There’s an old show-business maxim that as soon as you stop chasing your big break, it chases you. Such is the dilemma faced by Lena Machado, the titular character in Lena’s Dreams, an edgy independent feature from the writing/directing team of Heather Johnson and Gordon Eriksen. Set in the gritty…
What if fate has something horrific in store for you, and you can’t escape it? It’s an idea that’s been around for a long time, from Greek myths like Oedipus Rex, to the New Testament, to EC Comics and The Twilight Zone. Cinematically we tend to prefer the idea that…
Paola di Florio’s documentary Speaking in Strings takes a midcareer look at Italian-born violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, who leapt to prominence in 1981 when she became the youngest-ever winner of the international Naumburg Competition. Salerno-Sonnenberg, who moved to the United States at the age of eight, became a child prodigy of…
It’s not a startling breach of conventional wisdom to apply the term masterpiece to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, which is being reissued in a nice restored print that, if memory serves, is better (though not by much) than we’ve seen before. But critical reputations can be as volatile as the…
Three decades after Rosemary’s Baby, two decades after The Tenant, and following a series of five non-horror films, Roman Polanski returns to the supernatural thriller with The Ninth Gate. What could be more promising? Regardless of what one thinks about Polanski’s personal life or legal status, the man is clearly…
The first thought you have while watching The Next Best Thing is, Was Madonna always this bad an actress? It’s a question that soon fades from consciousness to be replaced by, Was Rupert Everett always this bad an actor? and, Was John Schlesinger always this bad a director? Since the…
Willie Morris’s autobiographical novel, My Dog Skip, is a nearly perfect piece of bedtime reading for kids and their parents. Each chapter is virtually a self-contained anecdote, the descriptions of World War II-era Mississippi are lush and dreamlike, and the escapades of the central canine character, depicted as smarter, faster,…
The Cup takes place in a Tibetan monastery-in-exile in Bhutan, where the head abbot (Lama Chonjor) is curious, though not the least bit ruffled, to discover that some of his monks are secretly sneaking off to a nearby town to watch World Cup matches on television. Not surprisingly the abbot…
Think Pretty Woman meets The Monica Lewinsky Story and you’ve got A Girl Called Rosemarie. Based on Germany’s biggest political scandal of the 1950s, Bernd Eichinger’s film (originally a miniseries for German TV) follows Rosemarie (Nina Hoss), an orphan who learned at an early age that sex gives her power…
After a light lead with Bossa Nova, this week the FIU Miami Film Festival comes to an end on a heavier note with the French screen version of Stalin’s world, East-West. The big French offering in this second half is Battle Cries, the story of a pregnant woman with breast…
Is it possible to take in 26 full-length movies in ten days? Most likely not. Although the heart and mind may want to, the eye could have a problem. And that’s not even including the two retrospectives and thirteen shorts unreeling at the FIU Miami Film Festival. (See “Kulchur” and…
Director Chen Kaige is best known in the United States for Farewell, My Concubine, the most successful Chinese production ever released here. As many pointed out at the time, this Oscar-nominated 1993 epic of modern Chinese history may have been wholly Chinese in both content and viewpoint, but it was…
La crème de la coiffure! A mock documentary about, of all things, a Scottish hairdresser who travels to America to compete in an international hairstyling tournament, The Big Tease is a mildly amusing romp that benefits enormously from an ingratiating performance by Scottish actor Craig Ferguson, who also co-wrote the…
Jane Campion’s 1992 film The Piano was an intoxicating work of art, a film of such beauty and power that it literally took my breath away. Nothing the New Zealand-born writer-director has done before or since even comes close to matching it in form, content, or sensibility. And her latest…
She took out her notebook. But he spoke so fast she couldn’t keep up. He paced the stuffy room as he dictated, drifting toward the stove. He lit one trembly cigarette after another, flicking them half-smoked into the ashtray. In October 1866 Anna Snitkina graduated from stenography school and agreed…
Sharon Stone doesn’t appear onscreen until halfway through this tale of three lives unraveling, but when she does, she makes quite an impression as Rosie, the third player in a horse-racing scam. Adapted from a play by Sam Shepard, Simpatico jumps back and forth in time between present day and…
The evening of March 14, 1885, was an auspicious one in the annals of musical theater. Less than four years had passed since the opening of London’s Savoy Theatre, built specifically for the productions of librettist William Schwenk Gilbert and composer Arthur Seymour Sullivan. The partners’ first six works had…
It’s easy to see how Play It to the Bone, writer-director Ron Shelton’s latest comedy-drama, got started. Shelton obviously wanted to do for boxing what he’d already done with baseball in Bull Durham, golf in Tin Cup, and pick-up basketball in White Men Can’t Jump. But somewhere along the way…
Alain Resnais is not only one of the most respected film directors from the French New Wave, but, in this writer’s opinion, he is the most important one. His film Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) showed us a different way to look at movies, and a completely revolutionary way to adapt…
In the past 30 years, Woody Allen has written and directed something like 28 movies (“something like” reflects the confusion of how to count his contribution to New York Stories), a remarkable productivity record for a major filmmaker, and one that’s even more impressive when you consider how high his…
Boo hoo! Frank McCourt had a miserable childhood! Honestly who can say their childhood wasn’t impoverished in some way … or in many ways? That Mr. McCourt survived and eventually published his inescapable memoir is nice, of course, and the book indeed is a poignant and crafty piece of work…
The world’s demand for minimally talented 30-year-old high school dropouts who believe they’re great poets or great musicians or great movie directors isn’t going to catch up with the supply anytime soon. That won’t keep the strivers from striving, of course, nor will it snuff out their dreams. Case in…
