In the bluish-green depths of the ocean, we see the deck of a sunken ship. Out of the murk, two pinpoints of light approach–humans, lured to this wreck by irresistible curiosity. It’s the beginning of a James Cameron movie, but it’s not that James Cameron movie. It’s the first shot…
Henry Jaglom’s movies offer everything that Americans hate about French films, but with little of the philosophical depth or visual daring that marks the best French cinema. He also captures the annoying qualities of Woody Allen movies–the self-absorption, the feigned feminism, the pretentiousness–without achieving anything like Allen’s humor and charm…
Slums of Beverly Hills is the first feature by the young writer-director Tamara Jenkins, and it has its mild amusements. One of those movies that gets bonus points for being “personal,” it bops along from episode to episode, as if the filmmaker were discovering her subject as she went along…
The idea of destiny–especially the notion that two people are fated to meet and fall in love–is a load of crap, but a surprising number of people buy into it. Probably for that reason it has proved to be a fairly popular component in movie romances, City of Angels and…
“That is known as the lowest point in my life, because I basically was a human barbell,” says Next Stop Wonderland star Hope Davis of her role in the 1995 remake of Kiss of Death, in which she played Nicolas Cage’s girlfriend. “Big, big hair and really cheesy clothes,” she…
Based on a French film of 1990 called Force Majeure, the unhelpfully titled Return to Paradise aspires to be a morality play, one of those stories that makes you fret about what you would do in the same situation. It also wants to be a belated coming-of-age story, the drama…
Darren Aronofsky’s debut feature, Pi, won the Dramatic Directing Award at Sundance this year, and it’s easy to imagine why. Whatever its faults, and it has more than a few, it is unquestionably different. It at least takes a stab at interpolating cerebral ideas into the format of a thriller…
Jamie Lee Curtis is the most obvious graduate of Slasher U to cross over into big-time stardom–she’s back, in Halloween: H20, for the class reunion. But she’s not alone. Some major, no kidding, Oscar-winning, A-list stars have also matriculated the world of disreputable, low-budget slice-and-dice movies. Here’s a brief compendium:…
The timing couldn’t be better for How Stella Got Her Groove Back. The “dog days” of summer are upon us, and few prospects could be more welcome to asteroid-weary moviegoers than a light romance-comedy that includes a trip to Jamaica as part of the package. Director Kevin Rodney Sullivan may…
The unkillable masked killer in John Carpenter’s slasher-movie prototype Halloween is the most generic of all movie monsters. Even his name–reputedly borrowed from a British film distributor who made an overseas hit out of Carpenter’s early film Assault on Precinct 13–is prosaic: Michael Myers. He’s just a tall, silent stunt…
Vincent Gallo, a left-field character actor whose best work has been in the films of mainstream eccentrics like Emir Kusturica (Arizona Dream), Abel Ferrera (The Funeral) and Alan Taylor (Palookaville), arrives as full-blown auteur with Buffalo 66, the million-dollar art project he directed and co-wrote that made the covers of…
Nicolas Cage has never seemed more dazzling than he does in the new Brian De Palma thriller Snake Eyes. Playing Rick Santoro, a corrupt Atlantic City cop who likes to think he’s “everybody’s friend,” Cage for almost two continuous hours is boogying to his own inner beat. It’s like watching…
In the little Pacific Northwest town of Cradle Bay, troubled, “underachieving” teenagers appear to be an endangered species. One day a kid will be a hoodlum or a pothead or a slut, and the next he or she will have joined the “Blue Ribbon Club,” whose members all have tidy…
Do we really need to see the great Kevin Spacey fuming and fussing in one of those we-do-things-my-way-or-we-don’t-do-them-at-all roles? In The Negotiator, he’s playing Chris Sabian, an expert hostage negotiator for the Chicago police, whose job it is to talk down Samuel L. Jackson’s Danny Roman, another police expert who…
The first shot in Steven Spielberg’s remarkable World War II epic Saving Private Ryan is an American flag with the sun behind it. It’s a delicate, almost diaphanous image–the fabric has the transparent delicacy of a chrysalis. This is the perfect introduction to a movie about the fragility–and fortitude–of compassion…
The deferral of grief through sex is the theme of Under the Skin, the fierce, occasionally impressive feature debut of Brit writer-director Carine Adler. The central character, Iris (Samantha Morton), a 19-year-old in suburban Liverpool, loses her mother (Rita Tushingham) to a swift, unexpected cancer. Iris’ married, pregnant older sister…
Recently I asked the director and screenwriter and several of the stars of Saving Private Ryan what their favorite war movies are. Their selections: Steven Spielberg (director): “My favorite, favorite war movie is Battleground [MGM, 1949]. It’s the story of the Ardennes, and the “Battling Bastards of Bastogne,” directed by…
Smoke Signals is a rare drama about modern life on an Indian reservation that, unlike Hollywood fare such as Dances With Wolves, has been written and directed by Native Americans. It’s a film that feels genuine and heartfelt–it understands the problems its characters are experiencing. It’s often a quirky, whimsical…
In The Mask of Zorro, Anthony Hopkins plays the eponymous masked hero as if he were doing Shakespeare. He’s trying to turn a kitsch hero into a real one, and his efforts are so weirdly off-key that you don’t know whether to applaud or titter. This dolorous Don Diego de…
For those who thought Dumb and Dumber signaled the end of the world as we know it, my advice is duck and cover. Comedy avatars Peter and Bobby Farrelly, the odium savants behind what some have considered Jim Carrey’s Hamlet–as well as its follow-up, the mondo bowlerama Kingpin–have turned their…
Spike and Mike’s Classic Festival of Animation is the other yearly film anthology from the same two Californians–Spike Decker and Mike Gribble–who concoct Spike & Mike’s Festival of Sick and Twisted Animation. Like Sick and Twisted, their annual blowout of scatology, sacrilege and sensationalistic sex, the Classic festival is a…
High Art is a low-budget American independent movie about a junkie, lesbian photographer, Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy), who spends most of her time looking romantically mournful. She’s famished and abrasive and oh-so-world-weary. When she smokes cigarettes, she exhales in a way that can best be described as existential–the smoke curls…
