John Sayles has been making movies for quite a while now, but making them less as a director and more as a screenwriter who directs. His interests are impressively wide, his plots are imaginative, his characters often complex, his dialogue pungent and funny. But his films, though never inept, are…
It’s understandable that Eldridge Cleaver would consider Panther “a travesty.” Cleaver, who in the ’60s was minister of information for the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, is a character in director Mario Van Peebles’ new film, and he doesn’t come off especially well. He’s presented as a hothead who can’t…
Those who squawked about Philadelphia’s depiction of the unwavering support shown to a gay man by his affluent family really will be put out by The Sum of Us. This little Australian film is about the unconditional love of a father for his gay son. Harry (Jack Thompson) is a…
After a modest first try last year, Arizona Film Society has taken the next step toward the elusive goal of bringing a regular annual film festival to the Valley–it’s come back for a second year. Saguaro Film Festival II will be held Thursday through Sunday at AMC Town & Country…
Last year, I reviewed a film called Go Fish, allegedly a comedy, about modern life among urban twentysomething lesbians. I panned it, and, predictably, got some static from lesbian readers who suggested that I disliked the film because I wasn’t a lesbian myself, and not for the actual reason, which…
Director Henry Hathaway’s 1947 Kiss of Death isn’t necessarily a great crime movie, but it has remained in our collective movie memory for two reasons: Richard Widmark and New York City. The film was shot entirely on location, a practice that’s now de rigueur, but was unusual enough at the…
Jim Carroll’s book The Basketball Diaries isn’t about basketball, it’s about how the diarist, a Catholic high school kid growing up in Manhattan, happened to quit basketball. It’s an autobiographical work, supposedly the real diary Carroll kept during the mid-Sixties, when he changed from an aspiring poet and star of…
Destiny Turns On the Radio is the unfortunate title of a small, strange, rather agreeable comic fantasy set in Las Vegas. The title cosmic force, personified by Quentin Tarantino as a flashy hipster with a shit-eating grin, finds Julian (Dylan McDermott), an escaped convict, wandering in the Nevada desert and…
Thomas Jefferson was a great American statesman–probably the greatest–and Nick Nolte is a superb American movie star. What a shame that the collaboration of these two estimable men–Nolte plays Jefferson in Jefferson in Paris, the new movie by producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory–is so utterly dull. About the…
Frequent moviegoers tend to develop pretty sharp instincts about what to see and what to avoid, and they’re often right. As soon as one sees that a feature vehicle has been made for a popular sketch character from Saturday Night Live, the review starts writing itself in one’s head–“What’s funny…
Once Were Warriors, a contemporary drama about a Maori family living in an urban New Zealand slum, is the feature debut of director Lee Tamahori. To describe the film with the usual adjectives–“raw,” “powerful,” “hard-hitting”–would be accurate, and then some. The theme of the film is domestic violence, and Tamahori…
A Goofy Movie is more-traditional Disney than Priest, but the plot is no less perennial. It’s about being estranged from, and embarrassed by, your parents. Or, in this case, parent–Goofy is a single father here, and the film is a road comedy in which he tries to reconnect with his…
Priest is a movie with a message, and in spite of a complicated–perhaps overly complicated–plot, that message is a simple one: The Catholic Church should give up its doctrine of priestly celibacy. If Church hierarchy refuses to do this, individual priests should ignore the doctrine as they see fit. I’ve…
Marlon Brando’s star turn in 1990’s The Freshman was possibly the greatest piece of self-parody in the history of film acting. Sending up his Godfather persona, the actor transcended it–he gave soul, warmth, humor and true innocence to the bleak old don, and the performance had both vitality and a…
Liam Neeson is a fine big slab of testosterone, a competent actor and a reasonably likable screen presence. He’s not, however, a movie star. He may be paid like a movie star, he may be given starring roles, but the excitement, the sense of intimacy that a true movie star…
During the mid-’80s, I heard director Richard Donner interviewed on television. He was plugging his film Lethal Weapon and noting, with a touch of Reagan-era pride, that on this project, he had gone back to the old, discreet conventions of action movies and TV, where the actor who was shot…
If it were possible to run Four Weddings and a Funeral, Strictly Ballroom and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert through a blender together, the result would look a lot like the new Australian film Muriel’s Wedding. From the first, there are two weddings and one funeral; from…
Style matches content in Exotica. The film is set in a strip club, and writer-director Atom Egoyan, a Canadian of Armenian descent, doles out his story as slowly and strategically as a stripper doles out skin. Sadly, having slipped your six bucks under Exotica’s garter belt, you may find it…
Set in 1979, Strawberry and Chocolate is a small, idyllic comedy about the political re-education of a young, conservative, staunchly Communist student by a gay, liberal, intellectual artist. It would seem an unlikely film to come out of Cuba, yet it’s that country’s entry for the foreign-language Oscar this year…
Despite insistence from some commentators that it was worthy of an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, Hoop Dreams failed even to cinch a nod in the Best Documentary category. Veteran Oscar buffs won’t be too surprised at this. Again and again, those rare documentaries that demonstrate anything resembling wide popular…
Most political thrillers, even the well-made and exciting ones, are cop-outs in the end. Of dozens of titles one could name, from The Manchurian Candidate to The China Syndrome to Capricorn One to The Pelican Brief to Clear and Present Danger, all, good and bad, start by dramatizing some valid…
The considerable charm of the new historical epic Queen Margot is that, when all is said and done, it’s really about how a nice, sexy, slightly wild Catholic girl manages to break free of her dysfunctional family. The historical Margot of the title was a political bargaining chip in 16th-century…
