The most surprising thing about the new teensploitation horror film Idle Hands is the lack of masturbation jokes. It is a movie about a 17-year-old boy who loses control of his right hand to an evil demon, yet there’s only one such obvious crack. As the gloriously lazy hero Anton…
The “SLC” in SLC Punk! stands for Salt Lake City, but it might as well stand for Some Lucky Chump. The filmmaker, James Merendino, has stated that this tale of two punk buddies trying to spread anarchy through the Utah capital in 1985 reflects his own rebellious teenage years there…
Based on the first Julian Barnes novel, Metroland is essentially a dramatization of the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime”: “You may find yourself/In a beautiful house/With a beautiful wife/You may ask yourself/Well, how did I get here?” The hero of Metroland spends the movie asking himself that question,…
Sean Connery has always been a terse, minimalist actor, spitting out his lines in tight bursts of Scottish brogue. But in Entrapment, the kingly Scot goes beyond minimalism to the point where he’s practically doing semaphore with his eyebrows. As the legendary art thief Robert MacDougal, Connery isn’t just reserved,…
Remember Keiko Ibi, the pretty Japanese woman who gave the touching acceptance speech after she won for Best Documentary Short at this year’s Oscars? The chance to see her 37-minute winning film, The Personals, on a big screen comes up this weekend, when it’s shown as part of the Saguaro…
Just as David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) came off as an organic reaction to a terrible new wasting disease, his new movie crystalizes the confusions of an epoch that can’t decide whether it’s the Entertainment Era, the Information Age, or the Digital Millennium. Named for a fictional “game system” also…
The heroine of Roland Joffe’s comic noir Goodbye Lover is Sandra, a modern femme fatale for whom seduction, murder and double-crossing are as natural as her severe blond china doll hairstyle is artificial. She’s the heroine of the story, that is; the heroine of the production is Patricia Arquette, who…
In Pushing Tin, the edgy new comedy from British director Mike Newell, the dominant image is a black screen pulsing with obscure fluorescent markings, like the characters on some early prototype of Pac-Man. In this case, though, nobody’s playing any games. The markings represent very real jet airliners filled with…
Stuffed full of fantasy comics, addicted to action, and steeped in digital technology, the frenetic moviemakers Andy and Larry Wachowski have done what they must–create an eye-popping, morph-mad, quasi-mythical sci-fi flick that will thrill computer nerds as it kicks serious ass. The Matrix also presumes to (ahem!) think deeply–although this…
It takes a few minutes’ worth of patience to get to the pleasures of Wrestling With Alligators, the feature debut of writer-director Laurie Weltz. The prologue may have you checking your watch before the credits are over. The characters are introduced, cavorting on the beach in that same sort of…
Imagine, if you will, one of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s classic road movies that never leaves the terminal, and you have pretty much described Life, the strikingly uneventful new comedy starring Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence. It’s their Road to Nowhere. Life, which was directed by Ted Demme from…
Has any major American director had quite so many career swings as Robert Altman? Maybe not, but if there’s one thing the last 30 years have made clear, it is that it’s never safe to count Altman out. The mid- and late ’90s have been particularly unfriendly to him. After…
Steve Martin says he doesn’t want audiences to expect the same old Steve Martin whenever he stars in a comedy. But that means one thing when he’s referring to Roxanne and L.A. Story, two inspired flights of romantic farce (based on his own scripts), and another when he’s talking about…
Courage comes in an infinite variety of forms and faces, but who among us would be brave enough to go back and relive our high school years, face the horrors of homeroom, and confront hallways so fraught with danger that the most treacherous battlefield would look as placid as a…
10 Things I Hate About You, an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew set at a modern-day high school, may have pioneered the idea of turning Shakespeare into teen comedy. But it is far from the first film to update or rework one of the Bard’s plots to fit…
The teen comedy 10 Things I Hate About You gets off to a nice peppy start thanks to a burst of “One Week” by Barenaked Ladies under the titles, but the song gets cut off halfway through. The plot suffers the same fate. The first quarter of the film–the exposition…
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” Kurt Vonnegut claimed that this was the moral of his novel Mother Night. As it happens, he was specifically referring to Nazis–the hero of that short book was an American-born resident of Germany…
“I hope it’s better than The Truman Show,” said the woman in line behind me at the publicized “sneak preview” of EDtv. Afterward, a man in my row declared, “That was a lot better than The Truman Show.” Pretentious high-concept films like The Truman Show often garner accolades and let…
Ginger and Fred. Shirley Temple and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds. To the list of unforgettable movie dance partnerships, we may now add Omar Epps, the trim, handsome young man who stars as one third of The Mod Squad, and Michael Lerner, the heavyset middle-aged actor who…
Imagine a bunch of kids watching the classic 1956 film musical The King and I on television, then going outside and spending the rest of the afternoon acting it out in the backyard. Apart from a lack of hired-gun Broadway voices performing the songs, their re-creation might not be too…
In the three decades that director Ken Loach has been a steadfast champion of the British working class, his films have lost none of their sting. Whether examining a brutal Belfast police incident in Hidden Agenda (1990) or the plight of an unemployed man struggling to buy his daughter a…
Immodesty becomes Guy Ritchie, the British writer-director who makes a jovial debut on a Jovian scale in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. In this wayward gangster comedy set in London’s East End, Ritchie cooks up a gleefully improbable tale out of mismatched ingredients–a rigged card game, a hydroponics marijuana…
