The doomed are often a remarkably energetic and productive lot, especially when it comes to creating portraits of their personal horrors. Themes vary in intensity between slow self-destruction and grand devastation, but in vampirism, the full spectrum of ghastliness may be covered. This is because the imbalance represents so much…
The reviewers are in agreement on Shadow of the Vampire: The 1922 German movie of which it’s a takeoff is great, a masterpiece. You won’t read different here — F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, on the set of which the rather roguishly conceived premise of Shadow unfolds, is a must-see. If you’ve…
For his first film as director, The Indian Runner in 1991, Sean Penn chose as his source material Bruce Springsteen’s “Highway Patrolman,” off the album Nebraska. It was a perfect song, and it spawned a nearly perfect movie; Penn, writing his own screenplay about two brothers — one good, one…
There’s definitely something weird going on in the British pop scene. Years after tasteful Yanks allowed classic works such as Saturday Night Fever and Grease to dissolve into our vast iconic array, villainous limey programmers were still hyping them over there. Thus, the dual plagues of disco and ’50s rock…
“This is some damn fine coffee you got here in Twin Peaks. And some damn good cherry pie. But I have to tell you something, sheriff: Last night, I had a dream in which a dancing midget talked backward, thus leading me to believe that our killer is a man…
In case you were wondering, here’s the most fulfilling way to enjoy the alleged thriller Antitrust.Step One: Go shopping for groceries at your favorite supermarket. Step Two: When the smiling employee asks you whether you prefer paper or plastic, choose paper. Step Three: Seek out the young actor known as…
The history of 3-D in the movies is half a century long now — the first major 3-D feature, Bwana Devil, was released in 1952, and there were experiments with the concept earlier than that. There have been dozens of other attempts scattered throughout the decades since, and although some…
Thirteen Days is a suspenseful look at the American government in the grip of a crucial, minute-to-minute, real-life crisis that threatens to destroy the country. No, it is not — as the relatively brief time span referenced in the title makes clear — about the recent election struggles . …
If M. Night Shyamalan makes movies to be seen twice, then Joel and Ethan Coen make films to be pawed over a dozen times. O Brother, Where Art Thou?, an opulent and often slapstick updating of Homer’s The Odyssey by way of Preston Sturges, Robert Johnson and Clark Gable, sneaks…
Skeptics will not take easily to the optimism in Thomas Carter’s teen love story Save the Last Dance, and outright cynics may find the whole thing absurd. The notion that a sheltered white girl from shopping-mall country and a knowing black boy from the inner city can dance their way…
For slightly more than a decade, Chinese martial arts films have — directly and indirectly — gained a growing audience in the U.S. Now the genre may find its greatest breakthrough coming from an unlikely source — director Ang Lee, best known for such comedy-dramas of social manners as Sense…
The War on Drugs has become this generation’s Vietnam, the unwinnable conflict that will, in the end, destroy the innocent and reward the guilty. That, in a coke vial, is the premise of Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, a film that gives flesh and face to bloodless government statistics and statements seldom…
Finding Forrester is the latest film from Gus Van Sant, one of the true American originals to emerge in the ’80s and ’90s. When Van Sant is at his best, he gives us stories and images we’ve never seen before. Finding Forrester, however, is not Gus Van Sant at his…
The moods of Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me are so artfully mingled that it’s difficult to get a fix on this highly personal independent feature. Set in a quiet little town in upstate New York’s Catskill Mountains, it is at once a drama about the unresolved traumas of…
So where’s the giant fetus?In 1968, we were promised a giant space-fetus floating above our heads this year. It’s not in evidence at this writing, nor is there any sign of the film that ends with the image — the seminal science-fiction movie of its decade and maybe of the…
During the summer of 1994, while most of the world was greeting Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump with dewy eyes and outstretched arms, this critic was grinning his fool head off at a very different tale of a lost, lone hero. While a featherweight Tom Hanks bumbled his lobotomized way through…
In assessing the merits of Quills, the lusty new feature by director Philip Kaufman (Henry & June), it’s tempting to seek correlative characters from popular movies to illustrate just how radical this business is not. In Kaufman’s film — affectionately constructed upon a screenplay by Doug Wright, who adapts his…
More than any other year I can remember, in 2000 I heard people comment on how particularly bad movies were. In retrospect, I think they were right. The normal preponderance of mediocrity in human affairs makes every year seem like a bad movie year, but then when you review the…
In Hollywood, all it takes is one big hit. Sandra Bullock’s ticket to stardom was the 1994 sleeper Speed, a rip-roaring action/crime thriller that co-starred Keanu Reeves. With her cute girl-next-door looks and ingratiating physical klutziness, Bullock established an instant rapport with audiences. That perception of adorableness was further enhanced…
It’s where Walter Huston found paradise at the end of The Treasure of Sierra Madre. It’s where the murdering lovers Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw rode into the sunset at the end of The Getaway. It’s where Thelma and Louise were headed when they ended up at the Grand Canyon…
Playwright-filmmaker David Mamet has the sharpest gift imaginable for shooting down the sins of American greed, the con games people run to get ahead, and the corruption that comes with success. Whether he’s haunting a secondhand junk shop, a poker room or an outlying real estate office, he always finds…
The Family Man offers but a slight variation on the threadbare holiday theme of what life might have been like had Our Hero followed a different path — or never been born. Not only is it a redo of It’s a Wonderful Life — complete with an angel (played by…
