Have adultery, murder and greed all moved to the sticks? Once firmly rooted in the big city, the seven deadly sins have taken on a distinct country-and-western twang in recent years, thanks to noirish, tough-minded scam fests such as John Dahl’s Red Rock West (1992) and The Last Seduction (1994),…
Back in the early Seventies, when John Waters made his first splash with such low-budget gross-outs as Pink Flamingos and Multiple Maniacs, who would have guessed that someday he’d be making a Hollywood film as benevolent as Pecker? In retrospect, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. If any director has ever…
As a director of action thrillers, John Frankenheimer has been a peerless stylist for nearly four decades–without leaning on a pile of glitzy special effects. What’s more, his most memorable movies, from The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to The Birdman of Alcatraz (also 1962) to 1986’s wickedly entertaining, unappreciated 52 Pick-Up…
One True Thing, directed by Carl Franklin, is trying to be the Terms of Endearment of the Nineties. Scripted by Karen Croner from the 1995 Anna Quindlen novel of the same name, One True Thing pushes the same high-gloss homilies about making peace with your family, and it caps everything…
The title Post Coitum derives, presumably, from the ancient Latin aphorism “post coitum omne animal triste”–every creature is sad after sex. The creature with which this French film concerns itself is Diane, a married, 40ish book editor played by Brigitte RoYan, who also co-wrote and directed. This attractive woman’s midlife…
A leg brace, a debilitating disease, sexual frustration, and Jackie Kennedy hair–breathes there a movie actress anywhere who could resist such fare? They’re as seductive as Richard III’s hump to the stage actor. Joanna Going straps it on–the leg brace, not the hump–and has a ball as the delicate heroine…
Jackie Chan’s American fans–and I include myself among them–have suffered through a nervous 1998 so far. The momentum the star earned with the 1996 release of Rumble in the Bronx has seemed to dissipate steadily: An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, the first American production to employ Chan since…
The heroine of The Governess is a young Jewish woman–a “Jewess,” in the parlance of 1840s London, in which the first scenes of the film are set. I thought that this drama, the feature debut of the young writer-director Sandra Goldbacher, might explore a chapter in Britain’s long, abysmal, and…
Men don’t get it. Moms don’t get it. Sometimes, even your roommate or best friend doesn’t get it. But if you bray and carp and vent long enough, someone will listen, someone will begin to understand the precious particulars of a young woman’s sexuality. Whether they’re interested or not. That’s…
The opening credits of Simon Birch assert that it was “suggested” by John Irving’s popular 1989 novel A Prayer for Owen Meany. Actually, it’s a thin but relatively faithful adaptation of the first few chapters of Irving’s comic ramble through the nature of religious faith, predestination, and heroism. Screenwriter Mark…
Matt Damon, the blond matinee idol, has apparently become Hollywood’s idea of a deep thinker. After playing a math whiz in last year’s Good Will Hunting, he’s now been reinvented as a poker genius in John Dahl’s Rounders. So anybody who had doubts about the second coming of Albert Einstein…
Shane, the teenage hero of Mark Christopher’s 54, wears the petulant expression of a Raphaelite cherub, and he comes complete with a halo of curly blond hair. He’s played by a pretty newcomer with the exotic name of Ryan Phillippe, but there’s nothing exotic about the voice that comes out…
In the pecking order of tragic black musicians, Frankie Lymon can’t hold a votive candle to, say, Charlie Parker or Billie Holiday. But now, like that pair, the late doo-wopper has got his own movie–or, rather, he’s got his own space in a movie that, for better or worse, is…
In the bluish-green depths of the ocean, we see the deck of a sunken ship. Out of the murk, two pinpoints of light approach–humans, lured to this wreck by irresistible curiosity. It’s the beginning of a James Cameron movie, but it’s not that James Cameron movie. It’s the first shot…
Henry Jaglom’s movies offer everything that Americans hate about French films, but with little of the philosophical depth or visual daring that marks the best French cinema. He also captures the annoying qualities of Woody Allen movies–the self-absorption, the feigned feminism, the pretentiousness–without achieving anything like Allen’s humor and charm…
Slums of Beverly Hills is the first feature by the young writer-director Tamara Jenkins, and it has its mild amusements. One of those movies that gets bonus points for being “personal,” it bops along from episode to episode, as if the filmmaker were discovering her subject as she went along…
The idea of destiny–especially the notion that two people are fated to meet and fall in love–is a load of crap, but a surprising number of people buy into it. Probably for that reason it has proved to be a fairly popular component in movie romances, City of Angels and…
“That is known as the lowest point in my life, because I basically was a human barbell,” says Next Stop Wonderland star Hope Davis of her role in the 1995 remake of Kiss of Death, in which she played Nicolas Cage’s girlfriend. “Big, big hair and really cheesy clothes,” she…
Based on a French film of 1990 called Force Majeure, the unhelpfully titled Return to Paradise aspires to be a morality play, one of those stories that makes you fret about what you would do in the same situation. It also wants to be a belated coming-of-age story, the drama…
Darren Aronofsky’s debut feature, Pi, won the Dramatic Directing Award at Sundance this year, and it’s easy to imagine why. Whatever its faults, and it has more than a few, it is unquestionably different. It at least takes a stab at interpolating cerebral ideas into the format of a thriller…
Jamie Lee Curtis is the most obvious graduate of Slasher U to cross over into big-time stardom–she’s back, in Halloween: H20, for the class reunion. But she’s not alone. Some major, no kidding, Oscar-winning, A-list stars have also matriculated the world of disreputable, low-budget slice-and-dice movies. Here’s a brief compendium:…
The timing couldn’t be better for How Stella Got Her Groove Back. The “dog days” of summer are upon us, and few prospects could be more welcome to asteroid-weary moviegoers than a light romance-comedy that includes a trip to Jamaica as part of the package. Director Kevin Rodney Sullivan may…
