A riveting but darkly disturbing thriller, Apt Pupil isn’t easy to sit through. The subject matter proves deeply unsettling, while two brief acts of sadism are so horrifying as to be unwatchable. And yet this brutal film borders on being brilliant. Beautifully structured and edited, with a chilling central performance…
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita still has the power to scare off people. Proof is the book’s new movie adaptation, directed by Adrian Lyne and scripted by Stephen Schiff and starring Jeremy Irons as the passionate pedophile Humbert Humbert, a man entranced by nymphets. Completed more than two years ago, the movie…
Insofar as filmmaker Tony Gatlif’s justly admired “Gypsy trilogy” is an exploration of his roots and a search for his nature–he was born in Algeria to Gypsy parents of Spanish origin, but later educated at Paris’ L’Ecole des Beaux Arts–it comprises one of the most passionate and telling self-examinations in…
The Jonathan Demme-directed Beloved runs nearly three hours, and it’s a long slog. This adaptation of the 1987 Toni Morrison novel bursts with ambition. On one hand, it tries to get inside the fevers of the African-American slave experience, but it also wants to be an epic family saga and…
The hero of The Mighty–the title character, in fact–is an eighth-grader known by the nickname “Freak” (Kieran Culkin). His might isn’t physical–he’s a small, frail boy who suffers from a degenerative birth defect. His spine curves painfully, and he’s able to walk only with crutches and leg braces. But he…
Recently a woman I know in her early 20s–about the same age as Sarah Jacobson, the writer/director of Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore–told me that, though she was well-versed in films ranging from The In-Laws to Pretty in Pink to Tommy Boy, she had been chided by a friend…
The Montreal World Film Festival ran for 10 days through Labor Day, and the Toronto Film Festival picked up a few days later and carried on for another 10. Twin colossi of the Great White North, they each unspooled some 300 movies, and, as in the past three years, I…
The ants in Antz show a lot of personality. The film is the best example yet of how a fully animated computer-generated feature can delineate facial movement. Toy Story (1995), the first such feature to be released, was brasher and more child-friendly, but Antz is more of a–how shall I…
As a professional lamenter of how “they just don’t make ’em like they used to,” I am always thrilled on those rare occasions when someone even tries to make ’em that way. So I am doubly thrilled that, with The Impostors, writer-director Stanley Tucci has tried and richly succeeded. Those…
Have adultery, murder and greed all moved to the sticks? Once firmly rooted in the big city, the seven deadly sins have taken on a distinct country-and-western twang in recent years, thanks to noirish, tough-minded scam fests such as John Dahl’s Red Rock West (1992) and The Last Seduction (1994),…
Back in the early Seventies, when John Waters made his first splash with such low-budget gross-outs as Pink Flamingos and Multiple Maniacs, who would have guessed that someday he’d be making a Hollywood film as benevolent as Pecker? In retrospect, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. If any director has ever…
As a director of action thrillers, John Frankenheimer has been a peerless stylist for nearly four decades–without leaning on a pile of glitzy special effects. What’s more, his most memorable movies, from The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to The Birdman of Alcatraz (also 1962) to 1986’s wickedly entertaining, unappreciated 52 Pick-Up…
One True Thing, directed by Carl Franklin, is trying to be the Terms of Endearment of the Nineties. Scripted by Karen Croner from the 1995 Anna Quindlen novel of the same name, One True Thing pushes the same high-gloss homilies about making peace with your family, and it caps everything…
The title Post Coitum derives, presumably, from the ancient Latin aphorism “post coitum omne animal triste”–every creature is sad after sex. The creature with which this French film concerns itself is Diane, a married, 40ish book editor played by Brigitte RoYan, who also co-wrote and directed. This attractive woman’s midlife…
A leg brace, a debilitating disease, sexual frustration, and Jackie Kennedy hair–breathes there a movie actress anywhere who could resist such fare? They’re as seductive as Richard III’s hump to the stage actor. Joanna Going straps it on–the leg brace, not the hump–and has a ball as the delicate heroine…
Jackie Chan’s American fans–and I include myself among them–have suffered through a nervous 1998 so far. The momentum the star earned with the 1996 release of Rumble in the Bronx has seemed to dissipate steadily: An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, the first American production to employ Chan since…
The heroine of The Governess is a young Jewish woman–a “Jewess,” in the parlance of 1840s London, in which the first scenes of the film are set. I thought that this drama, the feature debut of the young writer-director Sandra Goldbacher, might explore a chapter in Britain’s long, abysmal, and…
Men don’t get it. Moms don’t get it. Sometimes, even your roommate or best friend doesn’t get it. But if you bray and carp and vent long enough, someone will listen, someone will begin to understand the precious particulars of a young woman’s sexuality. Whether they’re interested or not. That’s…
The opening credits of Simon Birch assert that it was “suggested” by John Irving’s popular 1989 novel A Prayer for Owen Meany. Actually, it’s a thin but relatively faithful adaptation of the first few chapters of Irving’s comic ramble through the nature of religious faith, predestination, and heroism. Screenwriter Mark…
Matt Damon, the blond matinee idol, has apparently become Hollywood’s idea of a deep thinker. After playing a math whiz in last year’s Good Will Hunting, he’s now been reinvented as a poker genius in John Dahl’s Rounders. So anybody who had doubts about the second coming of Albert Einstein…
Shane, the teenage hero of Mark Christopher’s 54, wears the petulant expression of a Raphaelite cherub, and he comes complete with a halo of curly blond hair. He’s played by a pretty newcomer with the exotic name of Ryan Phillippe, but there’s nothing exotic about the voice that comes out…
In the pecking order of tragic black musicians, Frankie Lymon can’t hold a votive candle to, say, Charlie Parker or Billie Holiday. But now, like that pair, the late doo-wopper has got his own movie–or, rather, he’s got his own space in a movie that, for better or worse, is…
