In the rancid nightmare farce called Very Bad Things, Peter Berg, in his movie writing-directing debut, creates characters that you immediately want to see killed off. From the title to the ads to the Web site (which features a Vegas stripper who will dance for you), Very Bad Things has…
Even students of English history may have trouble sorting out the palace intrigues and intragovernmental conspiracies that fill Elizabeth, the handsome new production about Queen Elizabeth I’s ascension to the British throne in 1558. With the bewitching Australian actress Cate Blanchett (last year’s Oscar and Lucinda) in the title role,…
Surprise and pleasure come wrapped together in A Bug’s Life. This big adventure about tiny critters is the latest piece of robust whimsy from Pixar, the computer animation studio that broke into features with the 1995 smash Toy Story. It should prove irresistible to children. Toy Story opened up the…
Holed up with his Sidney Bechet records, old flannel shirts and a dog-eared copy of War and Peace, Woody Allen has made a second career of shunning fad, fashion and fame–and of ostensibly keeping to himself in the most populous city in the United States. No nouveau-grooveau glitz or designer…
The first time we see Ray Joshua, the young black hero of director Marc Levin’s impressive feature debut Slam, we get a vivid taste of the conflicting forces that rule him. His olive-drab pants, so hip-hop baggy that you could fit two rail-thin Rays inside, are stuffed with bags of…
First, a disclaimer: Having missed last year’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, I deliberately put off seeing it until after viewing its sequel, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. That way I could view part two without prejudice, as well as be able to judge whether…
Well, now we know why the term “bored to death” was invented. Meet Joe Black takes an interesting idea–Death assumes human form and comes to Earth to learn about human existence–and reduces it to a flat, uninspired, interminably slow movie. Not only slow but long: a full three hours. Produced…
For filmmaker Todd Solondz, it’s always midnight in suburbia. Life is lonely, and the natives can be hostile. In his daring second film, Happiness, the darkness engulfs victims of all ages: a boy in the throes of impending adolescence, three New Jersey sisters tormented by sex and love, an obscene…
Fifteen minutes into Velvet Goldmine, director Todd Haynes’ love letter to England’s glam-rock scene of the late Sixties/early Seventies, the film has already promised to be many things: a missing-person mystery; a meticulous period piece; an essay on sexually liberated dandyism; a quasi-musical; a portrait of the Machiavellian as an…
Before Universal released Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil in 1958, it added some new scenes, and fiddled with the editing and the soundtrack–all without the director’s consent or cooperation. Crushed after screening a pre-debut cut of the film, Welles fired off a 58-page memo to the studio, detailing his objections,…
Trey Parker’s Cannibal! The Musical is, I think, the best live-action American movie musical of the ’90s. But such praise may actually be too faint–the film is better than most of the animated ones, too. I couldn’t remember three notes of any of the songs from Hercules or Mulan, but…
When Montoya, one of the fearless vampire killers in John Carpenter’s Vampires, tells another character that nobody believes in the title creatures because nobody wants to, there’s no mistaking the ancestry of the line. It comes down, through two generations of horror films, from the moment in the original Dracula…
In 1994’s The Monster (Il mostro), his last film to gain wide American release, the Italian writer/director/star Roberto Benigni put himself at the center of a mistaken-identity farce about a serial killer. In Life Is Beautiful (La vita e# bella), Benigni plays a wacky, high-spirited man who convinces his young…
A young couple arrives at a rural cemetery to decorate their father’s grave. Both thin and blond, they look like siblings. But they’re not–just amateur actors in a low-budget movie. Minutes into the visit, the brother, Johnny, begins to carp about having to visit the grave–he no longer even recalls…
It comes as no surprise to learn that Paul Devlin, the producer, director and editor of SlamNation, is an Emmy winner for his work on TV sports shows like NBC and CBS Olympic coverage and Extreme Games 101 on ESPN2. SlamNation is a documentary chronicle of the 1996 National Poetry…
At the beginning of Gary Ross’ Pleasantville, fraternal twins who are unhappy suburban teenagers (is there any other kind?) fall down the rabbit hole of their television set and find themselves trapped in a parallel universe: a Fifties sitcom of the same name in which the family is more idealized…
A riveting but darkly disturbing thriller, Apt Pupil isn’t easy to sit through. The subject matter proves deeply unsettling, while two brief acts of sadism are so horrifying as to be unwatchable. And yet this brutal film borders on being brilliant. Beautifully structured and edited, with a chilling central performance…
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita still has the power to scare off people. Proof is the book’s new movie adaptation, directed by Adrian Lyne and scripted by Stephen Schiff and starring Jeremy Irons as the passionate pedophile Humbert Humbert, a man entranced by nymphets. Completed more than two years ago, the movie…
Insofar as filmmaker Tony Gatlif’s justly admired “Gypsy trilogy” is an exploration of his roots and a search for his nature–he was born in Algeria to Gypsy parents of Spanish origin, but later educated at Paris’ L’Ecole des Beaux Arts–it comprises one of the most passionate and telling self-examinations in…
The Jonathan Demme-directed Beloved runs nearly three hours, and it’s a long slog. This adaptation of the 1987 Toni Morrison novel bursts with ambition. On one hand, it tries to get inside the fevers of the African-American slave experience, but it also wants to be an epic family saga and…
The hero of The Mighty–the title character, in fact–is an eighth-grader known by the nickname “Freak” (Kieran Culkin). His might isn’t physical–he’s a small, frail boy who suffers from a degenerative birth defect. His spine curves painfully, and he’s able to walk only with crutches and leg braces. But he…
Recently a woman I know in her early 20s–about the same age as Sarah Jacobson, the writer/director of Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore–told me that, though she was well-versed in films ranging from The In-Laws to Pretty in Pink to Tommy Boy, she had been chided by a friend…
