Given a minimum of competence, there’s virtually no way that a film of Emile Zola’s novel Germinal could be a complete failure. The subject matter is too inherently powerful and Zola’s dramatizing of it too inherently skillful and impassioned. The trouble is, whatever the level of competence, there’s also little…
After a long film-festival drought, the Valley seems to be on the verge of a deluge. Although shaky promotional resources resulted in a disappointing turnout for last fall’s First Annual Equinox film festival at Herberger Theater Center, its producers have gamely promised a second annual effort this fall, at a…
The prologue of Suture, which also serves as its trailer, is chilling and teasingly elliptical. A man awakens in the middle of the night to hear someone sneaking into the house. He retreats to the bathroom, where he huddles in the tub with a shotgun, waiting for the intruder, who…
Urinating and making love and missing your family, struggling to survive and losing your courage at the crucial moment, eating chickens and trying to read the future in their livers–these things are what writer-director Bill Forsyth’s new movie, appropriately titled Being Human, is about. This ultimately unsuccessful but sometimes thrilling…
Jack, the 15-year-old hero of Andrew Birkin’s The Cement Garden, lives with his brother and two sisters in a bleak little house in an English suburb that gives new meaning to the word “godforsaken.” He rarely bathes or changes clothes, and his most frequent recreational activity is masturbating while looking…
For an exercise in frustration, try explaining the plot of The Winter’s Tale to someone. It can’t be done. You keep trying, but you can’t get away from the feeling you’re not quite getting it right. But that means that The Winter’s Tale also leaves plenty of room for interpretation…
In his last movie, 1990’s Cry-Baby, writer/director/bad-taste maven John Waters seemed to be off his game. There were terrific individual scenes, but the film sorely lacked the unifying personality common to all but one of his previous features (Desperate Living): the late and lamented, absurdly endearing transvestite star Divine (this…
The title characters of Bad Girls are a quartet of fugitive whores in the Old West. Three of them (Andie MacDowell, Drew Barrymore, Mary Stuart Masterson) daringly rescue the fourth (Madeleine Stowe) from an unjust hanging, and the women take off across country on the lam, planning to settle in…
Richard Connell’s pulp novella The Most Dangerous Game has been filmed once, excellently, under its own title–in 1932, as a taut, hourlong thriller from RKO–but has had its plot pilfered countless times. It’s the story of the mad Count Zaroff, played in the RKO version by Leslie Banks, whose hobby…
In the Western storytelling tradition, going back at least as far as King Midas, “gold” is more or less a synonym for “trouble.” It’s the symbol for everything for which you should be careful of wishing, because you might get it. You’ll only be able to keep it by losing…
God, we’re sometimes told, is in the details. Most of us have had some epiphanic moment or another at which it seemed likely that this notion was true, but the Vietnamese period film The Scent of Green Papaya may lend it a different kind of credence. It’s intensely focused on…
Threesome has the look, and the all-important soundtrack, of another entry in the Generation X youth-movie sweepstakes, along the lines of Reality Bites. It’s a comedy set on a college campus, and it has just three characters of any significance–dormmates Eddy (Josh Charles), Stuart (Stephen Baldwin) and Alex (Lara Flynn…
Hugh Grant, star of Mike Newell’s current Four Weddings and a Funeral, is also the star of the Australian John Duigan’s new Sirens. Grant plays a young, vaguely liberal English vicar who is sent by the bishop of Sydney to the outback. His mission is to persuade painter Norman Lindsay…
Chilean novelist Isabel Allende’s epic The House of the Spirits is set in a fictitious South American country. About the most charitable term one can apply to the South American setting of the film version, which was directed by a Dane and shot in Denmark and Portugal, is that it’s…
Hugh Grant, star of Mike Newell’s current Four Weddings and a Funeral, is also the star of the Australian John Duigan’s new Sirens. Grant plays a young, vaguely liberal English vicar who is sent by the bishop of Sydney to the outback. His mission is to persuade painter Norman Lindsay…
Hugh Grant, star of Mike Newell’s current Four Weddings and a Funeral, is also the star of the Australian John Duigan’s new Sirens. Grant plays a young, vaguely liberal English vicar who is sent by the bishop of Sydney to the outback. His mission is to persuade painter Norman Lindsay…
Chilean novelist Isabel Allende’s epic The House of the Spirits is set in a fictitious South American country. About the most charitable term one can apply to the South American setting of the film version, which was directed by a Dane and shot in Denmark and Portugal, is that it’s…
Chilean novelist Isabel Allende’s epic The House of the Spirits is set in a fictitious South American country. About the most charitable term one can apply to the South American setting of the film version, which was directed by a Dane and shot in Denmark and Portugal, is that it’s…
Weddings, or incipient weddings, are the traditional tags of English comedy. The idea is, if everybody ends up paired off at the end, then everything must have worked out all right. Director Mike Newell, a Brit not known as a laugh riot until recently–he gave us Dance With a Stranger…
This year’s Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, Belle Epoque, is set “somewhere in Spain”–somewhere rural and sun-dappled and placidly lovely–in 1931. It wasn’t such a beautiful epoch elsewhere in Spain that year, what with the mad, factional contentions by which the Second Republic was beginning its brief existence before…
Weddings, or incipient weddings, are the traditional tags of English comedy. The idea is, if everybody ends up paired off at the end, then everything must have worked out all right. Director Mike Newell, a Brit not known as a laugh riot until recently–he gave us Dance With a Stranger…
This year’s Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, Belle Epoque, is set “somewhere in Spain”–somewhere rural and sun-dappled and placidly lovely–in 1931. It wasn’t such a beautiful epoch elsewhere in Spain that year, what with the mad, factional contentions by which the Second Republic was beginning its brief existence before…
