Arts & Culture

After the focused ugliness of Short Cuts, the casual, audience-contemptuous sloppiness of Robert Altman’s Ready to Wear (Pret-a-Porter) was a relief. It wasn’t a very good film, but at least Altman hadn’t stooped to indicting the fashion game–it was possible to enjoy his enjoyment of the subject’s naked absurdity, its…

Regarding last week’s announcement that Meteorite ALH84001 may have been crawling with Martian germs: What’s the big deal? Science may consider this the first sign of Martian life, but we moviegoers have always known that Mars was a jumpin’ place, teeming with everything from snarling monsters to Ruritanian civilizations of…

A perky little armadillo bustles around under the titles of Ron Shelton’s Tin Cup, snout out, tail high. After a while, it becomes clear that this creature is supposed to represent Kevin Costner’s character, Roy “Tin Cup” McAvoy. Of the two, it’s the armadillo who’d have grounds to take offense…

In Maybe . . . Maybe Not, a character mentions that he’s going to a Men’s Movement discussion group. “Oh, that’s so ’70s,” says another, and while the first guy concurs, he observes that such things are coming back into vogue. Apparently, a number of other things from the ’70s…

With the exception of Mansfield Park and a few minor or unfinished works, all of Jane Austen’s fiction has been adapted either for movies or for television within the past two years or so. Though almost two centuries have passed since she’s written anything new, Austen’s novel-to-film ratio is right…

Who saw Old Yeller? Who cried when Old Yeller got shot at the end? Nobody cried when Old Yeller got shot? I’m sure! I cried my eyes out . . . –Bill Murray, Stripes The title canine of Disney’s Old Yeller saves young Tommy Kirk from wild pigs, and catches…

“Breathtaking” is one of the most overworked words in the critical lexicon, but make no mistake–the Jackie Chan vehicle Supercop is breathtaking. A dubbed and very slightly reedited version of a film I saw three years ago under the title Supercop (Police Story 3), this light-footed action comedy from Hong…

Cape Fear–De Niro poisons pooch Cujo–St. Bernard catches rabies, terrorizes people, dies gruesomely Dances With Wolves–Dog killed by evil Pawnee; wolf Two Socks killed by evil white soldiers Desperate Living–Dog run over by lesbians on crime spree Eye for an Eye–Dog doused with hot coffee by Kiefer Sutherland A Fish…

Movies about junkies certainly don’t exact the same toll from their audiences that actual junkies do from the people who care about them, but their techniques are often the same. Junkies can frequently be charming; so can junkie movies. Junkies elicit one’s pity, sometimes calculatingly; so do junkie movies. Junkies…

Farce often operates best with the sword of horror hanging over its head, and horror can chill more deeply when spiked generously with humor. Martin and Lewis and Hope and Crosby and the Dead End Kids all braved haunted houses; half of the monsters on the Universal lot played straight…

With the exception, maybe, of Oliver Stone, no current American director is as adept at staging battle scenes as Edward Zwick–the engagements in his Glory had a speed and terror that could make you gasp. Battle scenes also figure importantly in Zwick’s new film, Courage Under Fire, the first major…

John Sayles rushes in where other straight white males fear to tread. He’s written screenplays set everywhere from Secaucus to Harlem to Ireland to Depression-era West Virginia to Louisiana to, with the current Lone Star, a border town in Texas. And that’s just in his pet projects–his hackwork for other…