Michael Crichton seems pretty clever. The doctor-screenwriter-novelist digs odd history (Eaters of the Dead, a.k.a. The 13th Warrior), clashing cultures (Rising Sun), and cutting-edge biotechnology (Jurassic Park, and virtually his whole canon). His 1999 novel and its inevitable new movie adaptation, Timeline, both attempt to deliver all this and more,…
In director Ron Howard’s The Missing, Tommy Lee Jones’s Samuel Jones takes his place among the oldest archetypes in the Western genre — the white man who has lived among the Indians till he has at last become one. This plot device, used in Hombre and Nevada Smith and myriad…
The spooky beauty of Elephant, Gus Van Sant’s strange take on the Columbine massacre, arises not from the shock of sudden violence but from the filmmaker’s steady gaze at the numbing routines of life inside a suburban high school. With what first looks like cool detachment, Van Sant (My Own…
If you’re hankering for a movie about an awkward yet lovable “outsider” type who wanders into a pastel mockup of Middle America and cajoles the straights to get saucy, you’re in luck. It’s called Edward Scissorhands and it’s been available on video for years. Renting it will absolve you of…
In the annals of fraud and fakery, a discredited ex-magazine reporter named Stephen Glass will likely wind up a mere footnote. The people who forge Van Goghs and the con artists who bilk naive grandmothers out of their life savings (not to mention certain fast-dancing corporate executives) even more richly…
“We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers.” So said civil rights activist, Gandhi disciple, and all-around troublemaker Bayard Rustin. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, you’re not alone. Although a trusted confidant and mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr., his name is rarely mentioned in the…
Russell Crowe to his agent: “More Oscar-bait. Now.” Agent, considering his cut of Crowe’s $20 million payday: “Yes, sir.” A possible scenario, anyway. Thus Crowe is back in another iconic, self-serious performance, and his beefy mug will stare down upon us from this season’s heroic movie posters until Tom Cruise…
In Autumn Spring, a bittersweet comedy from the Czech Republic, an aged ex-actor, Fanda, lives in bleak, unfulfilling retirement with his dour, too-careful wife, Emilie; he is forever pestered by the complaints from his hapless, thrice-married son. As he lacks youth, money, and health, Fanda’s one pleasure is to make…
A few words of advice for those among you fortunate and/or dogged enough to have seen the original The Singing Detective miniseries that aired on the BBC in 1984: If you plan on seeing the new movie, also called The Singing Detective and also written by the late Dennis Potter,…
Even when people were watching Will Ferrell on television every Saturday night, they weren’t seeing Will Ferrell. They saw no more than a glimpse of him, beneath wigs and behind glued-on beards and buried under characters who became almost better known than he during his seven years on Saturday Night…
The nineteenth Israel Film Festival lets us see once again how diverse the troubled land in that turbulent sea is — physically, politically, and philosophically. A classic across-the-divide love story in A Trumpet in the Wadi follows the impossible relationship of a Russian immigrant and an Arab woman; in Miss…
When it comes to defining love (romantic, brotherly, erotic, platonic), no one has come up with a term to describe the complex emotions that arise when love and survival become dangerously intertwined. This is the challenge for filmmaker joshua bee alafia’s new work Cubamor, which attempts to understand love in…
Just what is it with movies about men in dresses? Sometimes they’re brilliant (Some Like It Hot, Tootsie), sometimes they’re weird (Glenn or Glenda?, Flaming Creatures), sometimes they’re utterly conventional (Charlie’s Aunt, Mrs. Doubtfire), and sometimes they’re truly “outside the box” (Trash, The Rocky Horror Picture Show). But whatever the…
“I really like the cold — it makes me feel really alive.” There are few more attractive things a woman can say, and when wunderkind Sarah Polley says this in My Life Without Me — to a gullible dork she is seducing with totally unconscious malice, no less — thinking…
If you lie down with dogs, you’ve got to expect to get up with fleas. And when you go to a movie about a coked-out former porn star who was implicated in the grisly murders of four lowlife drug dealers — a case that remains “officially” unsolved to this day…
Watching Hollywood’s endless stream of John Grisham adaptations — The Firm, The Chamber, A Time to Kill, etc. — it would be easy to assume that Grisham is the worst sort of hack writer, with simplistic morals that usually overwhelm logic and come close to contravening the very law the…
Recently ornithologists in Antarctica made a startling discovery: Female emperor penguins, being forced against their wills to endure stern patriarchal societal norms, tend to practice iffy mating habits. Close scrutiny revealed that most adult females go bonkers struggling to choose between an exciting-but-destructive “bad-boy” penguin and a dependable-but-boring “good-boy” penguin,…
The opening credits insist Kill Bill: Volume 1 is “Quentin Tarantino’s 4th film,” when it’s actually his 3.5th; it’s too incomplete to be measured as a whole, half a movie waiting for a proper ending due to arrive in the next volume in February. Till then we’ll have to contemplate…
You gotta love John Sayles. No, really — you gotta, or else a mob of indie-minded cineastes will club you into submission. Sometimes it’s easy to comply, as with City of Hope and Sunshine State, both astute portraits of uniquely American class, race, and real estate struggles boiling down to…
You see them all the time, on the sides of walls and buildings, rectangles a few square feet or more painted a shade noticeably different from the rest of the structure. They’ve become such a part of our urban landscape, like the graffiti they’re intended to cover up, that we…
Director Richard Linklater’s School of Rock imagines, sort of, what might have become of voluble rock snob Barry the morning after his grand finale in Stephen Frears’s adaptation of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity — after his Marvin Gaye impersonation had faded and been forgotten in the daylight hours, after he…
The dumbed-down movie version of Frances Mayes’s best-selling travel memoir Under the Tuscan Sun is a virtual case study of Hollywood’s irrepressible urge to lower the bar in the hopes of upping the take. Mayes’s 1996 book is a nicely written, carefully observed meditation on buying a decrepit Italian villa…
