Howard and Emily’s wedding is the talk of Greenleaf, Indiana, a small town idyllic enough to repel Norman Rockwell. The town has waited three years for the couple to make it official–and slimmed-down Emily (Joan Cusack) has waited three long years for Howard (Kevin Kline) to consummate their relationship. She’s…
The 1950s-era Los Angeles of L.A. Confidential is Noir Central. Its denizens are tattooed by shadow; the play of light and dark in the streets, the police stations, the morgues, is fetishistic. The postwar L.A. touted in the travelogues and billboards is a boom town, but what we actually see…
The Game is a puzzle picture, and beyond its premise there isn’t much you can divulge without giving the show away. I’m not one of those critics who likes to write Stop reading now if you plan to see this movie, so I’m tempted to wrap up things right now…
If you spent a lot of time during the early Eighties watching what were known in those days as “T&A” comedies–low-budget youth sex farces like Hardbodies or Private School–then the new film Butch Camp may amaze you. It’s made perfectly and unselfconsciously in the same cruddy nonstyle. It’s technically shoddy,…
Cold comfort though it must be to those who suffered through it, Great Britain’s Tory-era industrial collapse at least produced two delightful, defiant movie comedies. Mark Herman’s Brassed Off! followed a North England mining town’s brass band on its swan song. The film wasn’t escapist–it was pretty preachy at times,…
In Woody Allen’s early comedy Take the Money and Run, stickup man Allen’s wife complains about the unfairness that her husband never made the Ten Most Wanted List. “It’s who you know,” she bitterly insists. The makers of the period gangster epic Hoodlum seem to have felt the same snub…
When Time magazine columnist Walter Shapiro referred to himself last month as part of a generation that still believes “A Thousand Clowns holds all the secrets to human existence,” I thought he must be daft. Yes, high school students took Herb Gardner’s hit comedy about an urban dropout (played by…
Mike Leigh’s new film Career Girls is compact and minor. I don’t mean that as a slam, exactly. After the dawdling expansiveness of last year’s Secrets & Lies, his latest one is something of a relaxation–it’s appealingly small-scale. Leigh isn’t doing anything here he hasn’t done better before, but at…
Excess Baggage, Alicia Silverstone’s first feature from her First Kiss Productions, turns out to be a rather shaggy and uninvolving jaunt. As Emily T. Hope, the moneyed teenager looking for love from her emotionally distant single dad (Jack Thompson), Silverstone pouts a lot while trying to wring our sympathy. Even…
In the Company of Men is about Chad (Aaron Eckhart) and Howard (Matt Malloy), two thirtysomething white-collar execs who have recently been passed over for promotions and rejected by their girlfriends. En route to a six-week business trip at the home office, Chad, the bristlier and wilier of the two,…
If you’re nostalgic for the cockeyed, let-it-all-out gabfests of the late John Cassavetes, She’s So Lovely will seem like dejà vu all over again. Cassavetes wrote the script more than a decade ago, and now his son Nick Cassavetes–whose first feature, Unhook the Stars, starred his mother, Gena Rowlands–has directed…
In G.I. Jane, Demi Moore’s Naval Intelligence officer, Lieutenant Jordan O’Neil, is recruited as a test case to be the first female Navy SEAL. She gets a buzz cut and loses her period. She endures the indignities of the male volunteers snickering at her in the food line. She rolls…
When the beautiful entomologist rips open the chest cavity of a huge, bloodthirsty insect in the sci-fi nightmare Mimic, it turns into Thoraxic Park. This movie, like Steven Spielberg’s, features evolution gone haywire and dramaturgy gone to hell. In the prologue, the heroine–the reckless and courageous (or foolhardy and stupid)…
Time has a way of slipping away. But don’t worry–studio executives are keeping a typically keen eye on the calendar, and calculating the simple economics of boomer nostalgia. Hmmm . . . 1997 minus 1957 equals 40 years. Forty years of nostalgia times a gazillion boomers plus all the baffled…
Having been fixated all his life with both movies and insects, Mimic director Guillermo Del Toro recently offered his expert opinion on the subject of bugs, especially huge bugs, in the movies. “There are only two giant-insect movies that are really good,” he said, modestly excepting Mimic, of course. “Them!…
Miguel Arteta, director of Star Maps, attended film programs at Harvard, Wesleyan and the American Film Institute. But how did he make the leap into the movie business? “I gave a tape of my film to Jim, my car mechanic,” says Arteta. “God bless him, he introduced me to Jonathan…
The cops in Cop Land carry on like a bunch of goombahs. On the take from the Mob, they mimic the Mob. The fuzzy line dividing cops and crooks is the subject of many a strong police movie, but Cop Land goes a step further–it says there is no line…
In the not-so-brave new world of independent filmmaking, low-budget movies premiere at Sundance or Cannes and win plaudits from overpsyched audiences, publicity from desperate feature writers, and distribution from boutiques that are usually subsidiaries of major studios. Right now Tarantino-style thrillers are out; crazy-clan stories and upstairs-downstairs tales are in…
Before Billy Connolly has said hello or shaken your hand, before you’ve even stepped into his hotel room, he’s already effusively telling you about something BRRRILLIANT he’s just seen on TV. This particular BRRRILLIANT program was about a Hells Angels convention in rural Alberta, Canada, and how the townies were…
Jerry Fletcher, the hero of Conspiracy Theory, is a comic, glamorous variation on Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Like Travis, he’s a New York cabby obsessed with protecting a woman from the world’s hidden malignancies. Unlike Travis, Jerry snaps when he achieves sanity. Mel Gibson has been almost too willing…
Mrs. Brown (a Cannes hit and Miramax release) is dignified to the dead max–brownish-gray in mood and look and spirit. It’s based on the true story of the platonic but controversial bond between Queen Victoria (Judi Dench) and a Highlander named John Brown (Billy Connolly), who had been the devoted…
British filmmaker Peter Greenaway sits near a window in the dining room of a Hollywood hotel; he indicates a man walking down the sidewalk outside. He’s about to explain his use of multiple imagery in his new film, The Pillow Book–distinguishing it from the conventional notion of the split screen…
