The new Adam Sandler comedy Big Daddy isn’t just the funniest movie of the summer; it’s also the most improbable feel-good movie of the season. It’s improbable because practically everything about Adam Sandler seems so unlikely, so strangely back-assward. His whole phenomenal career (from Billy Madison to Happy Gilmore, from…
Twice Upon a Yesterday seems almost too geared for the Sliding Doors crowd. By relying on the same kind of conceptual sleight of hand as that recent Brit hit (which owed a giant debt of its own to Groundhog Day), this romantic fable’s sense of originality and wit is greatly…
Pretentiousness masquerading as profundity; self-indulgence masquerading as art. The Loss of Sexual Innocence, the dreadful new film from writer/director Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas, One Night Stand), joins the ranks of the worst films ever made. A statement that may, on the surface, seem harsh and heartless but that will…
While Hong Kong movies have been invading Hollywood through the success of Jackie Chan, John Woo, Jet Li, and others, mainland Chinese cinema has invaded the classier neighborhoods of the film industry during the past decade or so. The latest contender is The King of Masks, an affecting melodrama from…
A fine line divides inspired silliness from out-and-out witlessness; it’s a short leap from grin from groan. In 1997’s Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Mike Myers took a thin premise — spoof the Sixties by transplanting a horny Matt Helm-like secret agent into the Nineties — and danced an…
In John Sayles’s Limbo, which is set amid the rough-and-tumble of southeast Alaska, an ex-salmon fisherman with guilty memories (David Strathairn), an itinerant lounge singer with a lousy voice (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), and the singer’s melancholy teenage daughter (newcomer Vanessa Martinez) become stranded, Robinson Crusoe-style, on a remote island. This…
In an early scene in Instinct, released by Touchstone, a division of Disney’s Buena Vista Pictures, we’re told that a brilliant primatologist named Ethan Powell (played by Anthony Hopkins) is being brought back to the United States from Rwanda, where for several years he has been engaged in a close…
It has not been lost on the Quinn brothers (actor Aidan, cinematographer Declan, and writer/director Paul) that in old Gaelic culture the tribal bard, or storyteller, was held in the highest esteem. The Quinns want to be Irish storytellers, too, and to that end they have loaded up This Is…
The peerless Ethiopian distance runner Haile Gebrselassie is a tiny man (five foot three and barely 115 pounds), but in his native country his heroism looms large. Since 1994 he has set fifteen world records at five different distances, and at the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, he outdueled…
In the desert outpost of Needles, California, two pathetic, near-bankrupt used-car salesmen (writer/editor/ director/producer Joe Carnahan and producer Dan Leis) are offered a quarter of a million bucks just to hide a 1963 Pontiac LeMans for two days … without looking in the trunk. They know the deal stinks, and…
If your poodle is decked out in the complete Captain Kirk uniform, you’ve taken Klingon language classes, or you once mailed DeForest Kelly a joint taped to a piece of cardboard just “to return the favor,” the 86-minute documentary called Trekkies is a must-see: love it or loathe it. In…
Relentlessly hip? You better be. Enjoy pretentious talk about the great god Art and the hidden meanings in old gangster movies? Couldn’t hurt. Like to sit up till dawn smoking black cigarettes and exchanging ironic barbs about the tragedy of life? Bingo. Amos Poe, an East Village-based avant-gardian since the…
Maybe it’s the damn blinking thing, because it’s not simply the foppish hair and boyish face, or, for that matter, even the vaguely befuddled reticence and wry, self-abasing demeanor we Americans prefer to see in our Brits. It’s got to be the blinking. That’s what he does, almost all he…
Fans call it “that Star Wars feeling,” the raw emotional high achieved by watching or even just thinking about the films of George Lucas. It’s a sort of gut-swirling, swooning sensation, the effect of tripping on a fantasy world, a wonderland, a place unlike Earth or even the movies. And…
Even English actresses of a certain age have a difficult time finding good roles, so it’s understandable that Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, and Joan Plowright might jump at the chance to star in Tea with Mussolini, Franco Zeffirelli’s new film about a group of English expatriates living in Florence during…
No other filmmaker in movie history has immersed himself more completely in his art than the great French director François Truffaut. Nor was there ever a director who in his work would blur the line between fiction and autobiography, or who would advocate more passionately that the art of film…
David Mamet, famous for his in-your-face characters, brutal and frequently raunchy dialogue, and deliberate, staccato prose, would seem an unlikely choice to write and direct a screen adaptation of British playwright Terence Rattigan’s genteel drama about injustice. But the Pulitzer Prize-winning author (for Glengarry Glen Ross), whose body of work…
The Castle is a modest little comedy from Australia that falls into the subgenre of Capraesque idealism, in the little-guy-triumphs-over-evil-powers-that-be division. The story revolves around the unpretentious Kerrigan clan. Darryl (Michael Caton), the father, has his own towing business. Sal (Anne Tenney), the mother, is the family cook and a…
The most surprising thing about the new teensploitation horror film Idle Hands is the lack of masturbation jokes. It is a movie about a seventeen-year-old boy who loses control of his right hand to an evil demon, yet there’s only one such obvious crack. As the gloriously lazy hero Anton…
In Pushing Tin, the edgy new comedy from British director Mike Newell, the dominant image is a black screen pulsing with obscure florescent markings, like the characters on some early prototype of Pac-Man. But in this case, nobody’s playing games. The markings represent very real jet airliners filled with very…
The latest release from MTV Films, Paramount Pictures’ bouncing baby, is set in a high school and has been inoculated with the usual doses of teenage angst, teenage wit, and teenage lust. Here’s the surprise: It declines to get down on hands and knees to woo Generation Y to the…
We seem to be in the middle of one of those thematic blitzes that happen every now and then in the film world. This past year it was Dark City and The Truman Show; so far this year we’ve had EDtv, The Matrix, and eXistenZ. Coming up in the next…
