Where Have All the Russkies Gone?

This summer Air Force One kicked off the post-Cold War thriller derby. The Peacemaker, the first feature from DreamWorks, the studio headed by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen, picks up the hot potato and carries it another nine yards. Once again we’re watching thickly accented Russians bemoaning the…

Excessive Use of Farce

Howard and Emily’s marriage is the talk of Greenleaf, Indiana, a small town idyllic enough to repel Norman Rockwell. The town has waited three years for the couple to make it official, and slimmed-down Emily (Joan Cusack) has waited three long years for Howard (Kevin Kline) to consummate their relationship…

Bard Stiff

Every film adaption of an existing work has its own unique set of problems. In the case of Jocelyn Moorhouse’s A Thousand Acres, the problem is compounded. Not only was Jane Smiley’s 1991 novel a Pulitzer Prize-winning best seller with a large number of (presumably) devoted fans, but the book…

Dark Victory

The Fifties-era Los Angeles of L.A. Confidential is Noir Central. Its denizens are tattooed in shadow; the play of light and dark in the streets, the police stations, the morgues is fetishistic. The postwar L.A. touted in the travelogues and billboards is a boomtown, but what we actually see is…

Dub and Dumber

In their zeal to make sense of new and ever-evolving genres, rock critics are always quick to hold high a familiar sound from the past as the forerunner to and “seminal” influence on whatever is happening in the present. But Arkology (Island Jamaica/Chronicles), the new collection of reggae rarities produced…

Death in the Afternoon

The Disappearance of Garcia Lorca aims to cover a great deal of ground. It portrays Spain, with picturesque splendor, just before civil war, and the fate of impassioned, iconoclastic Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca in the clutches of fascism. Still, no matter how earnestly it attempts to realize its epic…

Game, Set, Match

The Game is a puzzle picture; beyond its premise there isn’t much you can divulge without giving the show away. I’m not one of those critics who like to write “Stop reading now if you plan to see this movie,” so I’m tempted to wrap things up right now and…

Reel to Real

Somewhere in the meat-packing district in downtown Manhattan, behind a nondescript door in an unremarkable building, about 100,000 reels of film sit in stacks on twelve-foot-high metal shelves, and in unruly piles on the concrete floor. The titles taped to the sides of each canister — The Honey Industry, Resistance…

Father and Child Reunion

If you’re nostalgic for the cockeyed let-it-all-out gabfests of the late John Cassavetes, She’s So Lovely will seem like dejà vu all over again. Cassavetes wrote the script more than a decade ago, and now his son Nick, whose first feature, Unhook the Stars, starred his mother, Gena Rowlands, has…

The Blonde Leading the Bland

Excess Baggage, Alicia Silverstone’s first feature from her First Kiss Productions, turns out to be a rather shaggy and uninvolving jaunt. As Emily T. Hope, the moneyed teenager looking for love from her emotionally distant single dad (Jack Thompson), Silverstone pouts a lot while trying to wring our sympathy. Even…

Way Too Ordinary People

Mike Leigh’s new film Career Girls is compact and minor. I don’t mean that as a slam, exactly. After the dawdling expansiveness of last year’s Secrets & Lies, his latest one is something of a relaxation — it’s appealingly small-scale. Leigh isn’t doing anything here he hasn’t done better before…

Strong Women Still MIA

In G.I. Jane, Demi Moore plays a naval intelligence officer, Lt. Jordan O’Neil, who is recruited to be the first female SEAL. She gets a buzzcut. She endures the indignities of the male volunteers snickering at her in the food line. She rolls huge barrels through the surf and clambers…

Them There Bugs

When the beautiful entomologist rips open the chest cavity of a huge bloodthirsty insect in the sci-fi nightmare Mimic, it turns into Thoracic Park. This movie, like Spielberg’s, features evolution gone haywire and dramaturgy gone to hell. In the prologue, the heroine — the reckless and courageous (or foolhardy and…

There Goes the Neighborhood

The cops in Cop Land carry on like a bunch of goombahs. On the take from the Mob, they mimic the Mob. The fuzzy line dividing cops and crooks is the subject of many a strong police movie, but Cop Land goes a step further — it says there is…

Dear Old Dad

In the not-so-brave new world of independent filmmaking, low-budget movies premiere at Sundance or Cannes and win plaudits from over-psyched audiences, publicity from desperate feature writers, and distribution from boutiques that are usually subsidiaries of major studios. Right now Tarantino-style thrillers are out; crazy-clan stories and upstairs-downstairs tales are in…

Men Behaving Badly

In the Company of Men is about Chad (Aaron Eckhart) and Harold (Matt Malloy), two thirtysomething white-collar execs who have recently been passed up for promotions and rejected by their girlfriends. En route to a six-week business trip to the home office, Chad, the bristlier and wilier of the two,…

Road Worrier

Jerry Fletcher, the hero of Conspiracy Theory, is a comic, glamorous variation on Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Like Travis, he’s a New York cabbie obsessed with protecting a woman from the world’s hidden malignancies. Unlike Travis, Jerry snaps when he achieves sanity. Mel Gibson has been almost too willing…

Learning Disabled

187, a number favored by adolescent thugs, is the California state penal code for homicide — and a harsh sentence for all involved in this hopeless, hapless movie. The gifted Samuel L. Jackson stars as a high school teacher who cracks under the constant threat of rabid teen machismo and…

Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

In Picture Perfect Jennifer Aniston tells a whopper of a lie partially to win the attentions of a guy who has heretofore ignored her, interrupts a wedding, and humiliates another guy at his workplace. This follows on the heels of My Best Friend’s Wedding, which finds Julia Roberts trying to…

Last Tango in Tokyo

At first glance, the new Japanese comedy Shall We Dance? appears to be an Asian remake of the Australian hit Strictly Ballroom. But in fact the similarities are only surface-deep, and just barely that. Part of the difference is rooted in the cultural gap between the two nations, but wider…

A Royal Pain

Mrs. Brown (a Cannes hit and Miramax release) is dignified to the dead max — brownish-gray in mood and look and spirit. It’s based on the true story of the platonic but controversial bond between Queen Victoria (Judi Dench) and a Highlander named John Brown (Billy Connolly), who had been…

Point Plank

Not satisfied with the president you have? Here’s Harrison Ford’s James Marshall in Air Force One: Vietnam war hero, straight as a ramrod, devoted husband and father. We first see him delivering a speech before a roomful of Russian dignitaries. Departing from the prepared, wishy-washy text, Mr. President fire-breathes his…