Before we see anything in Croupier, the new film from director Mike Hodges and screenwriter Paul Mayersberg, we hear the grainy whir of the ball spinning around the rim of a roulette wheel. When the image of the wheel appears, the sound drops out, to be replaced by the affectless…
Blink — or, more likely, doze — and you will miss it, this tiny, beautiful oasis in the middle of an otherwise barren wasteland. For a moment — a precious, frustrating moment to be treasured in a movie that flaunts its disposability — Nicolas Cage reminds us how good an…
Merchant/Ivory Productions has long been America’s quintessential purveyor of classy “literary” films. At its best, the team of director James Ivory and Ismail Merchant has given us A Room With a View (1986) and The Remains of the Day (1993); at its worst, Slaves of New York (1989) and Jefferson…
The moody, feverish images that fill Running Free are so exquisite they almost make up for the film’s disastrous auditory misstep: the decision to cast Lukas Haas as the voice of Lucky, the chestnut foal that narrates this unusual adventure story. A cross between Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout and Jean-Jacques Annaud’s…
I’ve heard ex-smokers talk about the after-dinner jones, how they hunger for that ritual cigarette, the sweet inhalation of tar and nicotine that tops off a great meal in a way nothing else can. So they settle for the other half of their ritual, a fine brandy or the slight…
Early on in Mission: Impossible 2 (or M:I-2, as the confident Paramount now calls it), hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) complains to his boss about his new assignment: “It’s going to be difficult.””It’s not mission difficult, Mr. Hunt,” the boss icily replies, “it’s mission impossible. “Difficult’ should be a walk…
Shanghai Noon is hardly as enervating as its trailer, which has such dreary sight gags and woeful jokes that it begs you to stay far away from any theater in which this film is screening. (Sample: A horse that stays by sitting . . . just like a dog.)But don’t…
“Industrial-strength boredom” is a vicious term to unload on anybody — friend, foe or former actress. Considering the lingering discomfort it inspires, one must beware of its impact, even around a seemingly invulnerable producer returning to the screen to melt our hearts in yet another variation on the emotional doppelgänger…
Dinosaurs used to be cool. In 1969, if you had asked me what I thought was the best movie ever made, I would likely have told you that it was Valley of Gwangi, in which a group of cowboys find a gully full of leftover dinosaurs, animated by Ray Harryhausen,…
Despite the title East Is East, the big message of this flavorful domestic memoir is really that West is West. In the tug of war between East and West for a soul, East, the film suggests, may hold out for a while through a combination of nostalgia, pride, national resentment…
When stars get popular enough (or win enough Oscars), they begin to get to call their own shots. Thus we have The Big Kahuna, the debut release of Kevin Spacey’s production company. Kahuna also marks the film debut of stage director John Swanbeck and screenwriter Roger Rueff. And, boy, can…
Woody Allen is back on screen in Small Time Crooks, a bittersweet comedy that in many ways could have been lifted straight from the ’30s. For the most part, it’s Woody Allen Lite, which is not at all a bad thing. While one doesn’t want to penalize Allen for his…
“I came to it late on–17” says Jimi Mistry of acting, and makes his interviewer feel roughly the age of a mummy. The young Brit, who did “most of my growing up in Manchester” before attending the Birmingham School of Speech and Dramatic Arts, made his film debut in 1996…
Digital video is poised to become a major factor in commercial filmmaking, and Time Code, the new feature from Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas), could be used as a commercial for the process, which is its greatest point of interest. The movie is not so much an intriguing story as…
Given that most film studios have multimillion-dollar marketing budgets with which to target 18- to 25-year-olds, it’s astonishing how little they seem to know about the everyday life of those they’re supposed to be studying. Drew Barrymore has never been kissed? Please. Rachel Leigh Cook undatable until Freddie Prinze Jr…
When asked to name the most erotic sequence they have ever seen in a film, people tend to pick moments like the love scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in Don’t Look Now or that indelible image of Kathleen Turner in Body Heat, standing just inside her house, silently…
There is a killing late in Gladiator, Ridley Scott’s new heroic epic, and it is one of those wonderfully cathartic extinguishings that make a wide-eyed audience rise and cheer. After several brutal battles, after much bloodshed, after considerable suffering both needless and entertaining, a blade finds its mark, and a…
The word “International” has been added to its title, but this year’s edition of the Saguaro Film Festival has become the fest without a country. After debuting at Harkins Camelview 5 seven years ago, Arizona Film Society’s shindig for indies has knocked around the Valley, landing, in one year or…
It is difficult to reconcile American perceptions of Iran, a rigidly authoritarian Islamic fundamentalist society, with the captivating and compassionate films that emanate from the country. Most of these pictures, including the 1995 Cannes Film Festival Camera d’Or winner The White Balloon and the 1998 Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar nominee…
Boys Don’t Cry hasn’t garnered the kind of box-office returns you’d expect from an Oscar winner. That’s understandable. No matter its brilliance, the film’s pallor of rural white trash dysfunction was probably too unsettling for that cash-cow megaplex demographic. After all, it was, as the Sunday Herald in Scotland recently…
Although its themes are about as revelatory as those of the average Cathy comic strip (clothes don’t fit, job too busy, male not clairvoyant, AACK!), there’s something irrefutably charming about Philippa “Pip” Karmel’s debut feature, Me Myself I. The editor of Academy darling Shine has scripted a laundry list of…
Why aren’t there more submarine movies? It seems like a no-brainer formula for success: claustrophobic setting, invisible enemy whose approach must be estimated, inherent threat of both drowning and depth pressure, and from a budgetary standpoint, one key set is really all that’s needed. There’s even a solid track record…
