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…
Belgian director Alain Berliner’s first feature film, Ma Vie en Rose (My Life in Pink), won the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, but, even so, it only nibbles around the edges of its unusual topic. It tells the story of Ludovic (Georges Du Fresne), a young boy who considers himself a…
The science-fiction works of the late, great Philip K. Dick haven’t been served particularly well onscreen. The most recent adaptation, Screamers, was junk; Total Recall had its moments but was less ingenious by half than the short story it was based upon. Blade Runner, of course, was brilliant, but in…
Back in the ’60s and ’70s, when its animation unit was in the doldrums, the Disney studio made a number of live-action “family” comedies (No Deposit, No Return and Freaky Friday, for instance) that were, within their limited ambitions, genuinely funny. The studio’s latest film, Krippendorf’s Tribe, is very much…
When and if humans make first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, the experience may have this much in common with Sphere: It could quite possibly be confusing and unsatisfying. But if it’s anywhere near so cliched, why bother? That Sphere is based on a Michael Crichton novel is not, in itself,…
Brazilian director Bruno Barreto is best known on these shores for the lush romanticism of the Sonia Braga travelogues Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands and Gabriela, and in his country for teen fluff like The Boy From Rio. With the Oscar-nominated Four Days in September, he’s likely to establish…
A cappella except for hand-clapping, Taj Mahal growls “John the Revelator” under the titles of Blues Brothers 2000. That was enough to make me glad I had gone. What I didn’t expect was how many other reasons followed. The Blues Brothers, 1980’s feature-length treatment of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd’s…
In these paradox-ridden times, producers on the hunt for cutting-edge fantasies look back–they visit their boyhood or girlhood rooms and ransack their old books and videos, or peruse their studio’s property list for works that scored well in other media. In the mid-’90s, the English company Working Title Films made…
Set in 19th-century Australia, this tale of two gamblers–Oscar, a failed minister, and Lucinda, a glass-works owner–is too wispy to be an art thing and too heavy to be a toy. Its key symbol is a tiny glass teardrop. The “Prince Rupert drop” cannot be smashed with a sledgehammer but…
John Woo has generated plenty of American disciples in the decade since his Hong Kong action films began playing film festivals in the West. Even before he began his Hollywood career with 1993’s Hard Target, bits of his action shtick started showing up in the work of savvy young filmmakers,…
As The Apostle’s title character, E.F. “Sonny” Dewey, writer-director Robert Duvall never stops moving and never speaks in a voice lower than a roar. He runs in place, dances when standing still, hollers even when he whispers; he vibrates. Sonny’s a true tent-revival preacher, spitting brimstone threats and heavenly promises…
In the new Great Expectations, directed by Alfonso Cuaron and scripted by Mitch Glazer, the teeming world of Charles Dickens’ 1861 novel is very loosely updated and transposed to Florida’s Gulf Coast and Manhattan. It wouldn’t be accurate to call this film an adaptation–at its best, it’s more like a…
Would that Half-Baked were even as well-done as its title implies. This attempt at a contemporary pothead comedy makes you long for the lightness and subtle urbanity of Up in Smoke. It has, maybe, this much of a claim on authenticity–it really does play like something that was written wasted,…
One of the conceits to which every critic must be genetically predisposed is the idea that, at the end of the day, his or her opinion actually matters. That some unknown phantasm at a nonspecific coffee shop sits immersed in said critic’s latest ill-advised screed, imbibing every word as if…
With all the brutal competition from the big-ticket films prior to the December 31 Oscar deadline, Hollywood has established a tradition in recent years of dumping lost-cause features during the first few weeks of the year. In 1997, it was the airplane “thriller” Turbulence; in 1996, Bio-Dome and Two If…
Hard Rain doesn’t display a lot of belief in human consistency. In this exceedingly odd little picture, responsible characters are suddenly corrupted into greedy, murderous marauders. People who seem like the salt of the earth are revealed to have been schemers all along. One fellow picks just about the least…
Martin Scorsese’s Kundun is a deeply ceremonial experience, a serene pageant of colors, rituals, costumes. It’s about the Dalai Lama–recognized as the 14th reincarnation of the Buddha of Compassion and the spiritual and political leader of Tibet–from his childhood in 1937 through the Chinese invasion in 1949 and his journey…
Where would Irish filmmakers these days be without The Troubles? In just the past couple of years, we’ve seen The Crying Game, In the Name of the Father, Michael Collins, Some Mother’s Son and now The Boxer, the latest collaboration between director Jim Sheridan, screenwriter Terry George and actor Daniel…
When was the last time the audience applauded a trailer and the movie lived up to it? Independence Day enticed millions with its preview shot of the White House blown to smithereens, but that film was a dumb, elephantine sci-fi pastiche. The trailer for Wag the Dog, a far more…
It’s been just two years since the Academy nominated the Italian film Il Postino (a.k.a. The Postman) for multiple Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor. The arrival of Kevin Costner’s epic The Postman raises the possibility of confusion in the Oscar history books–a very slim possibility, a…
