Have you ever endured a relationship in which your partner beat you up mercilessly, just so they could “heal” you and play the redeemer later on? Granted, that’s a weird question and perhaps one better explored via Akbar and Jeff in Matt Groening’s Life in Hell strip, but it directly…
The legend “That Afternoon” appears onscreen, and then we see a car hurtle past us on a lonely desert road, hotly pursued by two Arizona Highway Patrol units. Behind the wheel, our hero Wade (Drew Pillsbury) sits with a stricken look on his face, plainly baffled at how he’s gotten…
Be forewarned: In the continuing quest to get people to pay attention to their films by any means necessary, the marketing wizards at Artisan Entertainment have been misrepresenting Felicia’s Journey to an even greater extent than the Shooting Gallery did The Minus Man (also distributed by Artisan). No doubt hoping…
At the beginning of Spanish Fly, Zoe, the heroine, meets Antonio, who’s both Spanish and fly. Zoe’s an American writer staying in Madrid to research a book on machismo. Antonio, a blocked writer himself and a not-at-all-blocked womanizer, is her interpreter. They start bickering at once, so we know they’re…
The last time Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in an apocalypse-themed action movie with a Guns n’ Roses theme song was in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the biggest and loudest action movie that had thus far ever been seen. Since that time, he’s produced one bona fide balls-to-the-wall action flick (True Lies),…
The wide-screen debut of Pokémon has two subtitles: The First Movie, which implies, with almost tragic inevitability, the promise of a Second and a Third and so on, stretching out into the infinite reaches of posterity; and Mewtwo Strikes Back, which implies almost nothing, presumably even to those immersed in…
How do you make a sequel to a nearly perfect film? Toy Story, the 1995 hit from Disney and Pixar, was not only the first fully computer-animated feature; it was also as brilliantly written and directed a film as any of the classic Disney releases. Pixar did nearly everything right…
“The spectre is known at all the country firesides by the name of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow,” writes Washington Irving in his original fantasy. Thanks in large part to the silly, watered-down fun of the animated Disney version, the horseman and his victim, the gangling and gallant Ichabod…
Poor old MGM — the once-golden studio that has been battered and abused by ever-changing ownership and management for nearly three decades now — still has one sure-shot franchise among its assets: the James Bond series, whose longevity is astounding. If nothing else, the series’ overseas popularity keeps the films…
“Yesterday I wasn’t even sure God existed,” laments Bethany (Linda Fiorentino), the reluctant yet divinely touched heroine of Kevin Smith’s ambitious new film, Dogma. “Now I’m up to my ass in Christian mythology.” As it turns out, so are we. Strutting to a spiritually snappy groove not observed in mainstream…
As the 20th century grinds remorselessly to a close, Princess Diana, Monica Lewinsky and JonBenet Ramsey continue to be held up by the media as signal figures of our time. Yet something tells me that when future historians look back on this period, the bulimic socialite, the kneepad-ready intern and…
Luc Besson, director of La Femme Nikita, The Professional and The Fifth Element, is not the first name that would leap to mind to helm a biopic of Joan of Arc. Sure, he’s French, and, sure, most of his films have women/girls as protagonist or savior; but this is a…
In the eyes of the general public, Michael Mann is still best-known for Miami Vice. He has received a great deal of critical acclaim for films about serial killers, Mohicans and bank robbers. So who would have guessed that his most engrossing and suspenseful film to date would be a…
Much like the religion that has swirled around the Star Wars trilogy for twentysome years, the fanaticism evidenced among American fans of Japanese anime remains a mystery to some of us. Writer-director Hayao Miyazaki’s megahit Princess Mononoke does very little to cast light on this obsession: More’s the pity, since…
The first rule of Being John Malkovich is you do not look at the poster for Being John Malkovich! Sorry to crib from that inferior tale of incredible shrinking men (throw a rock at any multiplex marquee this season — please! — and you’ll hit several), but really, avoid that…
And now . . . a G-rated movie from David Lynch! No, Lynch hasn’t lost his mind. He hasn’t gone soft in the head. And he hasn’t sold out to the smiley-faced bean counters at Disney. While the notion of America’s King of Weird — the man who brought us…
Actor Frank Whaley has appeared in more than 30 movies, including Swimming With Sharks and Pulp Fiction. But none of them cuts as close to the bone, I suspect, as Whaley’s debut in the writer-director ranks, Joe the King. Set in the ’70s and carefully described by its maker as…
“That reminds me of the movies Marty made about New York,” stammered Lou Reed somewhere in the mid-’80s. “All those frank and brutal movies that are so brillyunt.” It was a clumsy, rhyme-impaired album track (“Doing the Things That We Want To” from New Sensations), but, as has often been…
Horned, fanged, cat-eyed and pointy-eared, the colossal green head glowered down on both lanes of I-10. Tempe Diablo Stadium, over the parking lot of which the Dante-esque visage floated, had never seemed so aptly named. “I don’t think this is the home of the Anaheim Angels today,” remarked the publicist…
David Fincher needs a hug, the poor bastard. Or possibly a diaper change. Ever since 1992, when he ruined the Alien series with the excrescence of his pointless, senseless third installment, he’s been making the same bratty, obnoxious movie over and over again: gloom, doom, indestructible protagonist, bureaucratic evil, quasi-religious…
The everyman hero of the horror movie Bats, a small-town Texas sheriff played by Lou Diamond Phillips, is given an odd character trait. After he and some other people have barricaded themselves into a school building and are awaiting attack by a flock of mutant killer bats terrorizing his little…
Based on his directorial debut, there are three things we can safely say about Antonio Banderas: 1) He’s an actor’s director — he can pick a good cast and coax great performances from them; 2) he knows how to make a good image and where to point the camera; 3)…
