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…
The unkillable masked killer in John Carpenter’s slasher-movie prototype Halloween is the most generic of all movie monsters. Even his name–reputedly borrowed from a British film distributor who made an overseas hit out of Carpenter’s early film Assault on Precinct 13–is prosaic: Michael Myers. He’s just a tall, silent stunt…
Vincent Gallo, a left-field character actor whose best work has been in the films of mainstream eccentrics like Emir Kusturica (Arizona Dream), Abel Ferrera (The Funeral) and Alan Taylor (Palookaville), arrives as full-blown auteur with Buffalo 66, the million-dollar art project he directed and co-wrote that made the covers of…
Nicolas Cage has never seemed more dazzling than he does in the new Brian De Palma thriller Snake Eyes. Playing Rick Santoro, a corrupt Atlantic City cop who likes to think he’s “everybody’s friend,” Cage for almost two continuous hours is boogying to his own inner beat. It’s like watching…
In the little Pacific Northwest town of Cradle Bay, troubled, “underachieving” teenagers appear to be an endangered species. One day a kid will be a hoodlum or a pothead or a slut, and the next he or she will have joined the “Blue Ribbon Club,” whose members all have tidy…
Do we really need to see the great Kevin Spacey fuming and fussing in one of those we-do-things-my-way-or-we-don’t-do-them-at-all roles? In The Negotiator, he’s playing Chris Sabian, an expert hostage negotiator for the Chicago police, whose job it is to talk down Samuel L. Jackson’s Danny Roman, another police expert who…
The first shot in Steven Spielberg’s remarkable World War II epic Saving Private Ryan is an American flag with the sun behind it. It’s a delicate, almost diaphanous image–the fabric has the transparent delicacy of a chrysalis. This is the perfect introduction to a movie about the fragility–and fortitude–of compassion…
The deferral of grief through sex is the theme of Under the Skin, the fierce, occasionally impressive feature debut of Brit writer-director Carine Adler. The central character, Iris (Samantha Morton), a 19-year-old in suburban Liverpool, loses her mother (Rita Tushingham) to a swift, unexpected cancer. Iris’ married, pregnant older sister…
Recently I asked the director and screenwriter and several of the stars of Saving Private Ryan what their favorite war movies are. Their selections: Steven Spielberg (director): “My favorite, favorite war movie is Battleground [MGM, 1949]. It’s the story of the Ardennes, and the “Battling Bastards of Bastogne,” directed by…
Smoke Signals is a rare drama about modern life on an Indian reservation that, unlike Hollywood fare such as Dances With Wolves, has been written and directed by Native Americans. It’s a film that feels genuine and heartfelt–it understands the problems its characters are experiencing. It’s often a quirky, whimsical…
In The Mask of Zorro, Anthony Hopkins plays the eponymous masked hero as if he were doing Shakespeare. He’s trying to turn a kitsch hero into a real one, and his efforts are so weirdly off-key that you don’t know whether to applaud or titter. This dolorous Don Diego de…
For those who thought Dumb and Dumber signaled the end of the world as we know it, my advice is duck and cover. Comedy avatars Peter and Bobby Farrelly, the odium savants behind what some have considered Jim Carrey’s Hamlet–as well as its follow-up, the mondo bowlerama Kingpin–have turned their…
Spike and Mike’s Classic Festival of Animation is the other yearly film anthology from the same two Californians–Spike Decker and Mike Gribble–who concoct Spike & Mike’s Festival of Sick and Twisted Animation. Like Sick and Twisted, their annual blowout of scatology, sacrilege and sensationalistic sex, the Classic festival is a…
High Art is a low-budget American independent movie about a junkie, lesbian photographer, Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy), who spends most of her time looking romantically mournful. She’s famished and abrasive and oh-so-world-weary. When she smokes cigarettes, she exhales in a way that can best be described as existential–the smoke curls…
Except when they’ve been busy defeating the Nazis or something like that, every generation of young adults has whined. Usually it’s about their poverty and their crappy prospects and the failure of the world to recognize their innate value and reward them accordingly with money, praise and sex. But it’s…
In Mr. Jealousy, director Noah Baumbach (Kicking and Screaming) takes on the most coiled and resilient of the seven deadlies. Even as Eric Stoltz’s romantic comedies were becoming forced and generic by the time of Kicking and Screaming, in this bright comedy of manners his amiable every-mannerisms are sharpened by…
Michael Bay is the director of Bad Boys and The Rock and the new asteroid-attack movie Armageddon–which should be called The Very Big Rock. He has, I’m afraid, perfected a new form: His movies are trailers for themselves. Every scene is all climax and no foreplay. When it’s all over,…
One of the more frequently occurring adjectives in reviews of The Truman Show, which continues to chug away at the box office, is “original.” Well, The Truman Show may be clever, may be touching, may be visually elegant, but it’s not original. The film is, indeed, a virtual amalgam of…
It’s Christmas vacation, 1958. The movie my dad has chosen for a first-grade pal and me to see is the new Disney live-action adventure Tonka, starring Sal Mineo as a young Sioux named White Bull who traps and domesticates a clear-eyed, spirited wild horse named Tonka. Having seen The King…
