Well, at least those idiots at the Motion Picture Academy (MPA) got this one right. Last month Nikita Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun copped the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. It’s a damn good film — I still prefer Before the Rain, but why quibble? And yet I swore…
Like The Perez Family, Steven Soderbergh’s new film, The Underneath, ultimately underachieves despite flashes of brilliance. Soderbergh tries his hand at film noir with disappointing results, largely because all the clever editing, time-frame juggling, droll dialogue, and unconventional camerawork cannot conceal a pencil-thin narrative that boils down to this: A…
It probably won’t do any good to preface this review with a disclaimer, but here goes: I wanted to like The Perez Family. I really did. May has been a sad month for movies about Latin Americans with the word family in the title. Last week I panned director Gregory…
I don’t know how I’d go about making the ultimate film about the Chicano experience in the U.S. without resorting to cliches and stereotypes. But I don’t feel so bad; Gregory Nava didn’t have a clue, either, and somebody gave him a pile of money to tackle the job. In…
Gerard Depardieu may well be the greatest actor in the world, but you can’t blame American moviegoers for doubting the veracity of that claim if their only familiarity with Depardieu’s work stems from his three strikes at cross-Atlantic stardom: Green Card (1990), 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), and My Father,…
I hope all the hue and cry over David Caruso’s decision to bolt from TV’s NYPD Blue to pursue a career as a leading man in Hollywood does not muffle the bang made by Nicolas Cage in Caruso’s first film since the split. Cage is in peak form in Kiss…
Any credibility the film version of Jim Carroll’s raw, seditious, autobiographical 1978 book The Basketball Diaries may have hoped to establish flies right out the window the first time you see Carroll’s Hollywood surrogate, Leonardo DiCaprio, attempt to dribble a basketball. In the literary Diaries, Carroll lives for the game…
Forrest Gump’s momma said it best: Stupid is as stupid does. Too bad Pauly Shore didn’t grow up under her care, as well. Stupidity is not just another word to Totally Pauly. It’s a vocation. Dumber than Dumb and Dumber, Pauly’s latest exercise in pointless poppycock and narcissistic nonsense is…
“Gluttony is not a secret vice,” lamented the late great writer-director-actor-bon vivant Orson Welles, a man as well-remembered for his prodigious girth as for his oversized talent. Marlon Brando, who vies with Welles for the distinction of being the most feared, respected, influential, and caricatured figure in post-World War II…
Far be it from me to second-guess the platinum-plated producing tandem of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. Money talks, and nowhere does its voice carry more weight than in Hollywood, where the Simpson-Bruckheimer team churn out sleek but vapid entertainments that regularly rack up spectacular box-office returns. Since their initial…
The Sum of Us is an Australian vessel from stern to bow. David Stevens, an award-winning Aussie screenwriter (Breaker Morant) and filmmaker (the TV miniseries A Town Like Alice) scripted it. Jack Thompson, a fixture in Australian cinema as well as a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for Refugees and a…
Straight, middle-age widower Harry Mitchell just wants to make his gay son, Jeff, happy. Nothing wrong with that. But Harry tries so hard to encourage Jeff’s alternative lifestyle that he becomes a well-meaning nuisance. Eventually Harry learns that no matter how pure your motives or how badly you want to…
Here’s my fatal flaw as a film critic: After more than three decades of moviegoing, I still walk into a theater expecting the filmmaker to show me fairly quickly why I should give a damn about his protagonist. Experience has taught me that if I’m not hooked within the first…
During a question-and-answer session with the audience following the screening of the film Exotica at the Miami Film Festival in February, someone asked writer-director Atom Egoyan whether a closing shot of a troubled young woman entering an ominous-looking house signified that the woman was a murderer. Egoyan raised an eyebrow…
“I grew up in a town like Porpoise Spit,” confides Muriel’s Wedding writer-director P.J. Hogan. The Aussie auteur, who got his start in TV commercials and short features before landing a job as second-unit director on the 1991 gem Proof (which was directed by Hogan’s wife and Muriel producer Jocelyn…
Oh, to be the Dancing Queen. You can dance, you can jive, having the time of your life. See that girl! Watch that scene! Digging the Dancing Queen. Forgive me. I just get so carried away every time I hear those magic words, and I heard them a lot in…
Say this for Bye Bye, Love: A quick look at the title and the cast list and you have a very good idea of exactly what to expect A a glorified TV sit-com wrapped up in feature-film clothing. Paul Reiser, flush from the success of his popular TV series Mad…
How could anyone not pull for earnest, do-it-yourself filmmakers such as John Sayles and Maggie Renzi? Sayles tackles serious, challenging subjects — a coddled actress rediscovering her will to live after a paralyzing accident, violent labor union-management conflicts in West Virginia coal-mining country during the Twenties, the “Black Sox” World…
Why do men still run the world? Look at their track record: Millenniums have passed and they still haven’t figured out ways to avoid warfare, clean up the environment, eradicate poverty, and generally make the planet a better place to live. Along the way, technological advances have rendered their edge…
Rade Serbedzija, the actor who plays the doomed photojournalist Aleksander in Before the Rain, is quick to point out the irony of the powerful antiwar movie’s setting. The first major film about the ethnic conflicts that have torn apart the former Yugoslavia, Before the Rain takes place in Macedonia, which…
Writer-director J.F. Lawton is on the verge of creating a whole new subgenre of films: action movies for people who don’t really like action movies. Lawton authored the screenplay for 1992’s Under Siege, which accomplished the nearly impossible feat of making Steven Seagal look good. As a Cajun chef, no…
New ideas, new inventions, new fashions, new freedoms. A world on the verge of incredible medical and technological breakthroughs, yet still struggling with timeless bugaboos such as poverty, prejudice, and overpopulation. A rising tide of intolerance toward immigrants. Cynics, mystics, reactionaries, and charlatans vying for power, publicity, and pocket money…
