As any Klump family member can tell you, this has been a hot summer for black comedians. Movies starring Martin Lawrence, the Wayans brothers and Eddie Murphy have already pulled down more than $300 million at the box office, and by the time Chris Rock’s remake of Heaven Can Wait…
Irish charm and British eccentricity are hot properties on this side of the pond — especially among U.S. moviegoers. Witness the phenomenal success here of The Secret of Roan Inish, in which a 10-year-old Irish girl finds her lost brother living among seals off her country’s rugged western coast, or…
Despite a subtly scintillating cast of characters played with pitch-perfect verve, London — in this case, working-class, unpretentious South London — is the main character of Michael Winterbottom’s gritty yet kindly Wonderland. Navigating the labyrinthine streets and suburbs charted in Laurence Coriat’s debut screenplay (which evolved under the title Snarl…
There’s no explicable reason for the existence of The Replacements, which is to the football-film genre what Major League was to the baseball movie: sports rendered as sitcom (or Police Academy sequel). The Replacements, which takes as its cue the 1987 National Football League players’ strike, is stocked with every…
It would be the easiest thing in the world to write off But I’m a Cheerleader, the story of a teenager discovering her sexual identity through a program designed to repress it, as a Saturday Night Live sketch somewhat awkwardly inflated to feature length. But when you start looking deeper…
Okay, so there are these beautiful ladies in tight clothes, right? And — get this — they serve alcohol while dancing suggestively! Sound cool? How about we make a movie about them? The premise oughta be enough to draw in the guys, and we’ll call it “female empowerment” or something…
The bewildering penchant of recent American movies for glorifying the lovable naïf, the perpetual adolescent and the village idiot takes a strange new turn in Miguel Arteta’s dark comedy Chuck & Buck. Arteta’s hero, Buck O’Brien (Mike White), is a 27-year-old manchild who eats lollipops all day long, takes refuge…
It’s a pleasure to say that Clint Eastwood reverses his recent downward slide — A Perfect World (1993), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Absolute Power (1997), and True Crime (1999), each of which has seemed less satisfying than its predecessor — with Space Cowboys, his latest. It isn’t an…
So who are these celebrated Coen brothers anyway, and what’s their point? These days, it’s pretty easy to switch over to critical autopilot, to gush about funny-looking friends shoved into wood chippers or Hula-Hoops being designed, you know, for the kids. But where does the slender path of the Coen…
There are many, many productive paths a bright, ambitious young fellow can pursue in America. He can, for instance, start a mediocre rock band and try to make music for beer commercials. He can also design a Web site to advertise Web sites about Web sites. Or there’s always the…
Only in the movies could a kid who looks and acts like Jason Biggs be called a loser. Let’s see: charming conversationalist, big smile, washboard abs? Oh yeah, those’ll make a guy unpopular, for sure. About the only thing that’s surprising about Biggs’ character in Loser is that the filmmakers…
Peter Fonda is the top-billed star of Thomas and the Magic Railroad. The plot involves Fonda and Thomas the Tank Engine steaming across the country, with Steppenwolf blaring on the soundtrack, to Mardi Gras, a stash of dope taped under Thomas’ cow-catcher. They have an acid trip with New Orleans…
Rather than asking if this senseless and expensive new film from wunderkind entertainer Robert Zemeckis is devoid of merit (it is), or “worth seeing” (it isn’t), we should instead take the movie’s title — What Lies Beneath — as a direct question. Indeed, what does lie beneath? Possible answers include:…
Antonioni and Bergman, I get. Show me Buñuel or Godard, Tarkovsky or Marguerite Duras, and you won’t see me knit my brow. David Lynch is a snap. I can even sort of see where Stan Brakhage is coming from. When it comes to cryptic cinema, I’ll sit there and find…
In Bryan Singer’s last movie, 1998’s Apt Pupil, Ian McKellen portrayed a Nazi war criminal hiding out in the suburbs, passing himself off as an ordinary old man crouching behind drawn blinds. In Singer’s new movie, X-Men, McKellen plays Erik Magnus Lehnsherr, the son of Jews who were murdered in…
For most Americans, the social and political issues underlying José Luis Cuerda’s Butterfly seem remote at best. The tensions between republicans and fascists in Spain after the fall of that nation’s monarchy in 1931, and dictator Francisco Franco’s victory in the bloody Spanish Civil War, may have stirred strong feelings…
Armchair shrinks can debate for hours about why Mel Gibson loves to get the snot knocked out of him. A facile answer, considering the star’s reputation as a homophobe, is that the lady doth protest too much, and that getting electrically tortured by Gary Busey in Lethal Weapon or hacked…
Director Alison Maclean, from Canada by way of New Zealand, turns her camera on the American landscape — or, more accurately, the underbelly of the American landscape — in Jesus’ Son, an uneven, but often effective, adaptation of Denis Johnson’s autobiographical book. Billy Crudup stars as a thoroughly marginalized character…
Why is the film called Disney’s The Kid? Is it really possible that the studio was so concerned that someone might actually mistake the film for an update of the Chaplin classic that the brand name had to be formally incorporated in the title? Or was this an attempt to…
Is there a more bankrupt genre than the parody movie? So many movies nowadays are so painfully self-aware and referential anyway that there often isn’t much left to make fun of, which is especially the case for Kevin Williamson-penned films like Scream and its clones, clichéd teen slasher movies that…
Despite what many believe, it doesn’t come down to explosions, star power or millions of greenbacks thrown at the producers. The true indicator of success for a summer movie is The Moment, that one memorable scene that sticks in your head, the one that Billy Crystal parodies the following spring…
The press kit for The Perfect Storm contains the damnedest thing I’ve ever read. Right at the top, there is a “special request to the press” that reads, in full: “Warner Bros. Pictures would appreciate the press’ cooperation in not revealing the ending of this film to their readers, viewers…
