John Singleton’s new film, Rosewood, chronicles a shocking and little-known incident in the history of American racism–the destruction of the title village and massacre of many of its black residents by a white mob. A moderately prosperous hamlet in the pine forests of western Florida, Rosewood came under attack in…
Irvin Kershner’s The Empire Strikes Back, the continuation of George Lucas’ Star Wars, is a classic fantasy in its own right. I vastly prefer it to the first film. Its textures are richer, its emotions deeper, and it’s an honest-to-Jedi movie–not a dozen jammed-together entries of a serial. On its…
An impressive directorial debut from writer-actor Billy Bob Thornton (who co-wrote and starred in One False Move), Sling Blade is the stark, enveloping tale of Karl, a dimwitted killer released after 25 years in an Arkansas asylum for murdering his mother and her lover. Thornton plays Karl with a guttural…
In Absolute Power, Clint Eastwood plays Luther Whitney, a master thief who burgles on little cat feet. He’s as stealthy as the Pink Panther pilferer, though not nearly as amusing. Luther, you see, is presented to us as an artist. We first see him at the National Gallery dutifully copying…
Elmore Leonard’s Touch is identified on the paperback as a mystery and carried in stores next to Leonard’s celebrated crime novels (like Get Shorty). But this wan little book is actually the problem child of Leonard’s oeuvre. It’s about a former Franciscan monk named Juvenal (played in the film by…
On the run from a professional assassin in Shadow Conspiracy, Washington, D.C., insider Charlie Sheen stops to make a furtive cell-phone call right in front of the Lincoln Memorial–out in the open, in front of God and Honest Abe and everyone. It’s a brilliant tactical move, since the Lincoln Memorial…
At a 20-year remove, George Lucas’ Star Wars comes off less as the work of a wizard than as the weird obsessional by-product of an eccentric American primitive. If you’re not a Star Wars fanatic, and you re-see this movie now varnished to a sheen in its self-consciously spiffy new…
You can bet that at one point or another, some executive wanted the title of this long-awaited nonsequel to A Fish Called Wanda to be A Lemur Called Rollo (for the story does include such a character). While the latter wouldn’t have been the most commercial of titles, neither is…
As with The Crow a few years back, a grim, real-life shadow hangs over Gridlock’d that’s hard to ignore while watching it. Both films are swan songs for stars who died too young and left beautiful corpses: Brandon Lee in the former, and Tupac Shakur in the latter (although Shakur…
The first movie Hamlet was played by a woman–Sarah Bernhardt, in a 1900 short of the duel scene. Plainly, Hamlet has been as open to interpretation in the cinema as it has been in the theater. Of the dozens of film versions, ranging from cross-dressing intrigues to psychological case studies…
In Mother, Albert Brooks plays John Henderson, a science-fiction novelist recently divorced from his second wife who decides he can’t risk another relationship until he comes to terms with his mother. So he does the logical thing: He moves in with her. He hauls out of her garage all his…
Playwright Herb Gardner managed to immortalize retirement-age concerns on the American stage with his 1986 Tony Award-winning I’m Not Rappaport, and now his film version–which he also directed–comes along to try to reclaim geriatric humor from the Grumpy Old Men gang. Of course, one of those grumpy old men, Walter…
Hamlet (Kenneth Branagh) is Prince of Denmark. After his father (Brian Blessed) dies, his uncle Claudius (Derek Jacobi) takes the throne and marries Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude (Julie Christie). When the late king’s ghost reveals he was murdered by Claudius, Hamlet must decide which course of action to take. Meanwhile, he…
It could have been any town in America, and it often was: Athens, Georgia; Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Minneapolis; Austin, Texas. Seattle was just another stop on the A&R Express, another destination where the gold-card crowd could run up their expense accounts while they looked for the Next Big Thing…
World governments may topple, stock markets may soar and crash, deadly viruses may mantle the globe, but one constant remains: Woody Allen still hankers for a Cole Porterized New York. You have to be a deep-dish romantic, or else a blinkered snoot–or maybe both–to persist in such a demonstration. We…
For people who grow up loving movies, returning to old favorites can be as jarring and illuminating as blowing the dust off a family photo album. Even if our judgments about the films are identical the second time around, our emotional reactions, if we’ve grown at all, change or deepen…
When an incredulous Jane Campion fan asked what I hated about her version of Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, I immediately responded, “Everything.” Actually, I thought Barbara Hershey, as the subtle villainess, Madame Merle, made a good first impression: I laughed appreciatively when the heroine, Isabel Archer (Nicole…
The People vs. Larry Flynt is a Hollywood rags-to-riches success story with a twist. The inheritor of the American dream is a pornographer who admits to losing his virginity at 11 to a chicken and is known for saying things such as, “A woman’s vagina has as much personality as…
Robert E. Howard created the sword-and-sorcery genre with his Conan stories. The subject of Dan Ireland’s wonderful debut film The Whole Wide World, Howard had a grand yet coarse-grained consciousness. The Conan stories, set in a fictitious, primordial age full of demons and killers, boasted swift, cartoon-flavored action (“He moved…
Terry George, the director and co-writer (with Jim Sheridan) of Some Mother’s Son, has more complicated feelings about Northern Ireland than he can express coherently. They explode in penetrating shards of action and rhetoric from both the gutter and the pulpit. The story of an imprisoned IRA group known as…
A famous movie composer once told me a joke: Two songwriters are sitting around, and one of them says to the other, “I just saw the most amazing thing. A man fell off the roof of a building, hit a ledge, fell to the street, got winged by a bus…
My first impulse in considering the top movies of 1996 was to dispense with the new stuff altogether and go for the revival gold. The best films of 1996 were the rereleased restorations: Vertigo and Taxi Driver. The movie business has finally figured out how to turn out new classics–just…
