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…
Now that the Japanese Tora-san series–with 50-some entries in 30 years–has presumably drawn to a close, following the death of star Kiyoshi Atsumi last year, the James Bond films constitute the longest-running continuous series around. They’ve had their ups and downs, but something about the Bond formula has proved enduring…
Steven Spielberg’s Amistad is being given the Big Picture treatment–Schindler’s List Big, not Jurassic Park Big. Last week’s Newsweek featured the film on its cover, calling it “Spielberg’s controversial new movie,” even though it had not yet been released and the only “controversy” was a legal one about alleged cribbing…
Wes Craven’s Scream, which opened almost exactly a year ago, was the surprise hit of an overcrowded Christmas season. In part, its success was a triumph of counterprogramming: In a glut of classy Oscar contenders, Scream was the only teen-horror film. And it was helped by the relatively lackluster response…
Incongruous amid the cotton fields of Avondale, just off Interstate 10, there rises a huge, imposing structure that seems simultaneously futuristic, retro and decrepit. It’s the ruin of an abandoned horse-racing grandstand, glowering down on a track long since overgrown. A real estate white elephant, it’s nonetheless an atmospheric spot…
George Lucas ignited the modern cinematic special-effects explosion with his Star Wars movies; his trailblazing Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) in San Rafael, California, has continuously redefined the limits of fx technology, from inventing fabulous dreamscapes for the second Star Wars trilogy to devising miraculous digital fixes for non-special-effects movies…
A team of Russia-based international bad guys wants to knock off someone at the very top of the U.S. government. Who you gonna call? The Jackal. As personified by Bruce Willis, this assassin di tutti assassins is a rather tightlipped psychopath with an alarming collection of multicolored hair pieces. Willis’…
You can’t exactly call Alien Resurrection a pleasurable experience, but, then again, you wouldn’t say that about its predecessors, either. Directed by the Frenchman Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who previously co-directed with Marc Caro Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, this fourth installment in the Alien onslaught is once again designed…
First, The Heiress was unofficially remade as Washington Square, then Ace in the Hole as Mad City, and The Day of the Jackal as The Jackal. But now we get The Absent-Minded Professor, all dressed up in new threads, as Flubber. In this frenzy of plundering the past, is nothing…
In John Berendt’s beguiling travel-cum-true-crime book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the people of Savannah, Georgia, (in Berendt’s words) “flourished like hothouse plants tended by an indulgent gardener. The ordinary became extraordinary. Eccentrics thrived. Every nuance and quirk of personality achieved greater brilliance in that lush enclosure…
Weed is a documentary chronicle of the “8th Annual Cannabis Cup & Hemp Expo,” a competition among the marijuana coffee houses in that fabled civil-libertarian utopia known as Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Thousands of potheads from all around the world–but mostly Americans–pay a small fee for the privilege of sampling the…
Ignorance is bliss and success and virtue. The spoils of life go not to the planners but to those who are too dim to know the risks they’re taking. That very American notion was the theme of Forrest Gump; less cosmically–but also much less pretentiously–it’s the gag engine behind the…
Disney Studios has nearly monopolized feature animation for almost 60 years now, only occasionally encountering successful forays by others into its animation realm. Now Twentieth Century Fox and its Phoenix-based Fox Animation studios are going up against the giant mouse with Anastasia; too bad this first effort isn’t better. During…
John Grisham’s The Rainmaker lulls you into the mindset you get while reading a best seller at the beach. What a sad thing to say about a Francis Ford Coppola movie! Rather than heighten your awareness the way The Conversation or The Godfather did, The Rainmaker makes you feel lazy…
Put brutally, the marvelous The Wings of the Dove is the story of a romantic frame-up that backfires. Thankfully, nothing is put brutally in this smart, lyrical movie. Director Iain Softley and screenwriter Hossein Amini cut to the thick of Henry James’ masterpiece about amorous extortion and moral purification. Helena…
