Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s final film shares with the late Cuban director’s Letters from the Park (a sweetly lyrical film based on the Gabriel Garcia Marquez story about a man who ghostwrites love letters) and Strawberry and Chocolate a tone of wistful romanticism. Like a Garcia Marquez novel, Guantanamera, which screened…
One speech and one prop from Men in Black combine to sum up the movie. An alien in four-legged earthly form delivers the speech: “You humans, when’re you gonna learn that size doesn’t matter? Just ’cause something’s important doesn’t mean it’s not very, very small.” The most refreshing thing about…
The title of John Woo’s Face/Off is meant to be taken literally. John Travolta and Nicolas Cage play adversaries who swap faces. Here’s how: FBI agent Sean Archer (Travolta) has been single-mindedly tracking terrorist nut Castor Troy (Cage) ever since Castor’s botched assassination attempt six years earlier, in which he…
Slapstick decadence is the dominant style at the Disney studios this summer, reaching all the way from Touchstone Pictures’ action hit Con Air to the 35th Walt Disney animated feature, Hercules. It’s a moviemaking mode that weds anything-for-a-laugh to anything-for-a-jolt, leaving imagination and authenticity in the lurch. Instead of creating…
The Van is being billed as “the final chapter in the Barrytown Trilogy,” Irish author Roddy Doyle’s group of novels set in a fictional north Dublin suburb that also consists of The Commitments and The Snapper. That “final chapter” label, courtesy the production notes, gives The Van the aura of…
British filmmaker Peter Greenaway sits near a window in the dining room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel; he indicates with his eyes a man walking along the sidewalk toward Hollywood Boulevard. In trying to explain his use of multiple imagery in his new film The Pillow Book and separating it…
To get into a good-lovin’ mood before each date, a college housemate of mine croaked along to Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey” while blasting it through his stereo. My fondness for the song survived. So as the end credits for Ulee’s Gold unrolled against the robust lyricism of Morrison belting out…
First the good news: Unlike most action film sequels, Speed 2: Cruise Control is not a mere retread of the original. Now the bad news: Better it had been. Director Jan De Bont made a dazzling debut with the 1994 Speed. His riveting direction of action triumphed over a hackneyed,…
It wouldn’t be completely fair to say that the hits produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer from 1983 through 1996 are stylistically interchangeable. But it wouldn’t be so awfully unfair, either: A homogeneous, auteurial touch runs from Flashdance (1983) through Top Gun (1986), Beverly Hills Cop II (1987), and…
Short on irony, long on wit, writer/director Greg Mottola’s The Daytrippers breaks with the pack of recent thumbsucking U.S. indie productions to fashion a funny and frolicsome feature that scrutinizes the much poked and prodded American family. Working from what seems a slight premise, The Daytrippers, through economic storytelling and…
Time was when the annual Cannes Film Festival was about the only game of its kind. That colorful event having added a ton of gold to the coffers of Provence, it was only natural that other cities began to want their own festivals. Now one can scarcely find a town…
In a season of lumbering big-screen circuses, Rough Magic provides a rowdy creative sideshow. It’s the kind of haywire high-wire act that suspends the laws of science and grows more involving and comical with every artful near-fall. It’s about magic as illusion and magic as genuine miracle, and it shuffles…
The appearance of The Lost World: Jurassic Park carries a double burden. Not only is it the sequel to the most popular movie ever made, but it is also the first film Steven Spielberg has directed since 1993’s Schindler’s List. Now that he has finally won his Oscar and achieved…
Judy Davis is often at her ravaged best when she’s playing women pulled apart by their own warring impulses. Torn between their isolating desire for freedom and their need for solace, the women in films such as High Tide, Husbands and Wives, The New Age, and A Passage to India…
Sidney Lumet has had enough ups and downs in his long, prolific career that it’s never safe to count him out … even after two disappointing films in a row, A Stranger Among Us (1992) and Guilty as Sin (1993). Even the greatest directors frequently falter in their seventies, so…
In The Fifth Element, the all-knowing, all-powerful Supreme Being of the Universe turns out to be Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), an orange-haired babe in a skimpy, Band-Aid-thin mod outfit who speaks in a kind of Slavic scat and cries a lot. It’s as if the filmmakers started out to make a…
If you’re hankering to see a movie that sends up swinging Sixties London and Carnaby Street and vintage James Bond movies, don’t bother to check out Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. What the movie mostly sends up is its star and screenwriter, Mike Myers. That’s not all bad: Myers…
On the savvy festival-and-promo tour that helped the necrophiliac Kissed net advance praise everywhere from the Atlantic Monthly to Newsweek, writer-director Lynne Stopkewich said she thought independent films should be judged on their ingenuity and daring rather than on the size of their budgets. As arts-world stump speeches go, it’s…
New-to-movies subjects are hard to come by, but Traveller has one: the inbred world of Irish grifters living in the backwoods of the American rural South. Clannish con artists descended from the Irish Tinkers, they fan out across the countryside pulling bogus home-repair jobs on unsuspecting, mostly elderly, folk and…
No one has exploited the historical-epic form better than David Lean. At his peak he used its spaciousness and breadth to develop characters with conflicting points of view, so that audiences could feel viscerally swept away, emotionally engaged, and mentally sharpened, all at once. With the help of inspired actors…
John Woo has often cited the films of Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973) as among his greatest influences — particularly 1967’s Le Samourai — and it’s easy to see the connection. Even in France, Melville spent most of his career as a cult director: His series of gangster films, starting in 1956…
Volcano is set in Los Angeles, and for L.A. haters, it could prove a peak experience. You don’t even have to hate L.A. to enjoy it — love/hate will do. That’s why the film closes with Randy Newman’s mock-anthem “I Love L.A.” (which, of course, makes it L.A.’s true anthem)…
