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…
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…
Because Joel and Ethan Coen are such a couple of precocious sophomores, it’s not hard to find them annoying, or to wish to debunk them. The trouble is, there’s no denying that they always put on a great show. Even when they aren’t sure what they’re doing, as with Barton…
Suppose you were to travel backward in time to, say, 20 years ago. You start telling the people you meet about life in the 90s: The Berlin Wall is gone, the Soviet empire is in ruins, Virginia is the first state to have elected an African-American governor, and a Democratic…
Suppose you were to travel backward in time to, say, 20 years ago. You start telling the people you meet about life in the 90s: The Berlin Wall is gone, the Soviet empire is in ruins, Virginia is the first state to have elected an African-American governor, and a Democratic…
Because Joel and Ethan Coen are such a couple of precocious sophomores, it’s not hard to find them annoying, or to wish to debunk them. The trouble is, there’s no denying that they always put on a great show. Even when they aren’t sure what they’re doing, as with Barton…
In “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” what was the Emperor’s actual state? Hint: It’s the title of Mike Leigh’s new film. Naked, a black comedy, is built around a flawless performance by a superb young actor named David Thewlis. Thewlis and several of the other actors are so good, and some…
A friend of mine was a classmate of comedian-actor Denis Leary at Emerson College in Boston in the mid-’70s. He showed me a copy of the college literary magazine, to which both he and Leary had contributed some poetry. I confess I was hoping for an expos, hoping to find…
In “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” what was the Emperor’s actual state? Hint: It’s the title of Mike Leigh’s new film. Naked, a black comedy, is built around a flawless performance by a superb young actor named David Thewlis. Thewlis and several of the other actors are so good, and some…
A friend of mine was a classmate of comedian-actor Denis Leary at Emerson College in Boston in the mid-’70s. He showed me a copy of the college literary magazine, to which both he and Leary had contributed some poetry. I confess I was hoping for an expos, hoping to find…
The title is 8 Seconds, which refers to the length of time a rodeo bull rider must remain on the bull’s back in order to qualify in the competition. It’s also approximately the length of time that this little movie is likely to linger in your memory after you’ve seen…
The title is 8 Seconds, which refers to the length of time a rodeo bull rider must remain on the bull’s back in order to qualify in the competition. It’s also approximately the length of time that this little movie is likely to linger in your memory after you’ve seen…
In the grand tradition of noir, la Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, Romeo Is Bleeding is narrated by a hero who is a hopeless sap–his buddies refer to him at one point as “you dumbest of all fucks.” This particular DOAF is Jack Grimaldi (Gary Oldman), a…
In the grand tradition of noir, la Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, Romeo Is Bleeding is narrated by a hero who is a hopeless sap–his buddies refer to him at one point as “you dumbest of all fucks.” This particular DOAF is Jack Grimaldi (Gary Oldman), a…
Ben Stiller, who directed Reality Bites, also co-stars in it. He plays Michael, one point on a romantic triangle of Generation Xers (isn’t it amazing how quickly that term grew tiresome?). Michael is a well-to-do yupster, a producer for a vapid music-video network. Point number two is Troy (Ethan Hawke),…
If you look closely at beautiful Dana Wynter in the climactic chase scenes near the end of director Don Siegel’s 1956 sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, you can tell what she’s thinking: Oh, forget it, let’s just go to sleep and turn into aliens. She’s begun, you can…
John Guare’s acclaimed play Six Degrees of Separation would not, at first glance, seem like a very promising candidate for movie adaptation. It’s stagebound, not because it’s confined to one setting–it isn’t–but because of its presentational style. Much of the story is relayed directly to the audience by the actors…
The appeal of D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’ documentary The War Room is that it’s a buddy picture. The stars–and that’s how they’re presented, as stars rather than as documentary subjects–are James Carville and George Stephanopoulos, widely regarded as the true architects of Bill Clinton’s victory in the most recent…
Abel Ferrara’s movies combine self-conscious tawdriness with unconscious tawdriness. He’s fascinated by self-destructive excess, by obsessive, addictive behavior, by characters who willfully wreck themselves with drugs and booze and sexual degradation. Like many filmmakers with an attraction to this subject matter–the early Scorsese, for instance–Ferrara insists that such behavior has…
Daniel Day-Lewis is one of those rare actors who might be called consummate, yet he is not visibly self-congratulatory while working. He’s created a gallery of characters–the crippled, cosmically outraged Christy Brown in My Left Foot, the tuxedoed waxwork Cyril in A Room With a View, the fairy-tale hero Hawkeye…
