Jennifer Jason Leigh follows up one of her smallest, and weakest, roles (in A Thousand Acres) with a far more challenging, and formidable, performance in Washington Square, the new film version of Henry James’s 1880 novel chronicling the courtship of a wealthy girl with no obvious attractive qualities. But the…
It’s hard to fault The House of Yes, the wry toast of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, for its limitations as a film. In fact, it’s hardly a film at all — rather, it’s a barely staged, five-handed farce that trails its amiable cast around a looming Victorian mansion over…
Seven Years in Tibet feels more like Seven Days in the Movie Theater. It refuses to come to life — even when Brad Pitt, hirsute as a yak, wanders the frozen Himalayas with an Austrian accent that probably gave his dialogue coach the hives. The film’s an epic about how…
The Seventies were so awash in Fifties nostalgia that it’s surprising Going All the Way, the 1970 best seller by South Beach resident and FIU writing professor Dan Wakefield, is only now turning up in big-screen form. Of course, not all Fifties coming-of-age stories are the same: Unlike The Last…
Oliver Stone’s low-budget, hopped-up film noir U-Turn is being billed as a change of pace for the Conspiracy Dude, but actually it looks quite at home in the maestro’s hothouse. After all, aren’t conspiracies and the workings of fate what noirs are all about? Stone’s JFK pulped history with the…
Janeane Garofalo plows right through The Matchmaker with the same disgruntled sarcasm that typifies her testy, standard-bearer-for-the-underdog persona. Yet, try as it might to cast “America’s favorite anti-star” in a “romantic comedy for people who don’t like romantic comedy,” this film is a wholesale retread of Local Hero (which, in…
Critics and audiences outside France have been going on for so long about the decline in French cinema that it’s fun to see a French film — Irma Vep — that says much the same thing. The rap is, of course, somewhat unfair (most raps are), but there’s no question…
This summer Air Force One kicked off the post-Cold War thriller derby. The Peacemaker, the first feature from DreamWorks, the studio headed by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen, picks up the hot potato and carries it another nine yards. Once again we’re watching thickly accented Russians bemoaning the…
Howard and Emily’s marriage is the talk of Greenleaf, Indiana, a small town idyllic enough to repel Norman Rockwell. The town has waited three years for the couple to make it official, and slimmed-down Emily (Joan Cusack) has waited three long years for Howard (Kevin Kline) to consummate their relationship…
Every film adaption of an existing work has its own unique set of problems. In the case of Jocelyn Moorhouse’s A Thousand Acres, the problem is compounded. Not only was Jane Smiley’s 1991 novel a Pulitzer Prize-winning best seller with a large number of (presumably) devoted fans, but the book…
The Fifties-era Los Angeles of L.A. Confidential is Noir Central. Its denizens are tattooed in shadow; the play of light and dark in the streets, the police stations, the morgues is fetishistic. The postwar L.A. touted in the travelogues and billboards is a boomtown, but what we actually see is…
In their zeal to make sense of new and ever-evolving genres, rock critics are always quick to hold high a familiar sound from the past as the forerunner to and “seminal” influence on whatever is happening in the present. But Arkology (Island Jamaica/Chronicles), the new collection of reggae rarities produced…
The Disappearance of Garcia Lorca aims to cover a great deal of ground. It portrays Spain, with picturesque splendor, just before civil war, and the fate of impassioned, iconoclastic Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca in the clutches of fascism. Still, no matter how earnestly it attempts to realize its epic…
The Game is a puzzle picture; beyond its premise there isn’t much you can divulge without giving the show away. I’m not one of those critics who like to write “Stop reading now if you plan to see this movie,” so I’m tempted to wrap things up right now and…
Somewhere in the meat-packing district in downtown Manhattan, behind a nondescript door in an unremarkable building, about 100,000 reels of film sit in stacks on twelve-foot-high metal shelves, and in unruly piles on the concrete floor. The titles taped to the sides of each canister — The Honey Industry, Resistance…
If you’re nostalgic for the cockeyed let-it-all-out gabfests of the late John Cassavetes, She’s So Lovely will seem like dejà vu all over again. Cassavetes wrote the script more than a decade ago, and now his son Nick, whose first feature, Unhook the Stars, starred his mother, Gena Rowlands, has…
Excess Baggage, Alicia Silverstone’s first feature from her First Kiss Productions, turns out to be a rather shaggy and uninvolving jaunt. As Emily T. Hope, the moneyed teenager looking for love from her emotionally distant single dad (Jack Thompson), Silverstone pouts a lot while trying to wring our sympathy. Even…
Mike Leigh’s new film Career Girls is compact and minor. I don’t mean that as a slam, exactly. After the dawdling expansiveness of last year’s Secrets & Lies, his latest one is something of a relaxation — it’s appealingly small-scale. Leigh isn’t doing anything here he hasn’t done better before…
In G.I. Jane, Demi Moore plays a naval intelligence officer, Lt. Jordan O’Neil, who is recruited to be the first female SEAL. She gets a buzzcut. She endures the indignities of the male volunteers snickering at her in the food line. She rolls huge barrels through the surf and clambers…
When the beautiful entomologist rips open the chest cavity of a huge bloodthirsty insect in the sci-fi nightmare Mimic, it turns into Thoracic Park. This movie, like Spielberg’s, features evolution gone haywire and dramaturgy gone to hell. In the prologue, the heroine — the reckless and courageous (or foolhardy and…
The cops in Cop Land carry on like a bunch of goombahs. On the take from the Mob, they mimic the Mob. The fuzzy line dividing cops and crooks is the subject of many a strong police movie, but Cop Land goes a step further — it says there is…
In the not-so-brave new world of independent filmmaking, low-budget movies premiere at Sundance or Cannes and win plaudits from over-psyched audiences, publicity from desperate feature writers, and distribution from boutiques that are usually subsidiaries of major studios. Right now Tarantino-style thrillers are out; crazy-clan stories and upstairs-downstairs tales are in…
