The 1990-’95 run of Saturday Night Live, when the show was a playground populated by the likes of Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, Dana Carvey, Chris Rock, Chris Farley, Kevin Nealon, Mike Myers and David Spade, was a low point in a show with a longer history of making you groan…
As one who assesses creative works, you try to separate the individual artist from the output they produce. Watching Bedtime for Bonzo, you don’t want to think about Reaganomics. Viewing The Pianist tends to produce thoughts of the Holocaust, not of drugged and raped girls. Going back a little further,…
The last thing the Roman Catholic Church needs at this point is another exposé of its misdeeds. The shock of the pedophilia scandals and of the official cover-ups isn’t going away anytime soon, and when last we looked the former bishop of the Phoenix Diocese was out on $45,000 bail…
Harvey Pekar, star of a long-running comic-book series he writes and others illustrate, is reminded early in American Splendor that he’s no superhero. It’s Halloween, and the 11-year-old Harvey, played by a bent-over, sneering Daniel Tay, stands on a stoop seeking tricks and treats from a woman who recognizes the…
Maverick Russian director Alexander Rogozhkin hit upon a clever idea for his idiosyncratic anti-war fable The Cuckoo (Kukushka in Russian). The three main characters, marooned together on a remote reindeer farm in northernmost Scandinavia, all speak different languages. The Russian speaks and understands only Russian, the Finn knows only Finnish,…
If, in keeping with current fads, you seek movies featuring females kicking a bunch of ass, your appetite will be tended (and cultivated) at the multiplex all summer long. Wander into your local art house, however, and you may find a fine if somewhat challenging import called The Legend of…
The praising of Hollywood summertime cinema is the pastime of pale critics who, come late July, start to wonder what the strange yellow orb is hanging in the sky. Hence the gallons of kind ink spilled over the season’s sequels, which shipped spoiled but were guzzled nonetheless by parched writers…
It’s a great pleasure to behold a chunk of art that’s both dank and fresh at the same time, and this appraisal perfectly fits the superb Dirty Pretty Things. The latest from veteran director Stephen Frears (Gumshoe, Prick Up Your Ears, High Fidelity) immediately transports the viewer to a subjective…
Kevin Costner appeared in his first Western when he was 30 and looked to be in his early 20s. He was a slender, restless actor in Lawrence Kasdan’s Silverado, the 1985 film in which Costner played the blithe brother of a somber Scott Glenn — all giggles and gunshots, a…
Ah, Paris — City of Light, of Love, of Liver Damage and Lung Cancer. C’est formidable, non? Who in need of a posh vacation would turn down the opportunity to luxuriate in its finest hotels, to stuff oneself with sumptuous snails, and to work on a terribly flat romantic drama…
There’s magic in Northfork — both in the movie, by twin brothers Mark and Michael Polish, and in the Montana town soon to be drowned by the opening of the dam keeping the baptismal waters at bay. Northfork is a beguiling and bittersweet fantasy set in a netherworld where the…
Not to worry. Whenever summer machismo levels threaten to fall below mad-dog range, Hollywood invariably steps in to restore the status quo. Witness S.W.A.T. , a thoroughly unremarkable police action movie starring the magnetic Samuel L. Jackson as L.A.P.D. Sergeant Dan “Hondo” Harrelson, known affectionately to his men as “the…
For a few minutes, at least, things don’t look so bad. Watching Ben Affleck swagger around as the thuggish title character of Gigli (“Rhymes with really,” he tells us, twice) is amusing for a bit. Affleck’s eminently qualified for the role, actually — that of a low-level hood pretending to…
The heist-film genre, especially in recent years, practices the most blatant brand of cinematic swindle. It’s built upon little more than pilfered plots and purloined characters, and the closer we inspect the goods, the more we discover that the diamonds are phony, the bills counterfeit, the treasure utterly worthless. Who…
We seem to have touched a nerve a few weeks back by making reference to a theater full of leather-clad bikers. Our guest for the evening, comedian Jimmy Danelli, casually joked about the “Hell’s Angels” in the audience, which elicited some angry letters from biker types who felt slighted. So…
The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald asserted that “There are no second acts in American lives.” But a horse named Seabiscuit and the three disparate men who shared his success would surely disagree. Based on the best-selling nonfiction book by Laura Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit recounts the true story of an unprepossessing, knobby-kneed…
“Simon must propose to me now,” exclaims pretty, simpleminded Rose (Rose Byrne), “before he meets somebody else or gets to know me better!” Welcome to the none-too-subtly-named Mortmain family, wherein foundering patriarch James (Bill Nighy) — for all symbolic definitions a dead writer — has been allowing his prolonged delusions…
I purposely avoided reading anything about Capturing the Friedmans until seeing the film, which has been no easy task. Andrew Jarecki’s documentary, about a Great Neck, New York, family torn asunder in the late 1980s by allegations of kiddy-porn possession and the horrific sexual abuse of numerous children, has been…
There’s something to be said for a movie that’s honest enough to transcribe dialogue that must have emanated from the director’s mouth, and make it part of the script. “Everybody start shooting at somebody!” yells Detective Mike Lowery (Will Smith) in the midst of a particular situation. Earlier, he gives…
The title Morvern Callar may sound like an Edward Gorey book or a job designation for telephone solicitors, but it’s actually a name — pronounced (roughly) “Mawvin Calla” (like the lily). Although some sources claim that “morvern callar” is Scots for “quieter silence,” the words don’t show up in online…
French director François Ozon doesn’t like to repeat himself. His last film, 8 Women, was a theatrical, rather campy piece of fluff starring la crème de la crème of contemporary Gallic actresses. Before that came Under the Sand, an unsettling drama about a woman (Charlotte Rampling, giving perhaps her finest…
