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…
Last week I became a member of that select group of people who can claim to have received a telephone call from the Jerky Boys. Lucky me. Also known as Johnny Brennan and Kamal, the two Queens, New York, natives were in town to promote their bold effort to move…
The first film by New Zealander Peter Jackson to gain much notice here was last year’s Dead Alive. This frenzied, farcical splatter parody, about people turned into cannibalistic zombies through the bite of the dreaded Sumatran rat monkey, was like a cinematic coup de grce–it was so revoltingly, yet hilariously,…
The Wolfgang Press Funky Little Demons (4AD) Cranky Little Demons might be a more appropriate description. Showing the equivalent of an extraterrestial’s grasp on what makes music soulful and thus funky, Wolfgang Press spews lyrical references to Motown on the first two cuts and lifts the chorus from the Four…
Oh, dear, I’m not supposed to go mad ’til 1800! –Graham Chapman as King George III on Monty Python’s Flying Circus Most Americans know King George III of Britain, if at all, as the guy who taxed our butt-kicking forebears into revolt, and whom they eventually beat. Some may remember…
Richard Linklater’s films, so far, have shown a unity of time so disciplined that it would gladden Aristotle’s heart. The young writer/director’s first feature, Slacker, took place in a day and a night on the streets of Austin, Texas. His second, the ’70s period piece Dazed and Confused, took a…
Except for Roman Polanski’s 1971 adaptation of Macbeth, the new film Death and the Maiden is his only film version of a play. Shakespeare to Ariel Dorfman–what a comedown. Still, Polanski did his best–he gave Dorfman’s dreary, annoyingly earnest revenge melodrama about political torture a smooth, elegant rendering onscreen. The…
In the surprisingly crowded genre of documentaries about filmmakers, director Ray Mller’s The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl is most likely the best I’ve ever seen, because it deals directly with subjects far more important than filmmaking. That grandly contradictory title is not wasted on Riefenstahl–her life really has…
Talk about showmanship! One of the distinctions co-directors Chris LaMont and Steve Bencich are claiming, probably accurately, for their comedy The Best Movie Ever Made is “the largest mime scene in motion-picture history.” Indeed, the all-mime parody of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is one of the highlights of this mlange…
Red Rock West, the splendid, tight-as-a-drum feature debut of the young writer/director John Dahl, was a comic thriller about a guy trying to get out of a small town. The hero was a decent, honorable young man who tells a tiny lie to get a job, then realizes with horror…
Nobody’s Fool is to Paul Newman’s career what Scent of a Woman was to Al Pacino’s–generously, a “character study”; more frankly, a blatant vehicle, existing for no reason other than to give a great actor a chance to charm us. It’s a much better, much less addlebrained picture than Scent,…
Say you’ve got this wise and war-weary colonel living in Montana around the turn of the century. Say he’s got three pretty-boy sons–the eldest levelheaded, the middle wild and prodigal, the youngest sweet and sensitive. What do you need to turn this scenario into an epic tear-jerker Western in the…
