Robert E. Howard, the subject of Dan Ireland’s wonderful debut film The Whole Wide World, created the sword-and-sorcery genre with his Conan stories. Howard had a grand yet coarse-grained consciousness. His Conan tales, set in a fictitious primordial age full of demons and killers, boasted swift, cartoon-flavored action (“He moved…
Billy Bob Thornton’s richly observed Sling Blade opens with a prologue that can only be described as its own small film, a laconically eerie sequence that, as the rest of Sling Blade unfolds, begins to take hold in the memory like a particularly dense nightmare. As Daniel Lanois’s quietly atmospheric…
William Faulkner’s novella Old Man has a biblical magnetism, a primal moral pull. During the horrifying Mississippi flood of 1927, convicts are conscripted for disaster relief. A guard orders two of them to take out a boat, find a woman stuck in a cypress tree and a man clinging to…
The second half of the fourteenth Miami Film Festival, which concludes this Sunday, February 9, volleys from sweet (Argentina’s Wake Up, Love) to bittersweet (Spain’s Balseros), with most of the entries falling somewhere in between, including new releases from Richard (Slacker) Linklater and Stephen (My Beautiful Laundrette) Frears: subUrbia and…
Sometimes whispering, sometimes screaming, the fourteenth Miami Film Festival (January 31 to February 9) corrals thirty-two full-length films and five shorts, including eleven U.S. premieres, from fourteen different nations. The mix, as usual, leans heavily on recent U.S. (six), Spanish (five), and Latin American (five) works, but also features the…
At a twenty-year remove, Star Wars comes off as less the work of a wizard than the weird obsessive outgrowth of an eccentric American primitive. George Lucas is a tycoon version of those self-taught craftsmen who fill back yards, storage rooms, and cramped city apartments with paintings or gewgaws or…
Hamlet (Kenneth Branagh) is Prince of Denmark. After his father (Richard Briers) dies, his uncle Claudius (Derek Jacobi) takes the throne and marries Hamlet’s mother Gertrude (Julie Christie). When the late king’s ghost reveals he was murdered by Claudius, Hamlet must decide what action to take. Meanwhile, he has been…
You can bet that at one point or another some executive wanted the title of this long-awaited nonsequel to 1988’s A Fish Called Wanda to be A Lemur Called Rollo (the story does include such a character). While that wouldn’t have been the most commercial of titles, neither is Fierce…
Lars von Trier is, perhaps consciously and defiantly, one of the least-commercial brilliant directors in the world. His best-known movie, the 1991 Zentropa, and his earlier The Element of Crime both open with hypnotic voice-overs, seemingly daring us to succumb to sleep before the credits are even over. Nonetheless, if…
Watching Reese Witherspoon incandesce in the role of a sixteen-year-old girl stumbling through the reform school of hard knocks in Freeway, I was reminded of what Pauline Kael said about John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever: “There is a thick, raw sensuality that some adolescents have which seems almost preconscious.”…
Governments may topple, stock markets may soar and crash, deadly viruses may mantle the globe, but one constant remains: Woody Allen still hankers for a Cole Porter-ized New York. You have to be a deep-dish romantic or a blinkered snoot — maybe both — to persist in such a demonstration…
When an incredulous Jane Campion fan asked what I hated about her version of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, I immediately responded, “Everything.” Actually, I thought Barbara Hershey, as the subtle villainess Madame Merle, made a good first impression: I laughed appreciatively when the heroine Isabel Archer (Nicole…
The People vs. Larry Flynt is a Hollywood rags-to-riches success story with a twist. The embodiment of the American Dream is a pornographer who admits to losing his virginity at age eleven to a chicken and is known for saying things such as “A woman’s vagina has as much personality…
Hollywood routinely creates movies whose sole reason for existing is to provide a beloved celebrity a showcase to deliver a scenery-chewing star turn; occasionally these films even win their lead performer an Oscar (recent example: Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman). But The Evening Star may be the first…
Now and again as I sit here on my power perch, having just praised some pleasing cinematic trifle with a mot so bon it could singlehandedly vault the producers into new tax brackets, or having characterized some hack with invective withering enough to permanently brand his pathetic career like some…
My first impulse in putting together a ten-best list for 1996 was to dispense with the new stuff altogether and go for the revival gold. The best films of 1996 were the re-released restorations: Vertigo, Strangers on a Train, Lolita, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and…
“Long live the consciousness of the pure who can see and hear!” That statement by pioneer Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov kept reverberating in my brain after my prime movie experience this year — watching his silent extravaganza, The Man with the Movie Camera (1929), with a score performed live by…
When we first see the character of middle-aged Australian David Helfgott (Geoffrey Rush) in Shine, he’s standing in the driving rain and tapping at the window of a wine bar after closing time. Let inside by a sympathetic waitress, he keeps up a nonstop nonsensical patter that makes him sound…
The stodgy works of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, makers of Howards End and Jefferson in Paris, have encouraged the sad notion that costume dramas must be leaden and respectable. Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility helped rehabilitate the stifled form, and now Patrice Leconte’s Ridicule ventilates it with yet more…
A famous movie composer once told me a joke: Two songwriters are sitting around and one of them says to the other, “I just saw the most amazing thing. A man fell off the roof of a building, hit a ledge, fell to the street, got winged by a bus…
Wes Craven, creator of the Nightmare on Elm Street series and writer-director of its two best entries (the first and the last), works within whispering distance of the commercial Hollywood mainstream, just far enough away to allow for more rude wit and less comfortable resolution than most studio product. His…
Why a movie of The Crucible now? Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem witchcraft trials was first staged on Broadway in 1953, when McCarthyism was still in flower, and it was not a resounding success. Now, of course, it’s a staple of rep theaters and high school and college drama…
