With all the brutal competition from the big-ticket films prior to the December 31 Oscar deadline, Hollywood has established a tradition in recent years of dumping lost-cause features during the first few weeks of the year. In 1997, it was the airplane “thriller” Turbulence; in 1996, Bio-Dome and Two If…

It’s been just two years since the Academy nominated the Italian film Il Postino (a.k.a. The Postman) for multiple Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor. The arrival of Kevin Costner’s epic The Postman raises the possibility of confusion in the Oscar history books–a very slim possibility, a…

Now that the Japanese Tora-san series–with 50-some entries in 30 years–has presumably drawn to a close, following the death of star Kiyoshi Atsumi last year, the James Bond films constitute the longest-running continuous series around. They’ve had their ups and downs, but something about the Bond formula has proved enduring…

Wes Craven’s Scream, which opened almost exactly a year ago, was the surprise hit of an overcrowded Christmas season. In part, its success was a triumph of counterprogramming: In a glut of classy Oscar contenders, Scream was the only teen-horror film. And it was helped by the relatively lackluster response…

First, The Heiress was unofficially remade as Washington Square, then Ace in the Hole as Mad City, and The Day of the Jackal as The Jackal. But now we get The Absent-Minded Professor, all dressed up in new threads, as Flubber. In this frenzy of plundering the past, is nothing…

Disney Studios has nearly monopolized feature animation for almost 60 years now, only occasionally encountering successful forays by others into its animation realm. Now Twentieth Century Fox and its Phoenix-based Fox Animation studios are going up against the giant mouse with Anastasia; too bad this first effort isn’t better. During…

Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee has carved out a niche as our leading director of comedies of manners. His first three films–Pushing Hands (1992), The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)–combined humor with pathos to shed light on modern Chinese and Chinese-American family conflicts. The news that he…

The true-life story of the Cottingley Fairies is so full of possibilities, so thought-provoking and hilarious at once, that it’s amazing it’s never been filmed before. Making up for lost time, the incident has suddenly appeared (on its 80th anniversary) as the basis for two films simultaneously. Photographing Fairies, with…

Every film adaptation of a preexisting work has its own unique set of problems; in the case of Jocelyn Moorhouse’s A Thousand Acres, the problem is compounded. Not only was Jane Smiley’s 1991 novel a Pulitzer Prize-winning best seller with a large number of (presumably) devoted fans, but the book…

Time has a way of slipping away. But don’t worry–studio executives are keeping a typically keen eye on the calendar, and calculating the simple economics of boomer nostalgia. Hmmm . . . 1997 minus 1957 equals 40 years. Forty years of nostalgia times a gazillion boomers plus all the baffled…

It’s no secret that the “new” Jackie Chan releases in the U.S. aren’t really new at all. In fact, they’re not even showing up in chronological order: While New Line is issuing Chan’s more current stuff in order, Miramax is putting out the star’s relatively recent back catalogue out of…

At first glance, the new Japanese comedy Shall We Dance? appears to be an Asian remake of the Australian hit Strictly Ballroom–but, in fact, the similarities are only surface-deep (and just barely that). Part of the difference is rooted in the cultural gap between the two countries, but wider yet…

Face/Off, director John Woo’s new action film with John Travolta and Nicolas Cage, is Paramount’s big summer hope. Five years ago, when Warner Bros. offered Woo the project, he passed on it–he didn’t want to do science fiction, preferring something more emotional, he says. Later, producer Michael Douglas brought it…

First, the good news: Unlike most action-film sequels, Speed 2: Cruise Control is not a mere retread of the original. Now the bad news: Better it had been. Director Jan De Bont made a dazzling debut with the 1994 Speed. His riveting direction of action triumphed over a hackneyed, illogical…

It’s not completely fair to say that the string of hits produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer from 1983 through 1996 are stylistically interchangeable. But it’s not too far off: A homogeneous, auteurial touch runs from Flashdance (1983) through Top Gun (1986), Beverly Hills Cop II (1987) and Days…

Sidney Lumet has had enough ups and downs in his long, prolific career that it’s never safe to count him out . . . even after two disappointing films in a row, A Stranger Among Us (1992) and Guilty as Sin (1993). Even the greatest directors frequently falter in their…

Over the past five years, action star Jean-Claude Van Damme has become one of America’s leading importers of foreign talent. In 1993, he hired Hong Kong action ace John Woo to direct Hard Target. For last year’s Maximum Risk, he brought over Ringo Lam. And now he has used a…

Lars von Trier is, perhaps consciously and defiantly, one of the least-commercial, brilliant directors in the world. His best-known movie, the 1992 Zentropa, and his earlier The Element of Crime both open with hypnotic voice-overs, seemingly daring us to succumb to sleep before the credits are even over. Nonetheless, if…

In the two decades since Eraserhead, David Lynch has established himself as American cinema’s premier surrealist, our own Wizard of Weird. Although his first two Hollywood projects–The Elephant Man (1980) and Dune (1984)–had little room for the sort of spooky shit at which he excels, his style found its greatest…

You can bet that at one point or another, some executive wanted the title of this long-awaited nonsequel to A Fish Called Wanda to be A Lemur Called Rollo (for the story does include such a character). While the latter wouldn’t have been the most commercial of titles, neither is…

Hamlet (Kenneth Branagh) is Prince of Denmark. After his father (Brian Blessed) dies, his uncle Claudius (Derek Jacobi) takes the throne and marries Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude (Julie Christie). When the late king’s ghost reveals he was murdered by Claudius, Hamlet must decide which course of action to take. Meanwhile, he…

Wes Craven, creator of the Nightmare on Elm Street series and writer/director of its two best entries (the first and the last), works whispering distance from the commercial Hollywood mainstream, just far enough to allow for more rude wit and less comfortable resolution than most studio product. His films open…