I have a confession to make: I haven’t watched the annual orgy of stupidity, vanity, and self-congratulation popularly known as the Academy Awards in years. The Oscars are a farce, an abomination, a laughingstock, a repugnant folly, an insult to the intelligence of any moviegoer with even a modicum of…
Like the world itself, world music can be a scary place. When you don’t know a djembe from a darbukah, when nothing ever sounds even remotely like “Hot Blooded,” it’s easy to give up and play Graceland again. As the curious titles of its pair of recent releases might hint,…
The dreaded date movie. Snotty critics such as myself hate the genre because real-life moviegoers tend to hold date movies to a different standard: “Did you like it?” “Well, there was no story, the jokes weren’t funny, and the characters talked like somebody lifted their dialogue straight out of Cosmo…
If cynicism breeds contempt, obscurity can often breed cynicism. This is common knowledge in the blues world, which for decades has been overpopulated with hard-bitten also-rans untouched by the hand of popularity. For all the B.B. Kings, Robert Crays, and Buddy Guys out there who have parlayed their years of…
That Shakespeare fellow is all the rage at the cineplex these days. But as more filmmakers translate the Bard’s plays to the screen, the adaptions stray further and further from their source. Kenneth Branagh broke into the movie biz with his faithful version of Henry V in 1989, but his…
Last year’s Miami Film Festival introduced Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami to Miami audiences, and what an introduction it was. Kiarostami’s three films — Where Is My Friend’s Home?, And Life Goes On . . . , and Through the Olive Trees — were like nothing seen around these parts before…
Justino opens with the unsentimental butchering of a bull that has just met its end in the ring. As hammers, axes, and long knives do their dirty work in portentous grainy black-and-white footage, co-writers/co-directors Luis Guridi and Santiago Aguilar (they call themselves “La Cuadrilla” — “The Team”) let viewers know…
While each year the general public awaits the unveiling of a colorful poster heralding the arrival of the Miami Film Festival (February 2-11), I await the annual unveiling of an equally colorful excuse for not being able to preview festival films in time to meet my deadline. This year I…
Profiles of Kenneth Anger often express surprise that the legendary avant-garde filmmaker and author of the Hollywood tell-all books Hollywood Babylon and Hollywood Babylon II is, to quote Betsy Sherman of the Boston Globe, “cordial and soft-spoken in conversation, with no fangs in evidence.” After all, Fireworks, Anger’s first film…
Dead Man Walking offers many surprises, but none more astonishing than the mere fact that writer-director Tim Robbins — a man who has not been shy about stating his liberal political ideas in interviews — could avoid preaching, and present such a balanced take on a subject as emotionally charged…
You say you always wanted to go to film school but you couldn’t afford the tuition? You panic when some pompous cineaste such as me expounds upon the parallels between Pauly Shore’s work in Bio-Dome and Charlie Chaplin’s in Modern Times? You wouldn’t know Meliäs from Mayles, or Battleship Potemkin…
What a deliriously twisted opening to a wondrous flight of fancy called The City of Lost Children: Like millions of other children around the world, young Denree stays awake late on Christmas Eve awaiting Santa’s arrival. Suddenly the tail end of a rope appears at the bottom of the fireplace…
Last year one husband-wife/director-star team — Renny Harlin and Geena Davis — ran off to Malta to make a movie with some 70 million dollars of studio funds, then returned with nothing to show for it but an insipid little bit of derivative drivel entitled Cutthroat Island. Meanwhile, another husband-wife/director-star…
Finally, director Terry Gilliam (Brazil, The Fisher King) and screenwriters David Peoples (Blade Runner, Unforgiven) and Janet Peoples (The Day After Trinity) have managed to address the complaints of moviegoers upset by the quantity of gratuitous female nudity and the corresponding dearth of male nekkidness on display in modern U.S…
If you thought Anthony Hopkins made a convincing psychopath in Silence of the Lambs, just wait until you see Nixon. Hopkins doesn’t so much imitate the vile, vindictive little megalomaniac as reconstruct him from the ground up. From the browbeaten face poking out turtlelike from between hunched shoulders to the…
Frankie Starlight strives mightily (and succeeds intermittently) to couch itself in the warm, magical glow of a fairy tale. The story doesn’t start out much like a fantasy, though: Beautiful young Bernadette (Anne Parillaud) watches four of her friends get blown to bits by a mine that washes ashore on…
While Quentin Tarantino is no stranger to American audiences, one of his contemporary idols — Hong Kong noir director John Woo — is far less known on these shores. Woo’s unfortunate decision to team up with Brussels muscleman Jean-Claude Van Damme for the director’s big shot at crossover success, 1993’s…
If you took 1978’s California Suite, replaced screenwriter Neil Simon and director Herbert Ross with four of Hollywood’s hottest young filmmaking guns, each writing and directing his or her own twenty-minute segment, and then coated the whole thing with a fizzy, retro Love, American Style vibe, the end result would…
I hate compiling year-end top-ten movie lists. No, I don’t have a Woody Allen-esque objection to the concept of ranking works of art in a competitive fashion. Nor am I one of those haughty nose-in-the-air types who tell anyone within earshot that there weren’t ten films worthy of approval this…
When was the last time you saw a decent pirate movie? In recent years screen buccaneers have had better luck sacking filmmakers’ careers than they have a-pillagin’ and a-plunderin’. In 1980 Michael Ritchie’s The Island managed the extraordinary feat of out-dumbing the imbecilic Peter Benchley novel from which it was…
A young woman named Sabrina Fair, the daughter of the chauffeur for Long Island’s obscenely wealthy Larrabee family, misspends much of her youth perched in a tree spying on the dashing playboy David Larrabee as he seduces (and presumably abandons, although we never see the ugly part) a succession of…
“He loves her but she loves him And he loves somebody else, you just can’t win.” — J. Geils Band, “Love Stinks” The leap from Jane Austen novel to J. Geils Band song is not as great as you might think. In Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, dignified Colonel Brandon yearns…
