A homeless man stumbles into a New York fish market and asks for a glass of water. The owner’s wife gives it to him, and then, with a strange, sudden urgency, invites him home for dinner. Over her husband’s mild objections, by the end of the evening she’s offered him…
Thrillers that involve a threat to the nuclear family almost always have a reactionary subtext. Fatal Attraction, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Cape Fear leap to mind. When a director of Ron Howard’s guilelessness makes a film like Ransom, about a rich guy trying to best the man…
The swing in Swingers is in the music and the talk–the self-consciously hip chatter of young men cruising clubs and dancing to big bands. Yet the story of this low-budget romantic comedy unfolds not in the ’20s, ’30s or ’40s but in the ’90s, this decade in which style seems…
A few weeks ago, I saw a preview for William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. A woman in the row behind me remarked, “He must be turning over in his grave.” Shakespeare, she meant. Well, why not? Turning over in one’s grave is part of what Romeo & Juliet is all…
During the MTV Music Awards this year, Dennis Miller cracked that a band he was introducing was “so hip and alternative that Steve Buscemi tried out for a part in it.” Buscemi is to American independent film of the ’90s what Peter Lorre was to wartime noir–the signature character actor…
Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins opens with Collins’ trusted aide Joe O’Reilly (Ian Hart) speaking of his departed leader: “He never did what anyone expected.” But, in fact, Collins (Liam Neeson) does pretty much what is expected of a movie hero: He fills the screen with noble bluster; he aches for…
Last year, Arizona State University’s Gammage Auditorium hosted a special showing of Sergei Eisenstein’s masterpiece The Battleship Potemkin, accompanied live by the Phoenix Symphony, performing a score cobbled together from various Shostakovich works. I wrote about the event, focusing mainly on Potemkin’s importance in film history, and on the validity…
Trying to decide whether the Million Man March was good or bad, heartening or depressing, can give you a headache. At the center of the ambiguity is Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, the march organizer. It’s a stretch to believe that the anti-Semitism and xenophobia attributed to him in…
That Thing You Do! is perfectly beguiling, perfectly skilled, perfectly smart and perfectly harmless. Coming from anyone else, it might seem slick and calculated, but as the debut of Tom Hanks as a writer-director, it seems like an unusually personal piece of moviemaking. The story, which Hanks claims to have…
Corky, a parolee, gets a job fixing up a Chicago apartment next door to one occupied by Ceasar, a gangster, and Violet, his luscious moll. The moment Corky’s and Violet’s eyes meet on the elevator, the sexual tension between them is palpable. Eventually, they become lovers and hatch a daring…
All over the country, film reviewers who have just seen Big Night are frantically straining to think of a different way to say what they know perfectly well all their colleagues are going to say. Which is that Big Night will make you hungry. Here’s my variation: Recommending this movie…
The first play by David Mamet to receive wide notice was American Buffalo, a three-hander set in a junk shop, about marginal smalltime crooks planning to rob a coin collection. After an Obie-winning off-Broadway run, it hit Broadway in 1977, with Robert Duvall, Kenneth McMillan and John Savage, and it…
Short Cuts meets Pulp Fiction! That, no doubt, is how the script for 2 days in the valley was sold, but it’s not quite either movie. It’s more engaging than the former, less imaginative and intelligent than the latter, and a good deal more sentimental than either. This comedy-thriller sets…
In a kitschy, sappy way, Grace of My Heart is a likable movie. It has a lively period flavor, some terrific music and an excellent lead performance. Now and then, for a scene or two at a time, it’s even touching. But it’s still a show-biz soaper, and it’s not…
In 1994, PBS ran the 90-minute documentary Before Stonewall about events leading up to the 1969 riot outside the Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village, an incident regarded by some as the beginning of the modern Gay Pride movement in America. The late filmmaker Nigel Finch has taken another…
Score one for the character actors. Paul Newman’s chubby, dim sidekick in Nobody’s Fool, which was set in a small town in upstate New York, was played endearingly by Pruitt Taylor Vince–one of many times that Vince has shown his reliability in supporting roles. Beautiful Girls, JFK, Natural Born Killers,…
The names of the three main characters in The Spitfire Grill are Hannah, Shelby and Percy. That last name, the heroine’s, is short for–get this–“Perchance.” Still haven’t heard enough? Okay, here’s writer/director Lee David Zlotoff holding forth, in the production notes, on the theme of his film: “This film is…
The documentary A Perfect Candidate is like Al Gore doing the macarena at the Democratic National Convention–proof that political satire has become impossible. Under the opening titles, we see a combo called the Angry Young Pachyderms at the Virginia Republican Convention, performing a ditty called Don’t You Know It’s Your…
Part of Andy Warhol’s genius was his witty skill at daring us not to think he was a genius. Plenty of people took this dare, and it was no skin off his pasty nose–he may well have agreed with them. But if the art world was sufficiently gullible, or frightened…
Not far into The Trigger Effect, we see a street sign which reads “Maple Ct.” This is probably a nod by writer/director David Koepp to “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” a 1959 episode of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. If it isn’t, it ought to be. “Maple Street”…
H.G. Wells’ brusquely brief novel The Island of Dr. Moreau is one of the kinkiest of all classic horror tales. The likably flawed narrator/hero, Edward Prendick, finds himself stranded on the title island, where he is the guest of Moreau, a researcher, and his tippling associate Montgomery, a disgraced medical…
Those of us who were children during the late ’60s and early ’70s remember the kiddy movies of the time as a sorry, syrupy lot–as, I suspect, our parents do even more acutely. 1971’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory has much of the same saccharine quality around the edges,…
