is so euphorically wacked as a social dropout in The Big Lebowski that you get a secondhand high just looking at him. Padding around Venice, California, in a T-shirt that barely covers his midriff bulge, he comes off like a beach bum who bowls instead of surfs. His…
Palmetto is a film noir set in a torpid seaside Florida town. It’s based on the 1961 James Hadley Chase novel Just Another Sucker, and when we first see Harry Barber (Woody Harrelson), he fits that description exactly. He looks dazed and confused — a sucker incarnate. Suckers are, of…
Back in the Sixties and Seventies, when its animation unit was in the doldrums, the Disney studio made a number of genuinely funny live-action “family” comedies (1976’s No Deposit, No Return and 1977’s Freaky Friday, among them) that were, within their limited ambitions, genuinely funny. The studio’s most recent film,…
The science-fiction writing of the late great Philip K. Dick hasn’t been particularly well-served on-screen. The most recent adaptation of one of his works, Screamers, was junk; Total Recall (1990) had its moments but was less ingenious by half than the short story on which it was based. Blade Runner…
When Quentin Tarantino started up his boutique releasing company Rolling Thunder in 1996, his first release was, unsurprisingly, a Hong Kong production. After all, Tarantino has been one of the most vocal boosters of Hong Kong cinema in the United States. What was surprising was that he chose to release…
This period tale of two gamblers — Oscar, a failed minister, and Lucinda, a glassworks owner — is too wispy to be an objet d’art and too clumsy to be a toy. Its key symbol is a tiny glass teardrop known as the “Prince Rupert drop,” which can withstand a…
His eye trained on the manic collision of Catholicism and consumerism, Spanish director Pedro Almodovar has made some of the most lively, genre-bending films of the past two decades. The guru of a visual style that emphasizes bright primary colors and bold geometry, he’s in love with the glittering surfaces…
In these paradox-ridden times, producers in search of cutting-edge fantasies look back — they visit their boyhood or girlhood rooms and ransack their old books and videos, or peruse their studio’s property list for works that scored well in other media. In the mid-Nineties, the English company Working Title Films…
The fifteenth Miami Film Festival continues apace Thursday through Sunday with two works by Japanese director-actor Takeshi Kitano, a star-studded entry from venerable new-wave filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, and the most recent movie made by playwright David Mamet. Not forgetting a closing-night screening of Italy’s Il Ciclone, which has become that…
You will give yourself a migraine if you attempt to divine a theme running through the 26 films that make up the fifteenth Miami Film Festival. Don’t bother trying. A readily apparent theme does not exist — not that one needs to. International in everything but name, this year’s renewal…
After Santa’s overstuffed sack of Oscar qualifiers is disgorged every December, Hollywood dumps its lost-cause features during the first few weeks of the new year. In recent times these have included the airplane “thriller” Turbulence (1997), Bio-Dome and Two If by Sea (1996), and Cabin Boy (1994). This year we’ve…
One of the conceits to which every critic must be genetically predisposed is the idea that, at the end of the day, his or her opinion actually matters. That some unknown phantasm at a nonspecific coffee shop sits immersed in said critic’s latest ill-advised screed, imbibing every word as if…
Martin Scorsese’s Kundun is a deeply ceremonial experience; it’s like watching a serene pageant of colors, rituals, and costumes. It tracks the life of the Dalai Lama — recognized as the fourteenth reincarnation of the Buddha of Compassion and the spiritual and political leader of Tibet — from his childhood…
Swedish director Jan Troell’s Hamsun, starring Max von Sydow, is easily the greatest film I’ve seen in years. It takes you as far out as you can go — to the limits of feeling. As a movie about a great and grievous artist made by an artist of equal rank,…
Where would Irish filmmakers these days be without the Troubles? In just the past couple of years we’ve seen The Crying Game, In the Name of the Father, Michael Collins, Some Mother’s Son, and now The Boxer, the latest collaboration between director Jim Sheridan, screenwriter Terry George, and Daniel Day-Lewis…
When was the last time an audience applauded a trailer and the movie lived up to it? Independence Day enticed millions with its preview shot of the White House blown to smithereens, but that film was a dumb, elephantine sci-fi pastiche. The trailer for Wag the Dog, a far more…
