Scent of a Womanizer

In writer-director James Toback’s quicksilver sex comedy Two Girls and a Guy, Robert Downey Jr. plays Blake Allen, a struggling New York actor who lives in a spacious loft in SoHo he probably can’t afford. He’s a pampered prince who has worked out for himself a cozy romantic subterfuge: He…

Miss Parallel Universe

Gwyneth Paltrow gets another chance to show off her letter-perfect English accent in Sliding Doors, an engaging romantic comedy which employs a rather novel narrative device: After introducing the main characters and setting up the basic story, the film splits into two separate but parallel plot lines. It’s a twist…

Koresh and Burn

You’re not likely to come out of the bone-chilling documentary Waco: The Rules of Engagement with the belief that David Koresh was angelic, or that he had no hand in the deaths of his Branch Davidian followers in Waco, Texas, in April of 1993. But, if you assumed that the…

One From the Heart

Getting it on with a heavenly being must be just about the ultimate New Age sexual fantasy–so City of Angels is like soft-core for New Agers. That, and the current taste for schmaltz in the Titanic vein, could make City of Angels a hit, just as the sentimentality of modern-day…

Shooting Blanks

Lovers of American movies used to joke that foreign films wouldn’t look so good if you saw them without subtitles. John Sayles’ latest movie, Men With Guns, plays better than his other films because it does have subtitles. Bald dialogue always sounds better in Spanish and Indian dialects. Set in…

Here’s to You, Missing Robinsons

Danger, Will Robinson! Sensors detect boomer-TV redux once again. This time the victim is Lost in Space, Irwin Allen’s enjoyably absurd sci-fi TV fantasy which ran from 1965 to 1968 on CBS, before ABC’s Batman trounced it in the ratings. Grown-ups are likely to cringe at the prospect of sitting…

Populist Mechanics

Two chocolate croissants and a mixed bowl of Raisin Bran and Frosted Flakes–with skim milk. The first thing anyone wants to know when he hears you had breakfast with Michael Moore, director of Roger & Me and now The Big One, is what the Falstaffian filmmaker put away. To be…

Prole Violation

If nothing else, the current edition of Michael Moore’s continuing self-love fest does have a great subject: the desperation hidden inside a “thriving” U.S. economy. While politicians and financial wizards point to unemployment on the wane and profits on the rise, Moore notes that the largest employer in the country…

Blight Spirit

British actor Gary Oldman, who made his mark playing a punk in Sid and Nancy and a playwright in Prick Up Your Ears, wrote and directed Nil By Mouth, which has already drawn comparisons to the class-conscious dramas of Mike Leigh (Naked, Secrets & Lies). The film, which Oldman dedicates…

A Boy and His God

Rosie O’Donnell sure makes a believable nun. In the kids’ movie Wide Awake, she plays Sister Terry, a sports-loving teacher at a swanky private school in the Philadelphia suburbs, a sympathetic good egg in whom the troubled 10-year-old hero (Joseph Cross) confides. There’s not a minute when she isn’t convincing…

Jewry Deliberation

A Price Above Rubies confirms writer-director Boaz Yakin’s place on the list of filmmakers who barged into the opposite sex’s clubhouse and returned with an unsentimental, resonant understanding of a woman. It isn’t Yakin’s first exploration into milieu many would insist he had no right to enter. His debut feature,…

My Brilliantine Career

“Slick” is the word. At a glance, it would be hard to find two performances farther apart than the latest star turn of John Travolta as presidential hopeful Jack Stanton in Primary Colors, which opened last weekend, and one of his earliest, as Danny Zuko in Grease (or Vaselina, as…

Slack in the Saddle

Probably every film director itches to make a Western, so let’s be thankful that, with The Newton Boys, Richard Linklater has scratched his itch. Now he can go back to making movies about subjects he has some feeling for. Linklater should not be begrudged his chance to “stretch.” But he…

Counterfeit Bill

If ever there was an Op-Ed movie–a movie destined to be written about in an “elevated” realm beyond just the movie pages–it’s Primary Colors. Thanks to Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones, the Hollywood/Washington nexus has lifted this new Mike Nichols picture, based on the 1996 best seller by Joe Klein,…

A Wok on the Wild Side

The American reissues of Jackie Chan films have met with declining box-office success since Chan burst onto the scene in 1996 with Rumble in the Bronx. With any luck, the latest Chan opus to be recut and redubbed for Americans, the year-old Mr. Nice Guy, should reverse the trend. No…

Woolf Gang Pluck

Though her contemporaries often compared Virginia Woolf’s nonlinear, almost cubist narratives to the cinema’s then-burgeoning use of montage, close-ups, flashbacks, tracking shots and rapid cuts, the strength of Woolf’s novels lay in the rhythm of her arresting style, and in her heroines’ poignant melancholia, which insidiously seeps through the reader’s…

Unbleached Flower

One of the half-dozen main characters in Tom DiCillo’s ensemble comedy The Real Blonde is obsessed with finding a literal specimen of the title rara avis, a bona fide, not-out-of-the-bottle goldilocks. Exactly what gives rise to this fetish–what would make such a woman more appealing than a rinse-job blonde–isn’t dramatized…

Bowling for Dullards

Jeff Bridges is so euphorically wacked as a social dropout in The Big Lebowski that you get a contact high just looking at him. Padding around Venice, California, in a tee shirt barely covering his midriff bulge, he’s like a beach bum who bowls instead of surfs. His perverse nickname–“The…

Dusk Busters

A movie starring Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon, Gene Hackman, James Garner and Stockard Channing ought to be a whole lot better than Robert Benton’s Twilight. It’s one of those “autumnal” movies about a private detective who is too old for the game but still goes through the motions. Benton, in…

Petty in Pink

Belgian director Alain Berliner’s first feature film, Ma Vie en Rose (My Life in Pink), won the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, but, even so, it only nibbles around the edges of its unusual topic. It tells the story of Ludovic (Georges Du Fresne), a young boy who considers himself a…

Noir Wheresville

The science-fiction works of the late, great Philip K. Dick haven’t been served particularly well onscreen. The most recent adaptation, Screamers, was junk; Total Recall had its moments but was less ingenious by half than the short story it was based upon. Blade Runner, of course, was brilliant, but in…

The Lyin’ King

Back in the ’60s and ’70s, when its animation unit was in the doldrums, the Disney studio made a number of live-action “family” comedies (No Deposit, No Return and Freaky Friday, for instance) that were, within their limited ambitions, genuinely funny. The studio’s latest film, Krippendorf’s Tribe, is very much…