Director Garry Marshall (Pretty Woman, Beaches) has always tended toward unrealistically feel-good movies, and The Other Sister is no exception. Billed as “a love story for the romantically challenged,” it concerns a mentally challenged young woman, Carla (Juliette Lewis), struggling for independence from her overprotective mother (Diane Keaton). With the…
When hit men wore hats, and Cadillacs had running boards, the average Mafia don could knock off the Tattaglia brothers in mid-afternoon and sit down to a nice plate of chicken cacciatore that evening, content that he’d seen to the family business and blazed a path for his first-born son’s…
“Honey,” Ellen Burstyn’s character in The Last Picture Show remarks to her daughter, “everything gets old if you do it often enough.” The specific activity she had in mind was sex, but the maxim applies at least as appropriately to genre conventions in movies, which even the casual moviegoer can…
The independent production/distribution company The Shooting Gallery probably got a lot more attention when Monica Lewinsky showed up in Washington, D.C., wearing a cap with its logo than it is likely to from the release of The 24 Hour Woman, a modest, deserving film from writer/director Nancy Savoca. Savoca has…
Under the opening titles of 200 Cigarettes, we hear Bow Wow Wow’s near-peerless bubblegum anthem “I Want Candy.” The movie that follows seems designed to satisfy that craving–it’s sweet, tart, brightly colored, insubstantial and utterly lacking in nutritional value. It’s also fun to consume, and harmless enough as long as…
What’s entertaining about October Sky is the unlikely-but-true spectacle of backwater West Virginia teens teaching themselves rocket science in the Eisenhower Fifties. They progress from a glorified cherry bomb to sophisticated missiles through trial-and-error-and-error. Their inner rocket fuel is the desire to avoid getting stuck in the dying coal industry…
Plot is a central problem in both Jawbreaker and Office Space, two comedies opening this week: The first has too much; and the second (and far better of the two movies) has too little. Jawbreaker’s 26-year-old writer/director Darren Stein says he wanted to make an homage to the films he…
In the archetypal dead-end town of Lawford, New Hampshire, cold-eyed men looking for trouble prowl the streets in four-by-fours with chrome spotlights and loaded gun racks. The gloomy barrooms are not gathering places so much as solitary confinement cells, and the most popular local sport is macho posturing. In wintry…
For better or worse, the father figure in Larry Clark’s ironically titled Another Day in Paradise turns out to be Mel, a foul-mouthed, 40-year-old junkie wearing a devil-red tennis shirt. His notion of good counsel is showing his surrogate son how to disable the burglar alarm at a medical clinic…
In Hungary, the Holocaust lasted only for a year. But the word only is deceptive in this context. The Nazis, who entered the country in March of 1944, had been in the genocide business for a few years by then, and they’d gotten good at it. They were efficient, and…
Short of nuclear holocaust, a major sale at Kmart, or a confirmed Clint Eastwood sighting back in rural Iowa, there’s probably no way to keep the movie version of Message in a Bottle from overwhelming the tender emotions of the hearts-and-flowers crowd. After all, this relentless assault on the tear…
“When I was in film school, I was the guy who was gonna resurrect screwball comedy,” says filmmaker James Moll. It was an odd ambition for the man who would go on to make his feature directorial debut with The Last Days, a documentary about five Jewish survivors of the…
Between the current nostalgia for platform shoes and the epidemic of midlife crisis that has so many baby boomers in its grip, director Brian Gibson’s Still Crazy just might be able to find an audience among the disturbed, the deafened, and the disenchanted. It is, after all, the comic tale…
Last week a friend gave me a long distance phone number and insisted that I call it. It turned out to be the recorded information line for a movie theater in the presumably Mayberryesque town of Graham, North Carolina (my friend’s wife had found the number after hearing about the…
The new Mel Gibson vehicle Payback is arguably the first major-studio release this year to have even a modicum of aesthetic ambition. For his directorial debut, Brian Helgeland–who won an Oscar for his screenplay for 1997’s L.A. Confidential (co-written with director Curtis Hanson)–has chosen to adapt The Hunter, the first…
Elevate The Jerry Springer Show a notch or two–in other words, dispense with the one-legged serial killers who are having sex with their blind mothers, and other such nonsense–and you’ve got Willard Carroll’s Playing by Heart. Too harsh a judgment, some will say. After all, this well-meaning, relentlessly sincere ensemble…
The cold-hearted among us have watched Camille die tragically on the late show and have seen Brian Piccolo run his last yard through the cancer ward often enough to understand the several hazards of Hollywood “disease movies”–false sentiment, synthetic emotion, and tears for tears’ sake. It is with wariness, then,…
Somewhere under the glossy imbecility of Varsity Blues lurks an idea that could make a great American movie: a coming-of-age story in a setting where no one else has come of age, a place where the hero must find his way to maturity without a mentor. The setting, in this…
Because it revealed the coke-snorting, ego-fueled corruption of Hollywood in the early 1980s with such acid wit, David Rabe’s play Hurlyburly became a huge audience hit when it burst onto Broadway in 1984. Here was the inside stuff from the Left Coast, gotten up in a frenetic new language combining…
“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” Kris Kristofferson sings in his most beguiling song, “Me and Bobby McGee.” Stephen Frears’ The Hi-Lo Country tries in vain to be just as lyrical about love and liberty. In this 20th-century Western, a cattle rancher named Pete (Billy Crudup) narrates…
Genius can be a terrible, destructive gift. Jacqueline du Pre, the brilliant British cellist who enraptured audiences in the Sixties and Seventies with her musical passion and intensity, lived a life of great renown and acclamation, but also one of harrowing loneliness and emotional turmoil. Her story is movingly told…
Writer-director Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, the filmmaker’s adaptation of James Jones’ 1962 best seller about the World War II battle for Guadalcanal, arrives in theaters with an almost unbearable weight of expectation. After graduating in the first class at AFI’s Advanced Film Studies program and working briefly as…
