In the closing years of the 20th century, lowbrow white America finally learned to enjoy an ironic laugh at itself, led by Hollywood’s cheerful mockery of the culturally challenged working class. Outside the system, John Waters had this stuff pegged from the get-go, but the American grotesqueries of the original,…
The first thought you have while watching The Next Best Thing is, “Was Madonna always this bad an actress?” It’s a question that soon fades from consciousness to be replaced by, “Was Rupert Everett always this bad an actor?” and, “Was John Schlesinger always this bad a director?” Because the…
Ah, boxing. Beating and being beaten about the head and torso until one of two bruised and bloodied humans drops. Clever sport, tops even American football for sheer poetic elegance. So it’s not surprising — and this is only half sarcastic — that so many fine films have been made…
If you think the prevailing attitude toward sex in the United States is often somewhat backward, consider that of late-1960s Ireland, as depicted in Agnes Browne, the new movie directed by Anjelica Huston. When asked by her best friend Marion (Marion O’Dwyer) if she misses “it,” the recently widowed Agnes…
Willie Morris’ autobiographical novel, My Dog Skip, is a nearly perfect piece of bedtime reading for kids and their parents. Each chapter is virtually a self-contained anecdote, the descriptions of World War II-era Mississippi are lush and dreamlike, and the escapades of the central canine character, depicted as smarter, faster,…
Calling the subject matter of Errol Morris’ latest documentary, Mr. Death, “unpleasant” is like referring to the lavatory on a tuna boat as “lightly scented.” The director who brought us the zany Americana of Fast, Cheap & Out of Control and the lukewarm Stephen Hawking snoozer A Brief History of…
It’s hard to blame Kirk Douglas for choosing Diamonds as a comeback film, after fighting back from a devastating stroke almost four years ago. Certainly no one can fault him for wanting to act again, to prove he’s still got it. However, the question is this: Can the movie that…
Moviegoers, rejoice! The first fun movie of the year has arrived. Oh, Leo’s little seaside adventure was pretty to look at, but the attempts at depth were a real bummer. And let’s not even talk about Scream 3. Even the first one was highly overrated, and it’s been downhill from…
Film director Agnieszka Holland is the daughter of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, but she was raised in communist Poland in an atmosphere of state-imposed atheism. If those bona fides don’t qualify her to make a two-hour movie about the timeless tug of war between faith and reason,…
Twenty-seven-year-old Ben Younger delivers the message of his first feature, Boiler Room, with all the subtlety of a car bomb. To wit: Greed is alive and well in the new century, fueled by the material dreams of a generation bent on instant gratification and the distorted expectations of neophyte investors…
A late addition to the repertory company headed by A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood, Tigger has enjoyed a surge in popularity in recent years. That is, the Disney incarnation of Tigger has — the hyperactive, striped feline with the spring-loaded tail in Disney’s Winnie the…
Jane Campion’s 1992 film The Piano was an intoxicating work of art, a film of such beauty and power that it literally took my breath away. Nothing the New Zealand-born writer-director has done before or since even comes close to matching it in form, content or sensibility. And her latest…
A little more than three years after Scream and a little more than two years after Scream 2, director Wes Craven is back with Scream 3, this time without the participation of star screenwriter Kevin Williamson. From the very start, we have been told that Williamson planned for the series…
By far, the most creative thing about Snow Day is its clever integration of the studio logo into the narrative at the very beginning. As a man shovels snow from his driveway, a gigantic snowball falls from the sky and crushes his house. It’s a wonderfully anarchic moment, boding well…
The subject matter is surely the stuff of which can’t-miss movies are made: Jacqueline Susann, author of the best seller Valley of the Dolls and other jerk-off (pardon, “maddeningly sexy,” to quote Helen Gurley Brown) classic lit. There was nothing at all pedestrian about the woman who was regaled in…
Director Chen Kaige is best known in the U.S. for Farewell My Concubine, the most successful Chinese production ever released here. As many pointed out at the time, this Oscar-nominated 1993 epic of modern Chinese history may have been wholly Chinese in both content and viewpoint, but it was still,…
The computer-animated kiddy feature Sinbad: Beyond the Veil of Mists aspires to nothing more than Saturday-matinee thrills for the preadolescent crowd. The obvious direct source for the content is the cycle of Sinbad the Sailor fantasies — The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974) and…
It’s easy to see how Play It to the Bone, writer-director Ron Shelton’s latest comedy-drama, got started. Shelton obviously wanted to do for boxing what he’d already done for baseball in Bull Durham, golf in Tin Cup and pickup basketball in White Men Can’t Jump. But somewhere along the way,…
The evening of March 14, 1885, was an auspicious one in the annals of musical theater. Less than four years had passed since the opening of London’s Savoy Theatre, built specifically for the productions of librettist William Schwenk Gilbert and composer Arthur Seymour Sullivan. The partners’ first six works had…
In the past 30 years, Woody Allen has written and directed something like 28 movies — “something like” reflects the confusion of how to count his contribution to New York Stories — a remarkable productivity record for a major filmmaker, and one that’s even more impressive when you consider how…
In Cradle Will Rock, his third directorial outing, Tim Robbins takes on an almost insurmountably ambitious project: a re-creation of an era into which characters imaginary, obscure and famous are woven into a tapestry that represents the texture of the time. It’s a tall order. E. L. Doctorow was able…
Boo hoo! Frank McCourt had a miserable childhood! Honestly, who can say their childhood wasn’t impoverished in some way… or in many ways? That Mr. McCourt survived and eventually published his inescapable memoir is nice, of course, and the book is indeed a poignant and crafty piece of work. Nonetheless,…
