As a filmmaker, actor John Turturro clearly believes in drawing from personal experience: His directorial debut, the 1992 Mac (which won the Camera D’Or at Cannes), was avowedly based on his father’s life. For his second feature, Illuminata, Turturro takes a look at the theater, showing us the ambitions, fears…
There is something fairy-tale-like, but also deeply human, about Twin Falls Idaho, a gentle, beautifully realized tale of love and intimacy that marks the feature film debut of Mark Polish and Michael Polish. Identical twin brothers, Mark Polish wrote the script, Michael Polish directed it, and both brothers star. It…
If Kevin Williamson has anything to say about it, the good works of noble movie schoolteachers like Mr. Chips and Miss Dove and Mr. Holland will be wiped out in one fell swoop. In their place, the creator of TV’s hormonal Dawson’s Creek series proposes an unmitigated horror — a…
The comedy With Friends Like These has a setting with possibilities — the world of second- and third-tier Hollywood character actors, the hustlers who make a decent living in movies and TV but rarely get the sort of roles that are a joy to play, or that bring fame and…
Lo and behold the plight of the American gangster. John Gotti, the Dapper Don, has been sent down the river. His big-time heavy, Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, is famous and face-lifted for being a no-good dirty-rat stool pigeon. And Robert De Niro, the reigning deity of hoodlum heavies in films…
Filmmaker Bobby Bowfinger, the lead character in the intermittently funny Hollywood satire Bowfinger starring Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy, has a dream. Nothing so grand as an Academy Award, or even a table down front at the Golden Globes. No, when Bowfinger allows his fantasies to run wild, he sees…
Do not be fooled: Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley and Peter Criss receive top billing in Detroit Rock City, but KISS doesn’t actually appear in the film until its final three minutes. And when they do show up, clad in their de rigueur leather-and-greasepaint get-ups, it’s simply to perform…
It has been almost 40 years since Eric Rohmer, riding the crest of the French New Wave, embarked on the first of his Six Moral Tales. The series would eventually include at least two classics — My Night at Maud’s (1969) and Chloe in the Afternoon (1972). Linked by theme,…
In the highly competitive, dog-eat-dog world of the modern-day superhero, the members of the group that eventually becomes known as the Mystery Men — they don’t really have a name through most of Mystery Men — start out with a couple of strikes against them. First off, there’s the little…
Runaway Bride, the long-anticipated reunion of Pretty Woman stars Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, isn’t a sequel, but it feels like one. In everything, there is a distinct sense of predestination, of events occurring according to some irresistible force of the inevitable. This makes life especially easy for Garry Marshall,…
First published under the title The Iron Man in Great Britain in 1968, The Iron Giant is a minor classic of 20th-century children’s literature. The slim volume by the English poet laureate Ted Hughes is a pacifist parable in the guise of a sci-fi hero fantasy. Hughes spun his yarn…
Robert Wise’s 1963 version of The Haunting (from Shirley Jackson’s novel) has long been considered one of the milestones of the horror film. After 36 years, DreamWorks has bankrolled a new version under the direction of Jan de Bont (Speed, Twister) — an idea that should sound unpromising, even to…
Feel like shooting lutefisk in a barrel? Pick on beleaguered Minnesota again as the epicenter of everything that’s square-headed and unhip in America. Want to let the world know that two plus two equals four? Take aim one more time at the vain stupidity of beauty contests. Drop Dead Gorgeous,…
If you plan to park your kids in front of Inspector Gadget for 80 minutes, have at it. The film is terrible, drab, spiritless and empty, but it’s also harmless enough. Sure, it’s full of anarchic, slapstick violence, and it encourages the belief that if you stuff a trench coat…
Eyes Wide Shut, the final motion picture from the late, great Stanley Kubrick, is easily the most anticipated adult film of the year. It’s Star Wars: Episode I–The Phantom Menace for grown-ups. Any film by the notoriously painstaking auteur would have achieved this status. Kubrick made only 13 features in…
You can tell the first wave of summer blockbusters has shot its wad when the studios start tossing out their second- and third-string films. In the old days, these would have been called “programmers”–thoroughly competent entries that reiterated all the conventions of their reliable, easy-to-market genres. Such is Lake Placid,…
First the good news: The title of the high school comedy/Gen X nostalgia flick The Wood is not, despite this summer’s rash of double entendres, a dirty joke. The name’s as earnest and literal as the film itself, and simply marks the setting as Inglewood, California, the Los Angeles ‘burb…
Do you feel snug and secure in your cozy suburban life? Are you happy in your picture-perfect home, with your carefully manicured lawn, your kids and your soccer games and your barbecues? Do you feel safe? Well, the creators of Arlington Road, the ponderous new thriller starring Jeff Bridges and…
The Blair Witch Project, the bone-chilling indie by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, is easily the scariest horror picture of the ’90s, a movie that can take a place among the most potent and inexorable of modern shockers, like Night of the Living Dead or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Three…
It’s about time we had a talk. Yeah, you know, that talk. The one about how uncomfortable and strange it is to be a young human male, how raging and unforgiving the hormones, how fragile the ego, how mysterious the female form. You see, well, how do I say this?…
“Was it I that hurried to the deed? No. It was the daemon that possessed me. My limbs were guided to the office by a power foreign and superior to mine. I had been defrauded, for a moment, of the empire of my muscles. A little moment for that sufficed…
To hear Spike Lee tell it, Summer of Sam means to be a panoramic view of the summer of 1977 in New York City–when temperatures shot into the high 90s and power blackouts set nerves on edge, when the party agenda included snorting coke at Studio 54 and copulating with…
