The true-life story of the Cottingley Fairies is so full of possibilities, so thought-provoking and hilarious at once, that it’s amazing it’s never been filmed before. Making up for lost time, the incident has suddenly appeared (on its 80th anniversary) as the basis for two films simultaneously. Photographing Fairies, with…
In The Myth of Fingerprints, middle-class white people gather at their parents’ home for Thanksgiving, lovers in tow, to snipe at one another and bellyache about how horrible home life used to be. This description would also cover Home for the Holidays of two years ago. Myth’s people are a…
Stylishness without substance can become wearying real fast. Twenty minutes into A Life Less Ordinary, the new movie from the producing-directing-writing team of Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, I was already into overload. It’s not that director Danny Boyle doesn’t have imagination. It’s just that sometimes imagination is all he has…
What a relief it is to see a movie like James Dean: Race With Destiny. It had begun to feel as if the bad movie were dead–not gone, of course; as long as there are movies, most of them will be crummy. But in recent years, movie badness has been…
On the wintry Sabbath referred to by the title of Jonathan Nossiter’s Sunday, a middle-aged homeless man wanders the streets of Queens. Nothing new there. His name is Oliver (David Suchet), and he used to be a married, white-collar company man with IBM, but now he’s divorced, alone, sleeping in…
It’s hard to fault The House of Yes, the wry toast of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, for its limitations as a film. In fact, it’s hardly a film at all–rather, it’s a barely staged, five-handed farce that trails its amiable cast around a looming Victorian mansion during the course…
Seven Years in Tibet feels more like Seven Days at the Movies. It refuses to come to life–not even when prodded by Brad Pitt, hirsute as a yak, wandering the frozen Himalayas with an Austrian accent that probably gave his dialogue coach the hives. It’s an epic about how an…
The first scene of Different for Girls is both lyrical and chilling–a teenage boy (Stephen Walker) showers in a school locker room, posed like a Raphaelite statue, with his genitals tucked out of sight. Classmates, fully clothed, approach him through the steam and begin to harass him, until another boy…
By its very definition, a thriller should, you know, thrill. It should not only scare its audience with a quick jolt, that sudden noise in the dark that comes from nowhere and fills everywhere, but with its slow burn. It’s not enough for a thriller to tell its story, to…
Oliver Stone’s low-budget, hopped-up film noir, U-Turn, is being billed as a change of pace for the conspiracy dude, but actually it looks quite at home in the maestro’s hothouse. After all, aren’t conspiracies and the workings of fate what noirs are all about? Stone’s JFK pulped history with the…
Janeane Garofalo plows right through her new film, The Matchmaker, with the same disgruntled sarcasm that typifies her testy, standard-bearer-for-the-underdog persona. Try though it may to cast “America’s favorite antistar” in a “romantic comedy for people who don’t like romantic comedy,” this script, a wholesale retread of Local Hero (which,…
Everybody likes to run down Canadian movies, but Canadian film festivals–I speak of Montreal and Toronto–are something else again. How can a country turn out such mediocre movies and such terrific film festivals? In Hollywood, at least, we’re consistent: Our movies and our film festivals are equally lousy. I started…
The Peacemaker is the first feature from DreamWorks, the studio headed by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. It stars George Clooney and Nicole Kidman, and it’s about terrorists who steal Russian nukes. As an intelligence officer with the U.S. Army’s Special Forces, Clooney gets to model his jutting…
There’s a lovely formality to the structure of the comedy Wedding Bell Blues. Three young women (Paulina Porizkova, Illeana Douglas and Julie Warner), roomies, take a road trip to Vegas, with the vague plan of getting married, then immediately divorced. Their notion is that a 30ish divorcee is less pathetic…
Every film adaptation of a preexisting work has its own unique set of problems; in the case of Jocelyn Moorhouse’s A Thousand Acres, the problem is compounded. Not only was Jane Smiley’s 1991 novel a Pulitzer Prize-winning best seller with a large number of (presumably) devoted fans, but the book…
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…
