Time once again for the film reviewer’s grand annual act of arbitrary self-indulgence–as opposed to his petite weekly acts of arbitrary selfindulgence: the Top10 movies of the year. Every year, about this time, we bemoan what a dismal year it was for movies, and yet, every year, tallying up what…

It’s been a good year in the movies for Jane Austen, and who deserves it more? A month ago, we had a good, workmanlike version of her final novel, Persuasion; and, by far the best Hollywood comedy of the year, Amy Heckerling’s Clueless is a free adaptation of Emma. Austen’s…

Throughout Oliver Stone’s Nixon, the title character, played by Anthony Hopkins, interacts a la Forrest Gump with historical figures like JFK and Mao. Stone’s view of Richard Nixon is a negative-image version of Gump–a darker misfit traveling through the American scene in this century’s second half, turning history topsy-turvy. The…

Father of the Bride Part II: Directed by Charles Shyer; with Steve Martin, Diane Keaton, Kimberly Williams and Martin Short. Rated PG. Is it my imagination, or do the soundtracks of every movie from Touchstone Pictures include a faux-Leon Redbone vocalist crooning “The Sunny Side of the Street,” or some…

Jumanji, in the film of the same name, is a magical board game in which each roll of the dice conjures up some new terror from the Jungian jungle of childhood imagination. Once you have commenced play on the seductive-looking board, you must continue to the end, despite the attempts…

In Wild Bill, wildness has taken its toll on Bill. As played by Jeff Bridges in this shifting fever-dream from director Walter Hill, Bill, though not yet 40, is a grumpy old man–mean, dim, unimaginative, indignant over his legend. He’s a short-fused galoot, and a more-or-less heartless killer. Yet he…

In Get Shorty, John Travolta glided through his role with the confidence and smoothness of a true star, and with an infectious delight at being allowed to show it. The film was a trifle, finally, but Travolta’s effortless command of the screen was reestablished beyond doubt. It’s pleasing to see…

Sean Penn’s The Crossing Guard is an examination of how different people cope with devastating grief. Jack Nicholson is a jeweler whose young daughter was run over and killed by a drunken driver, David Morse. The story starts five years after the tragedy, with Morse being released from prison and…

The title of Smoke, which is set in a Brooklyn cigar store, refers to what the characters spend much of the movie blowing at each other. Its informal companion piece, set in the same store, is called Blue in the Face. This time, the title refers to the state that…

Optimism is the chief cash crop of Las Vegas, and everything about the city–the seductive casinos, the fast marriages, the endless, artificial daytime–is carefully devised to cultivate it. What sets Ben (Nicolas Cage) apart from the millions of other people who go to Vegas is that he’s not in the…

“It’s a simple battle between good and evil.” So says Lon Mabon, chairman of the Oregon Citizens Alliance, of the struggle to pass the title initiative in Heather MacDonald’s documentary Ballot Measure 9. He’s right. There are fewer shades of gray between good and evil in MacDonald’s movie than in…

In Jim Carrey’s first star vehicle, the hit Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, the comedian was “on” every second. He worked himself into a demented frenzy on every line, and in the pauses between the lines. A number of bright people I know assured me that it was a riot, and…

At the beginning of Feast of July, we see a pregnant young woman, alone, stumbling through cold, desolate moors and mountains. She takes refuge in a run-down, deserted shack, where, wailing loudly, she delivers herself of a stillborn child. She then buries the body in the rocks outside and continues…

The older I get, the more people I meet, the more I realize how fortunate I am with regard to family. I come from a fairly large, working-class brood, and while there is never a shortage of minor squabbles, as far as I know there are no significant grudges or…

Unlike Southeast Asia last week, Agnieszka Holland’s new film Total Eclipse has nary an eclipse, total or partial, in its length. A pity–astronomical phenomena would have provided a bit of diversion. The film concerns the tempestuous relationship between the prodigal French poet Arthur Rimbaud (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his older, sort-of…

Woody Allen and Mel Brooks both started out in movies by making wacky, hip slapstick farces. Allen later grew to be such a snob about comedy that, for an unfortunate period (happily over), he seemed to regard being funny as a form of Jewish self-hatred. Brooks, conversely, has kept dumbing…

Kevin Smith’s debut feature, Clerks, was about two young slackers hanging out at their boring counter help jobs, mooning about women, wrangling with skewed customers and ruminating upon bizarre philosophical notions. Smith’s sophomore effort, Mallrats, is about two young slackers hanging around a shopping mall, mooning about women, wrangling with…

After rumors that Louis Mall’s Vanya on 42nd Street would open in the Valley proved baseless, there seemed little to do but wait for it to arrive on video. But if you’d rather not see the film in your living room, you can at last catch its Valley premire at…

The 1926 masterpiece Bronenosets Potemkin (The Battleship Potemkin), the second feature of a wise-ass 27-year-old Soviet director named Sergei Eisenstein, is one of those works whose effect on modern culture almost can’t be overstated. Although Eisenstein already had experimented with the technique he called “montage” in his 1924 debut feature,…

The theme of The Scarlet Letter is hypocrisy, and the new film version of this classic never embodies its theme more strikingly than in one of its opening titles: “Freely adapted from the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne.” Yeah, right. Douglas Day Stewart’s script has wildly altered Hawthorne’s plot, to be…

Ralph–I beg your pardon, “Rafe”–Fiennes plays Lenny Nero, his first full-fledged Hollywood hero, in Strange Days, a futuristic thriller from the penof James Cameron and the eye of Kathryn Bigelow. He’s a schmoozing ex-cop street hustler who deals in illegal virtual reality discs of addictive quality, and Lenny’s fiddling around…

Director Gus Van Sant’s crackling new film To Die For matches up perfectly with the performance of its star, Nicole Kidman. It’s as lean and graceful as a cheetah, and it wears a lewdly sinister grin that intimates you’re being let in on a naughty joke. Watching the film, you…