There’s a lovely formality to the structure of the comedy Wedding Bell Blues. Three young women (Paulina Porizkova, Illeana Douglas and Julie Warner), roomies, take a road trip to Vegas, with the vague plan of getting married, then immediately divorced. Their notion is that a 30ish divorcee is less pathetic…

Cold comfort though it must be to those who suffered through it, Great Britain’s Tory-era industrial collapse at least produced two delightful, defiant movie comedies. Mark Herman’s Brassed Off! followed a North England mining town’s brass band on its swan song. The film wasn’t escapist–it was pretty preachy at times,…

If you spent a lot of time during the early Eighties watching what were known in those days as “T&A” comedies–low-budget youth sex farces like Hardbodies or Private School–then the new film Butch Camp may amaze you. It’s made perfectly and unselfconsciously in the same cruddy nonstyle. It’s technically shoddy,…

In Woody Allen’s early comedy Take the Money and Run, stickup man Allen’s wife complains about the unfairness that her husband never made the Ten Most Wanted List. “It’s who you know,” she bitterly insists. The makers of the period gangster epic Hoodlum seem to have felt the same snub…

Having been fixated all his life with both movies and insects, Mimic director Guillermo Del Toro recently offered his expert opinion on the subject of bugs, especially huge bugs, in the movies. “There are only two giant-insect movies that are really good,” he said, modestly excepting Mimic, of course. “Them!…

Miguel Arteta, director of Star Maps, attended film programs at Harvard, Wesleyan and the American Film Institute. But how did he make the leap into the movie business? “I gave a tape of my film to Jim, my car mechanic,” says Arteta. “God bless him, he introduced me to Jonathan…

Before Billy Connolly has said hello or shaken your hand, before you’ve even stepped into his hotel room, he’s already effusively telling you about something BRRRILLIANT he’s just seen on TV. This particular BRRRILLIANT program was about a Hells Angels convention in rural Alberta, Canada, and how the townies were…

Who is it that forbids me/darkness, and who would give me eyes again? –The Oedipus of Seneca, Act V Spalding Gray is about as economy-minded a showman as you could find. Not only does he require nothing more for his act than a table and chair, a mike, a spiral-bound…

Several times during the kid movie Wild America, the three teen-heartthrob heroes cruise down the road to the strains of “Born to Be Wild.” Disgrace, you say, to put the Easy Rider anthem through one more commercial indignity–yuppie car ads in the ’80s, and now a pulse-raiser for the Tiger…

The family film Shiloh slipped unheralded into town and is likely to slip back out quickly, since, peculiarly, it’s also being released on video this week. In one medium or the other, it’s worth catching–it being one of the few current movies for kids that doesn’t seem engineered to make…

The exhilarating, bird-flipping British film Brassed Off is about the systematic destruction of the coal-mining industry in northern England by the Thatcher government in the last decade. It’s set in the fictitious Yorkshire town of Grimley, where a profitable pit is on the verge of closure. Though there is still…

The production notes for Female Perversions could make one think that the film’s title was meant to attract the psychology-grad-student audience. This story of a high-powered lawyer struggling with her sexual confusions is a dramatization of a nonfiction psych study, Dr. Louise Kaplan’s Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary…

The Substance of Fire ought to be one of the major critical favorites of 1997. It won’t be, but is worth seeking out while it lingers in town. It’s an adaptation of the acclaimed drama by Jon Robin Baitz about Jewish guilt and familial war. Baitz was 26 when he…

Filmmakers and audiences have been captivated by the idea of dinosaurs since the primeval days of the cinema. Not until Jurassic Park four years ago, however, have the movies made truly convincing dinosaurs. Which is not to say that film dinosaurs prior to Park and to its current sequel, The…

You and I both may have complex feelings about reproductive rights, but the lucky folks to the right and left of us don’t–they’re blessed with absolute, black-and-white knowledge. The movies, with few exceptions, have steered clear of this debate, for the same reason that many of us tend to avoid…

For the fourth time in as many years, Arizona Film Society presents the Saguaro Film Festival. As in previous years, this year’s selections are a mixed bag, but a rewarding one–along with the usual batch of slackers-trying-to-get-laid comedies, there are such real gems as an enchanting, imaginative riff on the…

Paradise Road opens inside a posh British club in Singapore, February 1942. Beautiful young women dance with their uniformed sweethearts, while Colonel Blimp types and their wives cluck with amusement at the idea of the short, nearsighted Japanese getting the upper hand against the mighty Brits. Then the bombs start…

The Australian film Angel Baby is about the love affair between a young man and a young woman, both attractive and intelligent, and both afflicted with fairly severe mental illness–when they meet, they compare slash scars on their wrists. The sweet-souled, exuberant Harry (John Lynch) sees Kate (Jacqueline McKenzie) in…