The central character of the Mexican horror movie Cronos is a kindly old man named Jess Gris, the proprietor of a Mexico City curio shop. The luckless Jess finds, amid the dusty bric-a-brac of his shop, a little metal gadget in the shape of a scarab, built by a 16th-century…

“That Fred Flintstone–what an actor!” enthuses a morgue attendant in the Ron Howard comedy Night Shift. I’ve never particularly agreed. Although I dutifully watched, as a kid, Hanna-Barbera’s endlessly rerun cartoon series, which turned humankind’s prehistoric past into a 50s-style, suburban tract-house wonderland, I found it unsophisticated even then–my cartoon…

Nonthreatening gentleness and prettiness have made Keanu Reeves a teen heartthrob, and the hint of exoticism in his looks has made him a figure of glamour for some adults, as well. If he were a sizzling good actor, he’d have the world at his feet. But alas, poor fellow, he…

Uma Thurman’s distinctive physical traits–uncommon beauty and gangliness–uniquely suit her to the role of Sissy Hankshaw, the heroine of Gus Van Sant’s new film, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, adapted by Van Sant from Tom Robbins’ enduring late-hippie-era novel of 1976. Sissy’s distinctive physical traits–her beauty and her abnormally long…

Almost everyone who’s at all interested in show business knows that Brandon Lee, the star of The Crow, was killed last year in a shooting accident on the set of that film. It’s hard to imagine a movie worth dying for–The Crow certainly isn’t, striking though much of it is–but…

It isn’t often that I show any prescience, but I had a rare burst a couple of years ago, when I reviewed House Party 2, a Kid N Play vehicle. It was a mostly lousy little picture, and I said so, but I mentioned a grinning, rubber-faced kid named Martin…

After Roman Polanski’s last film as director, a halfhearted, soddenly wistful attempt at a romantic thriller called Frantic, his new film Bitter Moon is most encouraging, because it’s heartless and nasty. Polanski will probably never recapture the innovative subtleties of his early works, like Knife in the Water and Cul-De-Sac…

After the rigors of his last film, Malcolm X, director Spike Lee apparently decided to try something in a slightly lighter vein. The change suits him. His latest, an easygoing, nostalgic comedy titled Crooklyn, lacks the flashy, daring visual rhetoric that has characterized Lee’s past work. But it also lacks…

After a long film-festival drought, the Valley seems to be on the verge of a deluge. Although shaky promotional resources resulted in a disappointing turnout for last fall’s First Annual Equinox film festival at Herberger Theater Center, its producers have gamely promised a second annual effort this fall, at a…

Given a minimum of competence, there’s virtually no way that a film of Emile Zola’s novel Germinal could be a complete failure. The subject matter is too inherently powerful and Zola’s dramatizing of it too inherently skillful and impassioned. The trouble is, whatever the level of competence, there’s also little…

“Making a movie is about as close as a man comes to having a baby.” Paul Rodriguez expounds on this thought. “First, you have to sleep with somebody to conceive it. “Then you go through your morning sickness; then, when that puppy’s shot, when it’s born, you go through your…

Jack, the 15-year-old hero of Andrew Birkin’s The Cement Garden, lives with his brother and two sisters in a bleak little house in an English suburb that gives new meaning to the word “godforsaken.” He rarely bathes or changes clothes, and his most frequent recreational activity is masturbating while looking…

The prologue of Suture, which also serves as its trailer, is chilling and teasingly elliptical. A man awakens in the middle of the night to hear someone sneaking into the house. He retreats to the bathroom, where he huddles in the tub with a shotgun, waiting for the intruder, who…

The title characters of Bad Girls are a quartet of fugitive whores in the Old West. Three of them (Andie MacDowell, Drew Barrymore, Mary Stuart Masterson) daringly rescue the fourth (Madeleine Stowe) from an unjust hanging, and the women take off across country on the lam, planning to settle in…

In his last movie, 1990’s Cry-Baby, writer/director/bad-taste maven John Waters seemed to be off his game. There were terrific individual scenes, but the film sorely lacked the unifying personality common to all but one of his previous features (Desperate Living): the late and lamented, absurdly endearing transvestite star Divine (this…

In the Western storytelling tradition, going back at least as far as King Midas, “gold” is more or less a synonym for “trouble.” It’s the symbol for everything for which you should be careful of wishing, because you might get it. You’ll only be able to keep it by losing…

Richard Connell’s pulp novella The Most Dangerous Game has been filmed once, excellently, under its own title–in 1932, as a taut, hourlong thriller from RKO–but has had its plot pilfered countless times. It’s the story of the mad Count Zaroff, played in the RKO version by Leslie Banks, whose hobby…

Threesome has the look, and the all-important soundtrack, of another entry in the Generation X youth-movie sweepstakes, along the lines of Reality Bites. It’s a comedy set on a college campus, and it has just three characters of any significance–dormmates Eddy (Josh Charles), Stuart (Stephen Baldwin) and Alex (Lara Flynn…

God, we’re sometimes told, is in the details. Most of us have had some epiphanic moment or another at which it seemed likely that this notion was true, but the Vietnamese period film The Scent of Green Papaya may lend it a different kind of credence. It’s intensely focused on…

Chilean novelist Isabel Allende’s epic The House of the Spirits is set in a fictitious South American country. About the most charitable term one can apply to the South American setting of the film version, which was directed by a Dane and shot in Denmark and Portugal, is that it’s…

Chilean novelist Isabel Allende’s epic The House of the Spirits is set in a fictitious South American country. About the most charitable term one can apply to the South American setting of the film version, which was directed by a Dane and shot in Denmark and Portugal, is that it’s…

Hugh Grant, star of Mike Newell’s current Four Weddings and a Funeral, is also the star of the Australian John Duigan’s new Sirens. Grant plays a young, vaguely liberal English vicar who is sent by the bishop of Sydney to the outback. His mission is to persuade painter Norman Lindsay…