To mock Nell would be neither difficult nor entirely unwarranted–what’s bad in this movie is so irritatingly God-awful that you may want to scream. But what’s good in it is good enough to make up for some of the sentiment and cheesy didacticism. Jodie Foster plays the title character, a…
“Sexual harassment isn’t about sex, it’s about power.” So says a lawyer who specializes in harassment cases, in the film version of Michael Crichton’s best seller Disclosure. Later in the movie, the hero, an executive who is both the accused and the accuser in a harassment case, quotes this line…
Bad dates are a purgatorial experience common to most people who have been single for any length of time. Common, but not identical, however. To paraphrase Tolstoy’s (highly questionable!) observation about happy and unhappy families, all good dates are the same, but each bad date is bad in its own…
The title of writer/director George Gallo’s new film is Trapped in Paradise. I certainly felt like I was trapped somewhere, but paradise wouldn’t have been my guess. This execrable attempt at a farce is, I think, the second-worst big-studio comedy of the year, surpassed only by Exit to Eden for…
After a few years as a bit player and standup comic, Keenen Ivory Wayans made an impressive debut as writer/director/star in 1988 with I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, a lampoon of the “blaxploitation” films of the early ’70s. This scrappy, no-budget indie was probably the best of the freeform genre…
Santa Claus is the single greatest shill–except maybe for Bill Cosby–that the retail industry has ever had, and unlike Cosby, he comes dirt cheap. On the local level, minimum wage will usually cover it. Of course, the fees run a little higher in Hollywood. No doubt it cost the makers…
Junior is obviously the product of a one-sentence pitch–“Schwarzenegger gets pregnant!” somebody said, and was told to run with it. Arnie, his co-star Danny DeVito and the director, Ivan Reitman, collaborated previously on a similar high-concept comedy outing–“Schwarzenegger and DeVito are the stars, and we call it Twins!” Well, if…
The profession of Leon, the title character of director Luc Besson’s The Professional, is murder. Like the lethal similar character also played by Jean Reno in Besson’s La Femme Nikita, by whom he was probably inspired, Leon is a “cleaner,” an assassin of preternatural skill who leaves no traces. This…
After much carping, since recanted, by author/adapter Anne Rice about Tom Cruise’s suitability as one of the leads, the film version of Rice’s wildly popular novel Interview With the Vampire has at last reached the screen. With it, the New Gothic arrives full force as a mainstream vogue, though it’s…
Clerks calls to mind Eddie Murphy’s story of his first standup routine, performed when he was an adolescent. He had had none of the sexual or other adult experiences that comedians normally draw on for material, so he used the only “blue” subject he was acquainted with, and told jokes…
Since the mid-’80s, Woody Allen has maintained a steady output of films, working in two distinct modes. The ambitious Allen of Manhattan, Interiors, Another Woman and Crimes and Misdemeanors deals, sometimes with humor but usually not, with issues of art, love, sex and existential angst, trying like crazy to be…
Though it has been remade at least a half-dozen times for film and television, and at least twice for the stage, no adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s 1908 penny dreadful The Phantom of the Opera makes quite the same claim on the emotions as the original film of 1925. It’s a…
The most erotic moments in movies, as in life, tend to have a spontaneous, uncontrived quality. This may be utterly illusory–intense thought and care may have gone into crafting the abrupt kiss or smoldering stare or well-turned piquant phrase that seems so urgently and inexplicably sexy. But at their best,…
If Pirandello had ever made a splatter movie, it would probably have been along the lines of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare–the title might be Five Knives in Search of a Sequel. Wes Craven, writer-director of the first (and only good) A Nightmare on Elm Street film, back in 1984, has…
The term “art film” might have been coined to describe Peter Greenaway’s movies. They embody everything, good and not so good, that is suggested by that usually unhelpful label. They play in “art house” theatres, and they are arty in their (not always unjustified) pretensions. But above all this, Greenaway’s…
I Like It Like That is the movie that should have had the title Mi Vida Loca (My Crazy Life). This comedy is about the crazy life of Lisette (Lauren Velez), a young, black-Hispanic woman living in the Bronx. Her husband, Chino (Jon Seda), is in jail. Her son, who’s…
Pulp Fiction is rubbish about scum. The plot is a tangled mess of collisions between hit men, drug dealers, crooked boxers, murderous junkies, perverted security guards and the like. The script is packed full of ferocious violence and sadism, and even more full of savage racial and sexual invective. It…
Robert Redford’s new film, Quiz Show–his fourth, and perhaps best, effort as a director–stars Ralph Fiennes as Charles Van Doren, the “champion” of the Fifties game show Twenty-One. The role of Van Doren, who was publicly disgraced by revelations that Twenty-One was rigged, is one which, two decades ago, would…
Perhaps it’s only an illusion brought on by overfrequent moviegoing, but it sometimes seems as if good movies tend to arrive in swarms. One slogs through months of scrounging what merit one can find out of dull movies, and then suddenly there come, all within a few weeks’ time, Quiz…
The hero of Red Rock West–played, excellently, by Nicolas Cage–is an out-of-work ex-Marine. In the first few scenes, we are shown what a decent, standup guy he is. He refuses a buddy’s offer of a loan. And although he’s penniless and stuck in the middle of nowhere, he resists the…
There’s something admirably gutsy about an independent filmmaker choosing mother-son incest as the subject of his first film, and making it on a shoestring with a cast of unknowns. No matter how good a picture it may be, a topic this disturbing and depressing is not the sort of thing…
In an odd coincidence, two major films of the early ’70s are being rereleased this week, both in restored “director’s cuts.” Both are worth checking out, especially if you’ve never seen them on the big screen–and if you haven’t, it’s fair in both cases to say you haven’t seen them…
