“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” Kurt Vonnegut claimed that this was the moral of his novel Mother Night. As it happens, he was specifically referring to Nazis–the hero of that short book was an American-born resident of Germany…
“I hope it’s better than The Truman Show,” said the woman in line behind me at the publicized “sneak preview” of EDtv. Afterward, a man in my row declared, “That was a lot better than The Truman Show.” Pretentious high-concept films like The Truman Show often garner accolades and let…
Ginger and Fred. Shirley Temple and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds. To the list of unforgettable movie dance partnerships, we may now add Omar Epps, the trim, handsome young man who stars as one third of The Mod Squad, and Michael Lerner, the heavyset middle-aged actor who…
Imagine a bunch of kids watching the classic 1956 film musical The King and I on television, then going outside and spending the rest of the afternoon acting it out in the backyard. Apart from a lack of hired-gun Broadway voices performing the songs, their re-creation might not be too…
In the three decades that director Ken Loach has been a steadfast champion of the British working class, his films have lost none of their sting. Whether examining a brutal Belfast police incident in Hidden Agenda (1990) or the plight of an unemployed man struggling to buy his daughter a…
Immodesty becomes Guy Ritchie, the British writer-director who makes a jovial debut on a Jovian scale in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. In this wayward gangster comedy set in London’s East End, Ritchie cooks up a gleefully improbable tale out of mismatched ingredients–a rigged card game, a hydroponics marijuana…
At the movies, the fun-loving temptress has been liberating the buttoned-up clod ever since Katharine Hepburn’s leopard made off with Cary Grant’s dinosaur bone in Bringing Up Baby, 61 years ago. Maybe even longer, if you count pioneer vamp Theda Bara’s effect on a long succession of speechless men. In…
There’s no faulting Tango where technique is concerned. This collaboration between the Spanish writer-director Carlos Saura, the great Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and the Argentine composer Lalo Schifrin is a dazzling fusion of color and composition, movement and music. There’s some strong acting, too. But the film, reputedly the most…
The Deep End of the Ocean starts out as a maternal horror movie and ends up as a family therapy session. Michelle Pfeiffer plays the photographer wife of a restaurateur (Treat Williams) and mother of two sons and an infant daughter. While checking into a jammed hotel for her 15th…
For Cruel Intentions, his directorial debut, writer Roger Kumble has come up with the clever idea of updating Choderlos de Laclos’ durable 18th-century novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons). With its focus on totally amoral protagonists who use sex as a tool to manipulate innocents, often just for the hell…
Director Garry Marshall (Pretty Woman, Beaches) has always tended toward unrealistically feel-good movies, and The Other Sister is no exception. Billed as “a love story for the romantically challenged,” it concerns a mentally challenged young woman, Carla (Juliette Lewis), struggling for independence from her overprotective mother (Diane Keaton). With the…
When hit men wore hats, and Cadillacs had running boards, the average Mafia don could knock off the Tattaglia brothers in mid-afternoon and sit down to a nice plate of chicken cacciatore that evening, content that he’d seen to the family business and blazed a path for his first-born son’s…
“Honey,” Ellen Burstyn’s character in The Last Picture Show remarks to her daughter, “everything gets old if you do it often enough.” The specific activity she had in mind was sex, but the maxim applies at least as appropriately to genre conventions in movies, which even the casual moviegoer can…
The independent production/distribution company The Shooting Gallery probably got a lot more attention when Monica Lewinsky showed up in Washington, D.C., wearing a cap with its logo than it is likely to from the release of The 24 Hour Woman, a modest, deserving film from writer/director Nancy Savoca. Savoca has…
Under the opening titles of 200 Cigarettes, we hear Bow Wow Wow’s near-peerless bubblegum anthem “I Want Candy.” The movie that follows seems designed to satisfy that craving–it’s sweet, tart, brightly colored, insubstantial and utterly lacking in nutritional value. It’s also fun to consume, and harmless enough as long as…
What’s entertaining about October Sky is the unlikely-but-true spectacle of backwater West Virginia teens teaching themselves rocket science in the Eisenhower Fifties. They progress from a glorified cherry bomb to sophisticated missiles through trial-and-error-and-error. Their inner rocket fuel is the desire to avoid getting stuck in the dying coal industry…
Plot is a central problem in both Jawbreaker and Office Space, two comedies opening this week: The first has too much; and the second (and far better of the two movies) has too little. Jawbreaker’s 26-year-old writer/director Darren Stein says he wanted to make an homage to the films he…
In the archetypal dead-end town of Lawford, New Hampshire, cold-eyed men looking for trouble prowl the streets in four-by-fours with chrome spotlights and loaded gun racks. The gloomy barrooms are not gathering places so much as solitary confinement cells, and the most popular local sport is macho posturing. In wintry…
For better or worse, the father figure in Larry Clark’s ironically titled Another Day in Paradise turns out to be Mel, a foul-mouthed, 40-year-old junkie wearing a devil-red tennis shirt. His notion of good counsel is showing his surrogate son how to disable the burglar alarm at a medical clinic…
In Hungary, the Holocaust lasted only for a year. But the word only is deceptive in this context. The Nazis, who entered the country in March of 1944, had been in the genocide business for a few years by then, and they’d gotten good at it. They were efficient, and…
Short of nuclear holocaust, a major sale at Kmart, or a confirmed Clint Eastwood sighting back in rural Iowa, there’s probably no way to keep the movie version of Message in a Bottle from overwhelming the tender emotions of the hearts-and-flowers crowd. After all, this relentless assault on the tear…
“When I was in film school, I was the guy who was gonna resurrect screwball comedy,” says filmmaker James Moll. It was an odd ambition for the man who would go on to make his feature directorial debut with The Last Days, a documentary about five Jewish survivors of the…
