Very few moviegoers today, even those who would consider themselves film buffs, have had more than passing exposure to the films of the silent era. Yet it is in this period that the vast majority of the art’s fundamental techniques were invented and refined, often to levels of great accomplishment…

Stark type against a black background, actors’ names listed alphabetically, Louis Armstrong singing “Just One of Those Things”–Miami Rhapsody’s titles let us know at once that we’re in Woody Allen Land. The letters are in purple, however, not in Allen’s traditional white, presumably to suggest the flashier colors appropriate to…

The Scottish film Shallow Grave is an imaginative little noir thriller with a lively, grisly wit. Like Miami Rhapsody, the film is full of more or less open references to other movies in its genre–Brian DePalma’s Body Double and Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas, most notably. But unlike director David Frankel’s act…

The notion of an exquisite young woman becoming emotionally and/or sexually fixated on a paunchy, balding, poorly dressed older man is one that has a certain special appeal for the average movie critic. This may have more than a little to do with why Red, the third film in Krzysztof…

While Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump racks up the nominations, let’s pause a moment to take a look at the latest project of Zemeckis’ old buddy Bob Gale, his writing partner on Used Cars and the Back to the Future films. Mr. Payback, which Gale wrote and directed for Sony New…

True to its title, French director Nicolas Philibert’s documentary In the Land of the Deaf approaches deafness not as a handicap but as the unifying condition of a subculture. It’s a very simple, unaffected piece of filmmaking, smoothly intercutting several unconnected strands of narrative–the marriage of two young people, a…

The flawless, if sterile, computer illusions of Jurassic Park condemned stop-motion animation to extinction as a special effect. First developed in the silents by pioneering animator Willis O’Brien, this technique involved the frame-by-frame shooting of articulated puppets to simulate movement when run at regular speed. But it was always too…

The first film by New Zealander Peter Jackson to gain much notice here was last year’s Dead Alive. This frenzied, farcical splatter parody, about people turned into cannibalistic zombies through the bite of the dreaded Sumatran rat monkey, was like a cinematic coup de grce–it was so revoltingly, yet hilariously,…

Last week I became a member of that select group of people who can claim to have received a telephone call from the Jerky Boys. Lucky me. Also known as Johnny Brennan and Kamal, the two Queens, New York, natives were in town to promote their bold effort to move…

Richard Linklater’s films, so far, have shown a unity of time so disciplined that it would gladden Aristotle’s heart. The young writer/director’s first feature, Slacker, took place in a day and a night on the streets of Austin, Texas. His second, the ’70s period piece Dazed and Confused, took a…

Oh, dear, I’m not supposed to go mad ’til 1800! –Graham Chapman as King George III on Monty Python’s Flying Circus Most Americans know King George III of Britain, if at all, as the guy who taxed our butt-kicking forebears into revolt, and whom they eventually beat. Some may remember…

Talk about showmanship! One of the distinctions co-directors Chris LaMont and Steve Bencich are claiming, probably accurately, for their comedy The Best Movie Ever Made is “the largest mime scene in motion-picture history.” Indeed, the all-mime parody of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is one of the highlights of this mlange…

In the surprisingly crowded genre of documentaries about filmmakers, director Ray Mller’s The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl is most likely the best I’ve ever seen, because it deals directly with subjects far more important than filmmaking. That grandly contradictory title is not wasted on Riefenstahl–her life really has…

Except for Roman Polanski’s 1971 adaptation of Macbeth, the new film Death and the Maiden is his only film version of a play. Shakespeare to Ariel Dorfman–what a comedown. Still, Polanski did his best–he gave Dorfman’s dreary, annoyingly earnest revenge melodrama about political torture a smooth, elegant rendering onscreen. The…

Say you’ve got this wise and war-weary colonel living in Montana around the turn of the century. Say he’s got three pretty-boy sons–the eldest levelheaded, the middle wild and prodigal, the youngest sweet and sensitive. What do you need to turn this scenario into an epic tear-jerker Western in the…

Nobody’s Fool is to Paul Newman’s career what Scent of a Woman was to Al Pacino’s–generously, a “character study”; more frankly, a blatant vehicle, existing for no reason other than to give a great actor a chance to charm us. It’s a much better, much less addlebrained picture than Scent,…

Red Rock West, the splendid, tight-as-a-drum feature debut of the young writer/director John Dahl, was a comic thriller about a guy trying to get out of a small town. The hero was a decent, honorable young man who tells a tiny lie to get a job, then realizes with horror…

As Ty Cobb in Ron Shelton’s new biopic, Tommy Lee Jones gets to wave a pistol and vomit blood. What kind of an actor would he be if he could resist that? He doesn’t blow the chance–he’s remarkable as the man who, most commentators agree, was both the greatest baseball…

Most of the interview subjects in Jonathan Blank’s documentary Sex, Drugs and Democracy don’t look much like libertines. We see a prostitute here, a hippie or a Rastafarian there, and a couple of artsy types, but most of the Dutch folks Blank shows us extolling the merits of the Netherlands’…

Increasingly common in bookstores over the last few years have been literary anthologies of “erotica–by women for women.” Erotique is probably the first such collection done for the movies. Like Boys Life, which opened last week in the Valley, it’s an omnibus of three half-hour shorts by as many directors…

The title that Charles Schulz originally wanted to use for his comic strip was not Peanuts, but Li’l Folks. Perhaps Schulz, who once said that children were “caricatures of adults,” was thinking along the same lines as Louisa May Alcott when she gave her most beloved novel the name Little…

Boys Life is an omnibus consisting of three roughly half-hour works, all by young filmmakers and all concerning the tribulations of the first homosexual experience for middle-class white guys of late-high school/early-college age. They are low-key films of no particular cinematic daring, but this modesty makes all three affecting and…