Is the opposite of offhand onhand? If so, The Spanish Prisoner is the most onhand movie since Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. The writer/director, David Mamet, delights in his own supposed cleverness; he wants you to scratch your head while he manipulates your brain. Campbell Scott plays a researcher in…
Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel Les Miserables, which he began in 1845, runs in most editions to around 1,500 pages. The latest film version–there have been five other adaptations for movies or television–runs a bit under two and a half hours. It’s an expert piece of pruning–entire continents of plot and…
New Times film critic Peter Rainer was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, the Columbia University School of Journalism in New York announced last week. He was the only film critic among hundreds of book, theater, television, dance, architecture and movie critics nominated by their publications to…
In writer-director James Toback’s quicksilver sex comedy Two Girls and a Guy, Robert Downey Jr. plays Blake Allen, a struggling New York actor who lives in a spacious loft in SoHo he probably can’t afford. He’s a pampered prince who has worked out for himself a cozy romantic subterfuge: He…
Gwyneth Paltrow gets another chance to show off her letter-perfect English accent in Sliding Doors, an engaging romantic comedy which employs a rather novel narrative device: After introducing the main characters and setting up the basic story, the film splits into two separate but parallel plot lines. It’s a twist…
You’re not likely to come out of the bone-chilling documentary Waco: The Rules of Engagement with the belief that David Koresh was angelic, or that he had no hand in the deaths of his Branch Davidian followers in Waco, Texas, in April of 1993. But, if you assumed that the…
Getting it on with a heavenly being must be just about the ultimate New Age sexual fantasy–so City of Angels is like soft-core for New Agers. That, and the current taste for schmaltz in the Titanic vein, could make City of Angels a hit, just as the sentimentality of modern-day…
Lovers of American movies used to joke that foreign films wouldn’t look so good if you saw them without subtitles. John Sayles’ latest movie, Men With Guns, plays better than his other films because it does have subtitles. Bald dialogue always sounds better in Spanish and Indian dialects. Set in…
Danger, Will Robinson! Sensors detect boomer-TV redux once again. This time the victim is Lost in Space, Irwin Allen’s enjoyably absurd sci-fi TV fantasy which ran from 1965 to 1968 on CBS, before ABC’s Batman trounced it in the ratings. Grown-ups are likely to cringe at the prospect of sitting…
Two chocolate croissants and a mixed bowl of Raisin Bran and Frosted Flakes–with skim milk. The first thing anyone wants to know when he hears you had breakfast with Michael Moore, director of Roger & Me and now The Big One, is what the Falstaffian filmmaker put away. To be…
If nothing else, the current edition of Michael Moore’s continuing self-love fest does have a great subject: the desperation hidden inside a “thriving” U.S. economy. While politicians and financial wizards point to unemployment on the wane and profits on the rise, Moore notes that the largest employer in the country…
British actor Gary Oldman, who made his mark playing a punk in Sid and Nancy and a playwright in Prick Up Your Ears, wrote and directed Nil By Mouth, which has already drawn comparisons to the class-conscious dramas of Mike Leigh (Naked, Secrets & Lies). The film, which Oldman dedicates…
Rosie O’Donnell sure makes a believable nun. In the kids’ movie Wide Awake, she plays Sister Terry, a sports-loving teacher at a swanky private school in the Philadelphia suburbs, a sympathetic good egg in whom the troubled 10-year-old hero (Joseph Cross) confides. There’s not a minute when she isn’t convincing…
A Price Above Rubies confirms writer-director Boaz Yakin’s place on the list of filmmakers who barged into the opposite sex’s clubhouse and returned with an unsentimental, resonant understanding of a woman. It isn’t Yakin’s first exploration into milieu many would insist he had no right to enter. His debut feature,…
“Slick” is the word. At a glance, it would be hard to find two performances farther apart than the latest star turn of John Travolta as presidential hopeful Jack Stanton in Primary Colors, which opened last weekend, and one of his earliest, as Danny Zuko in Grease (or Vaselina, as…
Probably every film director itches to make a Western, so let’s be thankful that, with The Newton Boys, Richard Linklater has scratched his itch. Now he can go back to making movies about subjects he has some feeling for. Linklater should not be begrudged his chance to “stretch.” But he…
If ever there was an Op-Ed movie–a movie destined to be written about in an “elevated” realm beyond just the movie pages–it’s Primary Colors. Thanks to Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones, the Hollywood/Washington nexus has lifted this new Mike Nichols picture, based on the 1996 best seller by Joe Klein,…
The American reissues of Jackie Chan films have met with declining box-office success since Chan burst onto the scene in 1996 with Rumble in the Bronx. With any luck, the latest Chan opus to be recut and redubbed for Americans, the year-old Mr. Nice Guy, should reverse the trend. No…
Though her contemporaries often compared Virginia Woolf’s nonlinear, almost cubist narratives to the cinema’s then-burgeoning use of montage, close-ups, flashbacks, tracking shots and rapid cuts, the strength of Woolf’s novels lay in the rhythm of her arresting style, and in her heroines’ poignant melancholia, which insidiously seeps through the reader’s…
One of the half-dozen main characters in Tom DiCillo’s ensemble comedy The Real Blonde is obsessed with finding a literal specimen of the title rara avis, a bona fide, not-out-of-the-bottle goldilocks. Exactly what gives rise to this fetish–what would make such a woman more appealing than a rinse-job blonde–isn’t dramatized…
Jeff Bridges is so euphorically wacked as a social dropout in The Big Lebowski that you get a contact high just looking at him. Padding around Venice, California, in a tee shirt barely covering his midriff bulge, he’s like a beach bum who bowls instead of surfs. His perverse nickname–“The…
A movie starring Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon, Gene Hackman, James Garner and Stockard Channing ought to be a whole lot better than Robert Benton’s Twilight. It’s one of those “autumnal” movies about a private detective who is too old for the game but still goes through the motions. Benton, in…
