The exhilarating, bird-flipping British film Brassed Off is about the systematic destruction of the coal-mining industry in northern England by the Thatcher government in the last decade. It’s set in the fictitious Yorkshire town of Grimley, where a profitable pit is on the verge of closure. Though there is still…
It’s not completely fair to say that the string of hits produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer from 1983 through 1996 are stylistically interchangeable. But it’s not too far off: A homogeneous, auteurial touch runs from Flashdance (1983) through Top Gun (1986), Beverly Hills Cop II (1987) and Days…
It lasted a mere four seasons, but thirtysomething lives on. Its legacy began the moment the show went off the air in 1991: The yuppie-angst fantasy created by Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick continues to spawn even now, its children looking almost exactly like the parents. First came My So-Called…
The production notes for Female Perversions could make one think that the film’s title was meant to attract the psychology-grad-student audience. This story of a high-powered lawyer struggling with her sexual confusions is a dramatization of a nonfiction psych study, Dr. Louise Kaplan’s Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary…
Filmmakers and audiences have been captivated by the idea of dinosaurs since the primeval days of the cinema. Not until Jurassic Park four years ago, however, have the movies made truly convincing dinosaurs. Which is not to say that film dinosaurs prior to Park and to its current sequel, The…
Not only is The Lost World: Jurassic Park the sequel to the most popular movie ever made, but it is also the first film Steven Spielberg has directed since 1993’s Schindler’s List. He has finally won his Oscar and achieved Great Artist status in Hollywood’s pantheon of the Righteous, but…
The Substance of Fire ought to be one of the major critical favorites of 1997. It won’t be, but is worth seeking out while it lingers in town. It’s an adaptation of the acclaimed drama by Jon Robin Baitz about Jewish guilt and familial war. Baitz was 26 when he…
On the festival tour that helped the necrophiliac Kissed net prerelease praise everywhere from the Atlantic Monthly to Newsweek, writer-director Lynne Stopkewich said she thought independent films should be judged by their ingenuity and daring rather than by the size of their budgets. As arts-world stump speeches go, it’s a…
Sidney Lumet has had enough ups and downs in his long, prolific career that it’s never safe to count him out . . . even after two disappointing films in a row, A Stranger Among Us (1992) and Guilty as Sin (1993). Even the greatest directors frequently falter in their…
Okay, metaphor buffs: An “albino alligator” is what the other alligators in a group send out as a sacrificial lamb. Members of a second group of ‘gators attack the albino, and the first group violently finishes off its competition. Once this is explained in the movie Albino Alligator, you know…
In Children of the Revolution, Judy Davis plays Joan Fraser, an Aussie communist who sleeps with Joseph Stalin–their tryst kills him–and, unbeknown to anyone, has his child. Davis takes her character through almost 40 years of agitprop hellfire, and she has scaled her performance big. The movie, however, is rather…
In The Fifth Element, the all-knowing, all-powerful Supreme Being of the Universe turns out to be Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), an orange-haired babe in a skimpy, Band-Aid-thin mod outfit who speaks in a kind of Slavic scat and cries a lot. It’s as if the filmmakers started out to make a…
You and I both may have complex feelings about reproductive rights, but the lucky folks to the right and left of us don’t–they’re blessed with absolute, black-and-white knowledge. The movies, with few exceptions, have steered clear of this debate, for the same reason that many of us tend to avoid…
For the fourth time in as many years, Arizona Film Society presents the Saguaro Film Festival. As in previous years, this year’s selections are a mixed bag, but a rewarding one–along with the usual batch of slackers-trying-to-get-laid comedies, there are such real gems as an enchanting, imaginative riff on the…
New-to-movies subjects are hard to come by, but Traveller has one: the inbred world of Irish grifters living in the backwoods of the American rural South. Clannish con artists descended from Irish tinkers, they fan out across the countryside pulling bogus home-repair jobs on unsuspecting, mostly elderly folk, and rake…
If you’re hankering to see a movie that sends up swinging ’60s London and Carnaby Street and vintage James Bond movies, don’t bother to check out Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. What the movie mostly sends up is its star and screenwriter, Mike Myers. That’s not all bad: Myers…
Volcano is set in Los Angeles, and audiences get high watching the city crash and burn. For L.A. haters, Volcano could prove a peak experience. You don’t even have to hate L.A. to enjoy it–love/hate will do. That’s why the film closes with Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.,” a facetious…
Paradise Road opens inside a posh British club in Singapore, February 1942. Beautiful young women dance with their uniformed sweethearts, while Colonel Blimp types and their wives cluck with amusement at the idea of the short, nearsighted Japanese getting the upper hand against the mighty Brits. Then the bombs start…
Remember this joke? Question: Want to know how you can lose 10 pounds of ugly fat? Answer: Cut off your head. Well, according to the press kit for 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag, the average human head–dead and drained of blood–weighs 4.4 pounds. I can’t imagine the heads of…
Das Boot, the 1981 German nautical spectacular, is now being rereleased as an extended three-and-a-half-hour director’s cut. With an hour of new footage drawn from a six-hour German-TV version, the movie now plays more gracefully and clearly. If 60 more minutes of underwater rocking and rolling from depth charges and…
Kevin Smith is an impassioned jokester. The young writer-director double-whammies the audience by filling in his stick figures with thick brush strokes. His first film, Clerks, was a no-budget goof featuring an entire miniature universe of slacker goons, but its main protagonist was a sweetly jerky, lovelorn convenience-store employee who…
A parked sports car with steamed-up windows rocks from side to side. There’s a lot of sex in That Old Feeling, but that’s about as graphic as it gets–the film is rated PG-13. That was okay with me–I wasn’t panting for a close-up of Dennis Farina and Bette Midler getting…
