With movie adaptations of John Grisham potboilers, the third time has proved the charm. The Firm was limp, and The Pelican Brief wasn’t brief enough. The Client is nothing remotely special, just a routine legal melodrama with some major improbabilities flopping around in it. But director Joel Schumacher, abetted by…
At the beginning of Forrest Gump, a tiny white feather flits in the breeze above Savannah, Georgia. As the credits end, the feather comes to rest on the ground, between the sneaker-shod feet of the title character, who’s waiting at a bus stop. This sequence illustrates the theme of the…
The beauty of This Is Spinal Tap, Rob Reiner’s first and best work as a director, was that it simultaneously zapped the pretensions both of a species of pop music and of a species of cinema. Heavy metal got an affectionate working over from the film, a sham documentary supposedly…
“You either go mad or you learn about metaphors.” Allie Light, who made this remark, has done both. Years after being hospitalized for extreme depression, the San Francisco woman became a filmmaker. Her latest is Dialogues With Madwomen, and in addition to directing this unconventional and touching documentary, she is…
Over at Disney, they’ve been brushing up on their Shakespeare the last few years. Think about it–The Little Mermaid had characters named Ariel and Sebastian, as in The Tempest, and Aladdin had a trouble-making, tale-carrying villain named Iago. Even in the Gallic Beauty and the Beast, the brute Gaston’s toadying…
If there was one legendary figure of the Old West who could unambiguously be called a good guy–and there probably wasn’t–Wyatt Earp is surely not the fellow. This sometime lawman, sometime criminal wasn’t actually despicable, like Billy the Kid (although reports suggest Earp had less charm). He was a person…
I am obliged to consider . . . that the assertion that men are turned into wolves and back to themselves again is false, otherwise we must also believe in all the other things that over so many generations we have discovered to be fabulous. –Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia…
The central character of the Mexican horror movie Cronos is a kindly old man named Jess Gris, the proprietor of a Mexico City curio shop. The luckless Jess finds, amid the dusty bric-a-brac of his shop, a little metal gadget in the shape of a scarab, built by a 16th-century…
Indians in the movies go back about as far as movies themselves. While there’s been enough consciousness-raising in recent decades that only the most naive audience members could still believe that the movie Indians–both noble and savage–we’ve all been brought up on are accurate reflections of real Native Americans, the…
Nonthreatening gentleness and prettiness have made Keanu Reeves a teen heartthrob, and the hint of exoticism in his looks has made him a figure of glamour for some adults, as well. If he were a sizzling good actor, he’d have the world at his feet. But alas, poor fellow, he…
“That Fred Flintstone–what an actor!” enthuses a morgue attendant in the Ron Howard comedy Night Shift. I’ve never particularly agreed. Although I dutifully watched, as a kid, Hanna-Barbera’s endlessly rerun cartoon series, which turned humankind’s prehistoric past into a 50s-style, suburban tract-house wonderland, I found it unsophisticated even then–my cartoon…
It isn’t often that I show any prescience, but I had a rare burst a couple of years ago, when I reviewed House Party 2, a Kid N Play vehicle. It was a mostly lousy little picture, and I said so, but I mentioned a grinning, rubber-faced kid named Martin…
Almost everyone who’s at all interested in show business knows that Brandon Lee, the star of The Crow, was killed last year in a shooting accident on the set of that film. It’s hard to imagine a movie worth dying for–The Crow certainly isn’t, striking though much of it is–but…
Uma Thurman’s distinctive physical traits–uncommon beauty and gangliness–uniquely suit her to the role of Sissy Hankshaw, the heroine of Gus Van Sant’s new film, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, adapted by Van Sant from Tom Robbins’ enduring late-hippie-era novel of 1976. Sissy’s distinctive physical traits–her beauty and her abnormally long…
After the rigors of his last film, Malcolm X, director Spike Lee apparently decided to try something in a slightly lighter vein. The change suits him. His latest, an easygoing, nostalgic comedy titled Crooklyn, lacks the flashy, daring visual rhetoric that has characterized Lee’s past work. But it also lacks…
After Roman Polanski’s last film as director, a halfhearted, soddenly wistful attempt at a romantic thriller called Frantic, his new film Bitter Moon is most encouraging, because it’s heartless and nasty. Polanski will probably never recapture the innovative subtleties of his early works, like Knife in the Water and Cul-De-Sac…
“Making a movie is about as close as a man comes to having a baby.” Paul Rodriguez expounds on this thought. “First, you have to sleep with somebody to conceive it. “Then you go through your morning sickness; then, when that puppy’s shot, when it’s born, you go through your…
Given a minimum of competence, there’s virtually no way that a film of Emile Zola’s novel Germinal could be a complete failure. The subject matter is too inherently powerful and Zola’s dramatizing of it too inherently skillful and impassioned. The trouble is, whatever the level of competence, there’s also little…
After a long film-festival drought, the Valley seems to be on the verge of a deluge. Although shaky promotional resources resulted in a disappointing turnout for last fall’s First Annual Equinox film festival at Herberger Theater Center, its producers have gamely promised a second annual effort this fall, at a…
The prologue of Suture, which also serves as its trailer, is chilling and teasingly elliptical. A man awakens in the middle of the night to hear someone sneaking into the house. He retreats to the bathroom, where he huddles in the tub with a shotgun, waiting for the intruder, who…
Urinating and making love and missing your family, struggling to survive and losing your courage at the crucial moment, eating chickens and trying to read the future in their livers–these things are what writer-director Bill Forsyth’s new movie, appropriately titled Being Human, is about. This ultimately unsuccessful but sometimes thrilling…
Jack, the 15-year-old hero of Andrew Birkin’s The Cement Garden, lives with his brother and two sisters in a bleak little house in an English suburb that gives new meaning to the word “godforsaken.” He rarely bathes or changes clothes, and his most frequent recreational activity is masturbating while looking…
