To hear Spike Lee tell it, Summer of Sam means to be a panoramic view of the summer of 1977 in New York City–when temperatures shot into the high 90s and power blackouts set nerves on edge, when the party agenda included snorting coke at Studio 54 and copulating with…
The animated TV show South Park was the big sensation of the 1997-98 season–or at least as big a hit as a cable channel like Comedy Central can manage. It was almost inevitable that creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone would take their batch of foul-mouthed 8-year-olds to the big…
It won’t take long for anyone familiar with the original Wild Wild West from television to notice that something is not right with the listless new Barry Sonnenfeld-directed film version. Yes, the film features Will Smith in the role of James West, and Kevin Kline as his cerebral sidekick Artemus…
Woe to the scribbler who presumes to rewrite a master–unless he is so deft that his invasion of privacy produces something new and exciting. Enter British writer/director Oliver Parker. He has the nerve to meddle with Oscar Wilde’s sublime farce An Ideal Husband and the skill to pull it off…
Joy isn’t a word that often comes to mind when thinking about the films of director Wim Wenders. But infectious, intoxicating joy is the emotion conveyed by every frame of this ravishing, exuberant documentary. Buena Vista Social Club is not only the German filmmaker’s most engaging, soulful film since Wings…
In John Sayles’ Limbo, which is set amid rough-and-tumble southeast Alaska, an ex-salmon fisherman with guilty memories (David Strathairn), an itinerant lounge singer with a lousy voice (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and the singer’s melancholy teenage daughter (newcomer Vanessa Martinez) become stranded, Robinson Crusoe-style, on a remote island. This thrown-together family…
The new Adam Sandler comedy, Big Daddy, isn’t just the funniest movie of the summer; it’s also the most improbable feel-good movie of the season. It’s improbable because practically everything about Adam Sandler seems so unlikely, so strangely back-assward. His whole phenomenal career–from Billy Madison to Happy Gilmore, from The…
Simon West, the director of the new thriller starring John Travolta and Madeleine Stowe, likes the kind of close-ups that bore into an actor’s face, exposing every clogged pore and mascara smudge. In The General’s Daughter, his camera also tracks in to capture the thick layer of sweat coating the…
Twice Upon a Yesterday seems almost too geared for the Sliding Doors crowd. By relying on the same kind of conceptual sleight-of-hand as that recent Brit hit (which owed a giant debt of its own to Groundhog Day), this romantic fable’s sense of originality and wit is greatly diminished. Although…
Disney departed from its usual practice of basing its big animated features on classic literature or myth when it made what has proved to be one of the studio’s most popular films ever, The Lion King. Yet, just barely beneath its surface, that film had a streak of xenophobia carried…
Anthology films are an odd-duck genre: While there once was a time–long gone–when books of short stories were published with nearly the frequency of novels, their cinematic equivalent has never amounted to even 1 percent of the fictional films released. You could argue that Pulp Fiction counts as an anthology,…
It has not been lost on the Quinn brothers–actor Aidan, cinematographer Declan, and writer/director Paul–that in old Gaelic culture the tribal bard, or storyteller, was held in the highest esteem. The Quinns want to be Irish storytellers, too, and to that end they have loaded up This Is My Father,…
In an early scene in Instinct, released by Disney’s Buena Vista Films, we’re told that a brilliant primatologist named Ethan Powell (played by Anthony Hopkins) is being brought back to the United States from Rwanda, where for several years he has been engaged in a close study of mountain gorillas…
Bernardo Bertolucci’s Besieged is a movie of enthralling visual poetry. Set almost entirely inside a ravishing Roman villa, it is a love story played out in furtive glances and stolen looks by characters on opposite sides of the ethnic divide. Culturally, Mr. Kinsky (David Thewlis) and Shandurai (Thandie Newton) couldn’t…
A fine line divides inspired silliness from out-and-out witlessness; it’s a short leap from grin to groan. In 1997’s Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Mike Myers took a thin premise–spoof the ’60s by transplanting a horny Matt Helm-like secret agent into the ’90s–and danced an unsteady watusi along that…
Deja vu is usually a sign of love at first sight. Says who? Says the heroine of The Thirteenth Floor to the hero that she’s on the verge of kissing. Though they’ve just met a scene or two earlier, they both feel they’ve seen each other before. That maxim about…
The peerless Ethiopian distance runner Haile Gebrselassie is a tiny man–5-foot-3 and barely 115 pounds–but in his native country, his heroism looms large. Since 1994 he has set 15 world records at five different distances, and at the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, he outdueled a trio of favored…
David Mamet, famous for his in-your-face characters, brutal and frequently raunchy dialogue and deliberate, staccato prose, would seem an unlikely choice to write and direct a screen adaptation of British playwright Terence Rattigan’s genteel drama about injustice. But the Pulitzer Prize-winning Mamet (for Glengarry Glen Ross), whose body of work…
The Love Letter has the dubious distinction of being the other studio film to open this past week. In a week when all the other majors have run for cover, DreamWorks has taken a gamble with a classic bit of counterprogramming–in nearly every way, this sweet romance/romantic comedy is the…
Maybe it’s the damned blinking thing, because it’s not simply the foppish hair and boyish face–or, for that matter, even the vaguely befuddled reticence and wry, self-abasing demeanor we Americans prefer to see in our Brits. It’s got to be the blinking. That’s what he does, almost all he does,…
If your poodle is decked out in the complete Captain Kirk uniform, you’ve taken Klingon language classes, or you once mailed DeForest Kelley a joint taped to a piece of cardboard just “to return the favor,” the 86-minute documentary called Trekkies is must viewing–love it or loathe it. In the…
Nearly a quarter of a century after the fall of Saigon, only a small film industry has managed to grow on Vietnam’s war-scarred soil. And what has emerged is rarely seen outside of local cinemas. If ever there was a country that needed to seize back control of its cinematic…
