With the possible exception of the Empire State Building in King Kong, it’s doubtful there could be a stronger phallic symbol anywhere in movies than the submarine: an oblong shape that dives into the depths, is loaded with scurrying seamen and is eager to discharge itself. Small wonder that the…
The title The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill, but Came Down a Mountain suggests all sorts of possibilities, starting with a documentary about Sir Edmund Hillary. The movie that hides behind the title, however, is a charming, tall-tale comedy spun with sly, cheeky ease and flashes of visual grace…
Those who squawked about Philadelphia’s depiction of the unwavering support shown to a gay man by his affluent family really will be put out by The Sum of Us. This little Australian film is about the unconditional love of a father for his gay son. Harry (Jack Thompson) is a…
It’s understandable that Eldridge Cleaver would consider Panther “a travesty.” Cleaver, who in the ’60s was minister of information for the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, is a character in director Mario Van Peebles’ new film, and he doesn’t come off especially well. He’s presented as a hothead who can’t…
John Sayles has been making movies for quite a while now, but making them less as a director and more as a screenwriter who directs. His interests are impressively wide, his plots are imaginative, his characters often complex, his dialogue pungent and funny. But his films, though never inept, are…
Last year, I reviewed a film called Go Fish, allegedly a comedy, about modern life among urban twentysomething lesbians. I panned it, and, predictably, got some static from lesbian readers who suggested that I disliked the film because I wasn’t a lesbian myself, and not for the actual reason, which…
After a modest first try last year, Arizona Film Society has taken the next step toward the elusive goal of bringing a regular annual film festival to the Valley–it’s come back for a second year. Saguaro Film Festival II will be held Thursday through Sunday at AMC Town & Country…
Destiny Turns On the Radio is the unfortunate title of a small, strange, rather agreeable comic fantasy set in Las Vegas. The title cosmic force, personified by Quentin Tarantino as a flashy hipster with a shit-eating grin, finds Julian (Dylan McDermott), an escaped convict, wandering in the Nevada desert and…
Jim Carroll’s book The Basketball Diaries isn’t about basketball, it’s about how the diarist, a Catholic high school kid growing up in Manhattan, happened to quit basketball. It’s an autobiographical work, supposedly the real diary Carroll kept during the mid-Sixties, when he changed from an aspiring poet and star of…
Director Henry Hathaway’s 1947 Kiss of Death isn’t necessarily a great crime movie, but it has remained in our collective movie memory for two reasons: Richard Widmark and New York City. The film was shot entirely on location, a practice that’s now de rigueur, but was unusual enough at the…
Once Were Warriors, a contemporary drama about a Maori family living in an urban New Zealand slum, is the feature debut of director Lee Tamahori. To describe the film with the usual adjectives–“raw,” “powerful,” “hard-hitting”–would be accurate, and then some. The theme of the film is domestic violence, and Tamahori…
Frequent moviegoers tend to develop pretty sharp instincts about what to see and what to avoid, and they’re often right. As soon as one sees that a feature vehicle has been made for a popular sketch character from Saturday Night Live, the review starts writing itself in one’s head–“What’s funny…
Thomas Jefferson was a great American statesman–probably the greatest–and Nick Nolte is a superb American movie star. What a shame that the collaboration of these two estimable men–Nolte plays Jefferson in Jefferson in Paris, the new movie by producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory–is so utterly dull. About the…
Priest is a movie with a message, and in spite of a complicated–perhaps overly complicated–plot, that message is a simple one: The Catholic Church should give up its doctrine of priestly celibacy. If Church hierarchy refuses to do this, individual priests should ignore the doctrine as they see fit. I’ve…
A Goofy Movie is more-traditional Disney than Priest, but the plot is no less perennial. It’s about being estranged from, and embarrassed by, your parents. Or, in this case, parent–Goofy is a single father here, and the film is a road comedy in which he tries to reconnect with his…
The Scottish film Shallow Grave is an imaginative little noir thriller with a lively, grisly wit. Like Miami Rhapsody, the film is full of more or less open references to other movies in its genre–Brian DePalma’s Body Double and Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas, most notably. But unlike director David Frankel’s act…
Stark type against a black background, actors’ names listed alphabetically, Louis Armstrong singing “Just One of Those Things”–Miami Rhapsody’s titles let us know at once that we’re in Woody Allen Land. The letters are in purple, however, not in Allen’s traditional white, presumably to suggest the flashier colors appropriate to…
Very few moviegoers today, even those who would consider themselves film buffs, have had more than passing exposure to the films of the silent era. Yet it is in this period that the vast majority of the art’s fundamental techniques were invented and refined, often to levels of great accomplishment…
The notion of an exquisite young woman becoming emotionally and/or sexually fixated on a paunchy, balding, poorly dressed older man is one that has a certain special appeal for the average movie critic. This may have more than a little to do with why Red, the third film in Krzysztof…
True to its title, French director Nicolas Philibert’s documentary In the Land of the Deaf approaches deafness not as a handicap but as the unifying condition of a subculture. It’s a very simple, unaffected piece of filmmaking, smoothly intercutting several unconnected strands of narrative–the marriage of two young people, a…
While Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump racks up the nominations, let’s pause a moment to take a look at the latest project of Zemeckis’ old buddy Bob Gale, his writing partner on Used Cars and the Back to the Future films. Mr. Payback, which Gale wrote and directed for Sony New…
The flawless, if sterile, computer illusions of Jurassic Park condemned stop-motion animation to extinction as a special effect. First developed in the silents by pioneering animator Willis O’Brien, this technique involved the frame-by-frame shooting of articulated puppets to simulate movement when run at regular speed. But it was always too…
