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…
Love & Basketball is divided into four quarters; thank God there’s no overtime. The directorial debut from writer Gina Prince-Bythewood, who once penned scripts for A Different World and Felicity, is a film built upon transitions so weak and obvious it’s astonishing the entire thing doesn’t collapse on itself. You…
What is it with filmmakers and mental retardation? It seems as though use of the differently abled as a central theme ranks second only to troubled childhood when it comes time to make a “personal” film. The connection between the two is fairly obvious: the artist as gentle innocent besieged…
“You don’t come up to people’s doors!” yells a woman to a pair of Mormon missionaries, before slamming her door in their faces. The scene, near the beginning of the film God’s Army, is intended to illustrate the difficulties of Mormon missionary work, which I suppose it does. But my…
In the rich mythology of the New Yorker, a periodical renowned for the quality of its writing and the quirks of its writers, no legend carries more weight than that of Joseph Mitchell. On the occasion of the magazine’s 75th anniversary, it is currently great sport among the literati to…
It’s quite possible that American Psycho is a brilliant movie. It’s also quite possible that it’s a dreary, obvious chop-’em-up dressed in Alan Flusser suits and Ralph Lauren boxers, drenched in Pour Hommes after-shave, all to disguise it as bracing satire on the greed-is-good ’80s. The option audiences choose to…
La crème de la coiffure! A mock documentary about, of all things, a Scottish hairdresser who travels to America to compete in an international hairstyling tournament, The Big Tease is a mildly amusing romp that benefits enormously from an ingratiating performance by Scottish actor Craig Ferguson, who also co-wrote the…
What’s your pick for the most ridiculous movie ever made? The Conqueror, starring John Wayne as Mongol emperor Genghis Khan? How about The Manitou, in which the grizzled head of an Indian medicine man sprouts from Susan Strasberg’s neck? The musical remake of Lost Horizon surely deserves a couple of…
It’s hard to escape the potent magic of pop music. Some consumers never do, hovering forever in thrall to three-minute sermons of neurotic idiocy blasting from the commercially conjoined pulpits of R&B, rock and country. (To keep this point sharp, let’s credit “alternative” music with expanding the illusion of choice,…
Not so long ago, The Skulls would have starred Tom Cruise — but in which role? He could have been either lead; the one he didn’t choose could have landed in the lap of James Spader or Rob Lowe. One can easily imagine Cruise as Luke McNamara, the beefy, rough-and-tumble…
From its opening moments, The Road to El Dorado looks and sounds oddly out of time, as though it were removed only yesterday from a time capsule sealed and buried in 1972. With its Peter Max visuals and Elton John vocals, it’s a decidedly unhip piece of work — Starlight…
In the opening scenes of Price of Glory, set in the late ’70s, a young prizefighter named Arturo Ortega (Jimmy Smits) loses a career-making bout. He earns a few grand, but he’s plainly washed up in the ring, and we’re meant to see that it’s his greedy manager’s fault –…
The gun is a coward’s weapon, always has been, always will be. Likening it to the sword is like equating rape to romance. However, for reasons that can only be attributed to collective insanity, Hollywood absolutely loves to romanticize the gun, serving as an adjunct advertising agency for the firearms…
Here on Earth, the new teen romance, should do wonders for the reputation of veteran director Arthur Hiller. Not that Hiller had anything to do with the film, mind you — which wouldn’t do wonders for his rep. No, Hiller is the man who, back in 1970, directed the inexplicably…
The film is called Erin Brockovich, but it might as well be titled Julia Roberts. Never before in the actress’s erratic career has a film been so custom-made for her; it’s as though a screenwriter has been replaced by a seamstress who knows Roberts’ every curve. No matter that she…
