The made-on-a-shoestring male bonding comedy Swingers has become a darling of the film festival circuit thanks to the cinematic equivalent of good cocktail chatter: smart, funny lines delivered by a handful of stylish, good-looking (but not overpoweringly so) young hipsters whose slick, trendy appearances mask vulnerable hearts. Jon Favreau, the…
I hate the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival. I know, I know — film festivals are good for us, they give us a chance to see movies that we wouldn’t otherwise get to see, they bring area cinephiles together, et cetera. But after screening videos of FLIFF (not to be…
Let me give you a piece of advice regarding the movie Sleepers: As you settle into your seat for the opening credits and the phrase “based on a true story” appears, ignore it. Watch this movie as if it were a work of pure fiction. The best-selling book of the…
When is a soap opera not a soap opera? When it’s written and directed by a filmmaker as skilled as Mike Leigh and performed by actors as convincing as Brenda Blethyn and Timothy Spall in Leigh’s new film Secrets & Lies. Few plot lines have been as overworked in recent…
Tommy Basilio (Steve Buscemi) lost his pregnant girlfriend Theresa (Elizabeth Bracco) to his best friend and former boss Rob (Anthony LaPaglia). To add insult to injury, Rob fired Tommy from the garage where both men worked as mechanics because Tommy “borrowed” $1500 from the till and gambled it away. Tommy,…
An earnest, ambitious, and highly principled young lawyer takes on an unpopular case and uncovers evildoing in high places. Question #1: Which movie based on a John Grisham novel does that synopsis describe? Answer: All of them. Question #2: How many of those films suck? Answer: See Answer #1. Say…
You have to admire Shane Black. The guy writes ludicrous, thoroughly implausible scripts that should be laughed out of existence based on their premises alone, fleshes them out with brainless banter and stereotypical characters, and then sells them for more money than many far superior independent films have for their…
Tom Hanks’s new movie That Thing You Do! is a slight but catchy little ditty that grows annoying with prolonged exposure. In other words, it’s a lot like the song of the same title that sets the plot in motion and pops up repeatedly throughout the film. Hanks, surely the…
I wasn’t even going to review Leon Ichaso’s cliche-ridden anti-Castro diatribe Bitter Sugar. Ichaso’s Cuban Romeo and Juliet seemed neither good enough to merit my praise nor bad enough to invoke my wrath; the film drifts like a sunstruck balsero in a sea of mediocrity. But then, on September 25,…
The female protagonists of the darkly funny thrillers Bound, Curdled, and Butterfly Kiss don’t fit neatly into the usual Madonna-whore roles usually ascribed to women in film. But they are cleaning ladies, in a sense: Corky (Gina Gershon) and Violet (Jennifer Tilly) mop up a Mafia money-laundering machine in Bound…
You’re a doctor on duty in a hospital emergency room. Ambulances arrive and disgorge two gunshot victims. One is a cop and the other a drug-dealing scumbag. Both men need surgery, but the drug dealer is in more immediate danger. Only one operating room is available. The cop’s colleagues, his…
With his muscled arms, deep-set eyes and wavy black hair, 2 days in the Valley writer-director John Herzfeld looks the part of Starsky’s brother, a recurring role the actor-turned-filmmaker once played on the ultra-violent Seventies TV series Starsky and Hutch. But Herzfeld’s early acting career, which included performances in two…
American filmmakers born during the baby boom have been trying — and failing — for decades to make a really great rock and roll movie. A few have gotten close — This Is Spinal Tap and Backbeat pop into mind. But more often such films tend to fall back on…
Too many thrillers start out like gangbusters only to fall apart in the final act. When one finally happens along that ends more cleverly than it opens, the temptation arises to praise it on that basis alone. The Rich Man’s Wife is such a film. The sad truth is, however,…
For a musician, Tom Petty is one shrewd son-of-a-gun. He knows that movie soundtracks these days frequently become more popular than the movies they accompany. A motion picture can be a total box-office dog, but the barrage of media hype preceding its release is sure to emphasize the flick’s signature…
David Mamet’s 1975 play American Buffalo shocked audiences with its profanity and its unsparing examination of what Mamet characterized as “the American Dream gone bad.” Mamet garnered the New York Drama Critics Circle Award with his bleak tale of a pair of lowlife schemers and their half-baked plot to rip…
Massive power crash. Phones down. No TV, no radio, no computers. Chaos and lawlessness ensue. Suburban proto-yuppies Matt and his wife Annie panic; they have a screaming baby with an ear infection. They can’t get the medicine they need to cure the infant because the pediatrician can’t call in the…
I can’t believe that with all the money they spent on casting (Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer don’t come cheap), the geniuses who remade H.G. Wells’s sci-fi classic The Island of Dr. Moreau couldn’t spring for some semi-realistic man-beast effects. This is the third and least satisfying Hollywood retelling of…
Fans of Zhang Yimou’s haunting and visually striking epic Raise the Red Lantern may want to check out Li Shaohong’s new film Blush, a lush adaption of a novel by Su Tong, who also wrote the book upon which Raise the Red Lantern was based. Like Yimou’s film, Shaohong’s provides…
Multiple Oscar-winner Nick Park’s name is well-known in his native England but remains relatively unfamiliar here in the U.S. More Americans have probably witnessed Park’s Plasticine magic in the video for the Peter Gabriel song “Sledgehammer” than in any of his other projects, despite the fact that he has walked…
You won’t see a more damning testimony to the mindlessness of war than the final scene of Vukovar. It’s a sweeping panorama of burned-out rubble where once stood the town of Vukovar, a breathtakingly picturesque jewel of a city in the former Yugoslavia. It took three months for director Boro…
If Jean-Michel Basquiat had chosen rock music rather than painting as his metier, his life story would seem so familiar as to border on cliche: gifted young artist rockets from obscurity to fame, makes buckets of money, begins to believe his own press clippings, and ultimately succumbs to the too-much-too-soon…
