Now that the Japanese Tora-san series–with 50-some entries in 30 years–has presumably drawn to a close, following the death of star Kiyoshi Atsumi last year, the James Bond films constitute the longest-running continuous series around. They’ve had their ups and downs, but something about the Bond formula has proved enduring…
Steven Spielberg’s Amistad is being given the Big Picture treatment–Schindler’s List Big, not Jurassic Park Big. Last week’s Newsweek featured the film on its cover, calling it “Spielberg’s controversial new movie,” even though it had not yet been released and the only “controversy” was a legal one about alleged cribbing…
Wes Craven’s Scream, which opened almost exactly a year ago, was the surprise hit of an overcrowded Christmas season. In part, its success was a triumph of counterprogramming: In a glut of classy Oscar contenders, Scream was the only teen-horror film. And it was helped by the relatively lackluster response…
Incongruous amid the cotton fields of Avondale, just off Interstate 10, there rises a huge, imposing structure that seems simultaneously futuristic, retro and decrepit. It’s the ruin of an abandoned horse-racing grandstand, glowering down on a track long since overgrown. A real estate white elephant, it’s nonetheless an atmospheric spot…
George Lucas ignited the modern cinematic special-effects explosion with his Star Wars movies; his trailblazing Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) in San Rafael, California, has continuously redefined the limits of fx technology, from inventing fabulous dreamscapes for the second Star Wars trilogy to devising miraculous digital fixes for non-special-effects movies…
A team of Russia-based international bad guys wants to knock off someone at the very top of the U.S. government. Who you gonna call? The Jackal. As personified by Bruce Willis, this assassin di tutti assassins is a rather tightlipped psychopath with an alarming collection of multicolored hair pieces. Willis’…
You can’t exactly call Alien Resurrection a pleasurable experience, but, then again, you wouldn’t say that about its predecessors, either. Directed by the Frenchman Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who previously co-directed with Marc Caro Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, this fourth installment in the Alien onslaught is once again designed…
First, The Heiress was unofficially remade as Washington Square, then Ace in the Hole as Mad City, and The Day of the Jackal as The Jackal. But now we get The Absent-Minded Professor, all dressed up in new threads, as Flubber. In this frenzy of plundering the past, is nothing…
In John Berendt’s beguiling travel-cum-true-crime book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the people of Savannah, Georgia, (in Berendt’s words) “flourished like hothouse plants tended by an indulgent gardener. The ordinary became extraordinary. Eccentrics thrived. Every nuance and quirk of personality achieved greater brilliance in that lush enclosure…
Weed is a documentary chronicle of the “8th Annual Cannabis Cup & Hemp Expo,” a competition among the marijuana coffee houses in that fabled civil-libertarian utopia known as Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Thousands of potheads from all around the world–but mostly Americans–pay a small fee for the privilege of sampling the…
Ignorance is bliss and success and virtue. The spoils of life go not to the planners but to those who are too dim to know the risks they’re taking. That very American notion was the theme of Forrest Gump; less cosmically–but also much less pretentiously–it’s the gag engine behind the…
Disney Studios has nearly monopolized feature animation for almost 60 years now, only occasionally encountering successful forays by others into its animation realm. Now Twentieth Century Fox and its Phoenix-based Fox Animation studios are going up against the giant mouse with Anastasia; too bad this first effort isn’t better. During…
John Grisham’s The Rainmaker lulls you into the mindset you get while reading a best seller at the beach. What a sad thing to say about a Francis Ford Coppola movie! Rather than heighten your awareness the way The Conversation or The Godfather did, The Rainmaker makes you feel lazy…
Put brutally, the marvelous The Wings of the Dove is the story of a romantic frame-up that backfires. Thankfully, nothing is put brutally in this smart, lyrical movie. Director Iain Softley and screenwriter Hossein Amini cut to the thick of Henry James’ masterpiece about amorous extortion and moral purification. Helena…
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control sounds like an old exploitation title, but it belongs to the latest of the idiosyncratic documentaries of Errol Morris. This one interweaves interviews with four men of peculiar occupation, linked only by their study of animal form and function. Dave Hoover trains big cats…
Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee has carved out a niche as our leading director of comedies of manners. His first three films–Pushing Hands (1992), The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)–combined humor with pathos to shed light on modern Chinese and Chinese-American family conflicts. The news that he…
Family films are often pitched for “the child in us all,” but Bean doesn’t have an ounce of “inner child” in it. It’s been worked out to appeal to, at best, 8-to-10-year-olds; there’s not much to delight even precocious preteens, let alone adults. This really is too bad, since Rowan…
In Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, based on the late Robert Heinlein’s 1959 sci-fi opus, the killer arachnids upstage the humans. Not that it’s much of a contest, since the humans are all raging dullards. We’ve seen these young men and women with their square jaws and pert noses emoting their…
Mad City, a descendant of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, may irritate orthodox movie buffs. In the Wilder classic, Kirk Douglas’ supremely cynical newspaper reporter turns the rescue of a cave-in victim into “the big carnival” (the film’s alternate title). The protagonist of Mad City, a TV reporter (Dustin…
Three Halloweens ago, Tempe’s Valley Art Theatre hosted a screening of Universal’s 1925 horror classic The Phantom of the Opera, with live-organ accompaniment. On the night before Halloween this year, the admirable experiment is being repeated on a grander scale. Organist Rob Richards, who played the Valley Art show on…
Despite Red Corner’s muckraking pretensions, it is a rickety throwback to escapist adventures that featured beautiful foreign idealists spouting high-flown hooey to fighting Americans. The heroine, a scrappy Beijing defense lawyer, ends up whispering a whole succession of sweet somethings to the hero, a framed Yank. The banalities include (I…
Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights opens with a sinuous, breathlessly extended tracking shot that swoops us into a San Fernando Valley disco and then does a curlicue around a succession of faces. Popping out like jack-o’-lanterns in the discotheque’s low light, they have the look of trashy royalty–exalted and…
