Who saw Old Yeller? Who cried when Old Yeller got shot at the end? Nobody cried when Old Yeller got shot? I’m sure! I cried my eyes out . . . –Bill Murray, Stripes The title canine of Disney’s Old Yeller saves young Tommy Kirk from wild pigs, and catches…

Farce often operates best with the sword of horror hanging over its head, and horror can chill more deeply when spiked generously with humor. Martin and Lewis and Hope and Crosby and the Dead End Kids all braved haunted houses; half of the monsters on the Universal lot played straight…

Movies about junkies certainly don’t exact the same toll from their audiences that actual junkies do from the people who care about them, but their techniques are often the same. Junkies can frequently be charming; so can junkie movies. Junkies elicit one’s pity, sometimes calculatingly; so do junkie movies. Junkies…

John Sayles rushes in where other straight white males fear to tread. He’s written screenplays set everywhere from Secaucus to Harlem to Ireland to Depression-era West Virginia to Louisiana to, with the current Lone Star, a border town in Texas. And that’s just in his pet projects–his hackwork for other…

With the exception, maybe, of Oliver Stone, no current American director is as adept at staging battle scenes as Edward Zwick–the engagements in his Glory had a speed and terror that could make you gasp. Battle scenes also figure importantly in Zwick’s new film, Courage Under Fire, the first major…

Misfit kids–nerds, loners, class clowns–have a rough time of it in school, but for many of them, the ultimate payoff is considerable: They sometimes get to grow up to be rock stars, novelists, Nobel laureates, stand-up comedians, computer tycoons and, of course, filmmakers. (The luckiest of them get to be…

Independence Day isn’t dull–it holds the attention for all of its 144 minutes. Sometimes, it does so through the shocking gracelessness of its dialogue, or the weird jumble of its cast, or the simple astonishment over what cliches it isn’t above trying to put past us, but it never bores…

This much can be said about Striptease, anyway: It comes closer to capturing the spirit, if not the stature, of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders than the current film that appropriates that masterwork’s title. As one woman forced into a shady lifestyle to another, Defoe’s resourceful, foolish, lusty, pious, magnificently human…

Bill Rocz, the movie critic and celebrity interviewer for KPHO-TV, died last week after an excruciatingly long struggle with Lou Gehrig’s disease. A well-known and -liked Arizona media personality, the on-air Rocz epitomized wholesomeness as a sort of dapper, toupeed, mellifluous square. Hosting KPHO’s Hollywood Greats and Family Classics, he…

At the end of the 1939 film of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Hunchback gazes down from the bell tower of the title edifice at his beloved Esmeralda–Maureen O’Hara, who could make any man feel a bit deformed and subhuman. He’s saved her life repeatedly, yet there…

Ben Stiller and Jim Carrey may be the best TV comics in the movies. The sharpest work to date of that painfully promising and unrealized talent Stiller has been in his marvelous TV sketches, and that is the background of the comedy superstar Carrey, too. Both may feel that they…

Stella Gibbons’ 1932 debut novel Cold Comfort Farm is a sort of war between literary dispositions: Gibbons pits the fatalistic sense of Thomas Hardy’s haunted rustics against the cheery, matter-of-fact sensibility of a cultivated young Jane Austen-cum-P.G. Wodehouse heroine. As Gibbons bets on the latter, Miss Flora Poste, the result…

The films from the production team of Jerry Bruckheimer and the late Don Simpson are big, sloppy monuments to male bonding–and not repressed, defensive, John Ford-style male bonding, either; the men of Bruckheimer-Simpson let it all hang out. The films are like Wagnerian versions of the beer ads where the…

Aristotle was wrong, you know. In Poetics, his small book of dramatic criticism, he says that the action of a good tragedy elapses in a straightforward progression, without digression or counterpointing action, usually on the same day, in the same spot. More than two thousand years of theatrical practice and…

By subject, movies come in sets of three. In 1984, we had Places in the Heart, The River and Country; last year we had Highlander: The Final Dimension, Rob Roy and Braveheart; and I’m still wondering whatever happened to the third pig movie. Probably intended to capitalize on the loyal…

Peter Graves, star of TV’s Mission: Impossible, who has since retired to stately voice-overs on the A&E network, is not the sort of actor one thinks of as an old master. Yet he might have shown Tom Cruise, the star of the current feature version of MI, a trick or…

In June of 1968, a young, unpublished writer named Valerie Solanas assured herself a footnote in pop-culture history–a very brief footnote. She did this by shooting and nearly killing pop artist and party maven Andy Warhol, whom she had tried with little success to cultivate as a patron. As played…

In the press book for Heaven’s Prisoners, director Phil Joanou boasts, “Sure, we have shoot-outs in mysterious swamps and across the rooftops. . . . But that’s only meant to spice up the meal. The main course is the characters.” This is true, alas. The spices in a meal–even a…

“You talkin’ to me?” Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), title character of Taxi Driver, speaks this line to his own reflection in his fleabag apartment, while playing with his new guns. Martin Scorsese’s masterly 1976 film, now celebrating its 20th birthday with a rerelease at Valley Art Theatre, has no…

Barb Wire is the feature-film debut of Pamela Anderson Lee, that Jungian archetype of the buxom-blond bombshell who’s said to have been discovered at some public event on a Sony big screen–an electronic-age version of Lana Turner at the Schwab’s counter. The Baywatch star plays the title role in this…

The African maxim that it takes a village to raise a child is the theme of Once Upon a Time . . . When We Were Colored. Clifton L. Taulbert’s slim book about his boyhood in the black section of a small Mississippi town in the 1950s is childhood memoir…