Bessie Smith earned the right to sing the blues. Her first husband died soon after the wedding; the second one cheated on her regularly, and kidnapped their adopted son and placed him in a foster home. Bessie herself died in an auto accident, but not before making more than 50…
Let’s face it – Danny DeVito is typecast. From Louie DePalma on Taxi to the wife-hating husband in Ruthless People, DeVito has specialized in one role, the greedy, unprincipled moneymaker. Sure, he’s escaped from this sleazebag strangle hold with the occasional sweet dolt (Throw Momma from the Train, One Flew…
In a year in which gangster-movie inflation is at its all-time high, director Robert Benton’s Billy Bathgate has turned a profit, and done it the old-fashioned way – with heartfelt storytelling, inspired camerawork, and impeccable timing. Based on the novel by E.L. Doctorow, Billy Bathgate explores the criminal education of…
The prospects for Dede Tate (Jodie Foster) are limited. She’s a high school dropout, a cocktail waitress, a single mother who has no contact with the father of her child. In short, her life is ordinary. But then there’s the matter of her son Fred (Adam Hann-Byrd). Fred – the…
Like the Pacific Northwest landscape that serves as one of its major characters, Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho has both dramatic peaks and flat stretches. In the latest film from the director of Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy, River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves star as two pretty-boy drifters…
After a brush with death, a successful businessman plunges into a coma. The doctors aren’t sure if he’ll make it; his wife frets anxiously and keeps a bedside vigil. But the human spirit is stronger than medicine, and slowly, painfully, he returns to life. There’s only one problem: He cannot…
Garry Marshall once delivered sentimental films that didn’t scrimp on substance (The Flamingo Kid, Nothing in Common), but in the past few years he’s been content to plunk down cliches and wait for the registers to start ringing. He tapped our tear ducts with Beaches and then assaulted our common…
To its credit, Shout never pretends to be anything but a mealy-minded tribute to the liberating power of rock and roll. All this talk about music soothing the savage breast overlooks the fact that more often than not it’s used to inflame that very same breast. You know that feeling…
The New York character actor Joe Pesci (“I’m funny? How’ya mean, funny? You find me amusing?”) is at his best when sniping, kibbitzing and wise-cracking from the edges of street-tough movies like Raging Bull and Goodfellas. Whenever the spotlight hits him, he gives a film a lift, a shot of…
As with young Irish gun Kenneth Branagh, whose Dead Again is the summer’s most stunning achievement and a fully successful resurrection of the Muscle-bound Hollywood Romance, the truth about Ethan and Joel Coen lies in the past. But while countless critical search parties aimlessly spelunk for the Coens’ source-stream in…
Voyeurism is an amazingly supple subject for films. The whole cinematic process reeks of it – sitting alone in a darkened room, watching the actions of characters unaware of you, prying into their personal lives and innermost secrets. And many acclaimed films have explored it overtly: Rear Window, for instance,…
Filmmaker Scott Dittrich probably hates Patrick Swayze. If he doesn’t, he should reconsider. A former UCLA economics grad student, Dittrich (what? – you thought it was going to be Swayze?) has spent the past seventeen years as one of the nation’s foremost practitioners of the surf movie. In their pure…
Alone on the sidewalk in front of her house, a little girl (Natalie Morse) jumps rope, counting – and naming – the stars in the night sky. Her hoop skirt juts out alarmingly from her hips; her shadow is huge on the white wall behind her. From corner to corner,…
The British melodramatist and amateur muckraker Alan Parker has the blunt gift of a cartoonist, but he’s not much good at filling out his movie-essays. Give him a cause – any cause – and he’s likely to trivialize it. Set the cause to music, though, and you’ll want to start…
Galvanized by the raw vernacular of the Dublin streets, the language of The Commitments is dense and extremely local, kind of like a radically ethnic take on Bill and Ted’s most resplendent San Dimas-speak. Given the limits of the provincial tongue, director Alan Parker has found it in his culturally…
In the galaxy of young directors, there’s a short list of the brightest stars that critics recite like a litany: Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, the Coen brothers, Kenneth Branagh, Jane Campion. Every season, another auteur – John Singleton, John McNaughton, Richard Linklater, Tony Spiridakis, even Kevin Costner – twinkles briefly…
It’s pay-back time for Jean Vigo. In early-Thirties France, Vigo was a hot property, too hot for some, in fact, given that his schoolboy-satire Zero de Conduite (A Zero For Conduct) incurred the wrath of French censors for its irreverence. When it came time for a follow-up project, Vigo tried…
The white supremacists that populate Blood in the Face, a bracing, entertaining documentary about the far tip of the right wing, work hard to mass assassinate the characters of other ethnic groups. Jews, of course, are power hungry and corrupt. Hispanics reproduce mindlessly. Blacks, or “mud people” are subhuman brutes…
Sure, there was shit smearing and fork stabbing, but the most horrifying aspect of Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover was not the violence, the sadism, or the scatology, but rather the obsessive sense of order. In the maelstrom of rapes and beatings and trucks…
Dark Obsession is neither very dark nor very obsessive, but that does not disqualify it. On the contrary, all the fools and fops, snips and snobs you recall from British manor-house dramas past seem to have been coaxed out of retirement for one last go, and you’re bound to enjoy…
Giuseppe Tornatore is not the first young filmmaker to wilt in the heat of devotion to a past master (see: DePalma, Brian vis a vis Hitchcock, Alfred), but he may be the most gifted. When the young Sicilian scored an international hit last year with the boyhood reverie Cinema Paradiso,…
The latest in a series of pathetic American movies that baldly rip off foreign films, Pure Luck – based on the misadventure comedy Le Chevre (The Goat) – proves that international trade regulators should set aside important issues and get right down to the trivia. These French missed connections, which…
