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…
There’s no earthly reason we needed a live-action feature version of Mr. Magoo. But since we got one anyway, it should be said that there’s no real excuse for it having turned out so miserably. If a kiddy movie doesn’t even have the charm or inventiveness of the goofy little…
The new Gus Van Sant film Good Will Hunting is like an adolescent’s fantasy of being tougher and smarter and more misunderstood than anybody else. It’s also touchy-feely with a vengeance. Is this the same director who made Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy? Those films had a fresh way of…
If Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown didn’t arrive weighted with post-Pulp Fiction expectations, it might be easier to see it for what it is: an overlong, occasionally funky caper movie directed with some feeling. It’s derived from Elmore Leonard’s 1992 best seller Rum Punch, with the location shifted from Palm Beach,…
The ad line for As Good As It Gets is “a comedy from the heart that goes for the throat.” Isn’t this simply another way of saying, “You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll gag”? Jack Nicholson plays, of all things, a prolific romance novelist who’s a virulent xenophobe and a hopeless…
Deconstructing Harry opens riotously with a middle-aged man and his lover–who is also his sister-in-law–surreptitiously coupling at a family get-together. It seems at first that we’re about to be shown the story of this pair (Richard Benjamin and Julia Louis-Dreyfus). But before long, we realize that neither of them is…
Explained Biblically, the sinking of R.M.S. Titanic 400 miles off the southern coast of Newfoundland in 1912 is an act of divine one-upmanship. The White Star Line’s 46,328-ton “ship of dreams” was struck down on its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, because mere mortals should not presume to blithely conquer…
Macaulay Culkin’s replacement in the new Home Alone 3 owns a pet rat. If Mouse Hunt, the DreamWorks attempt at a holiday family comedy, hits it big, members of the Home Alone bunch may kick themselves. Why try to package a skin-crawly brat as America’s darling, when you can just…
