Pity the poor classic-film lover. All of the great films have been seen, over and over. The only thrill left is to imagine what it might be like to see Citizen Kane or The Seven Samurai or Children of Paradise for the first time. If that’s your wish, you’re in…
Far too often, those who work in the music industry are so concerned with making a living they often forget they’re capable, at their best, of making history as well. They sacrifice art and artists in the name of commerce, then sleep soundly wrapped in bedspreads made of silk and…
After nearly a decade’s absence from the big screen, Suture auteurs Scott McGehee and David Siegel finally deliver a second feature with The Deep End, an exciting, sharply realized melodramatic film noir, based on Elizabeth Sanxay Holding’s novel The Blank Wall, which also was the source for the 1949 Max…
There is something fairly amusing about this title, Apocalypse Now Redux. Think about it: Prophetic Disclosure Presently Shows Up Again Newfangled. Of course in the ten years since the release of the documentary Hearts of Darkness, we’ve been taught to revere the legend of Francis Ford Coppola walking the line…
Astroll along the Miami River one recent Sunday evening didn’t seem particularly promising. The rains had subsided, the river flowed calmly, nothing much disturbed the slumber of a rusting freighter slouched along the north bank. Over at Tobacco Road, the regulars were huddled over beers, largely ignoring a boxing match…
Ten years ago, Robert Harris picked up the phone to find on the other end a relative stranger bearing extraordinary news. This man was at a film exchange in Toronto, where movies are housed and rented out to exhibitors, and he was holding in his hands canisters of film containing…
During this cinematic Summer of Dumb, it would be all too easy to celebrate half-assed cleverness as a virtue, especially when proffered by Bobby and Peter Farrelly, who elevated the gross-out to an art form (or, more likely, fart form) in Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary. Osmosis Jones, one…
Festering somewhere between an Afterschool Special and kiddie porn lies this frank but heinously melodramatic open wound from veteran Canadian director Léa Pool (Emporte-moi). Adapted by screenwriter Judith Thompson from the novel The Wives of Bath by Susan Swan, Lost and Delirious is about girl joy and girl sorrow, girl…
There is only one reason Jon Favreau’s new film is called Made. Not too long ago, his old friend and co-star Vince Vaughn called him up and told him, in no uncertain terms, “You gotta write something that can get made.” It was less a demand than it was a…
Times certainly have changed. Twenty years ago a musical about an East German transsexual rock singer would have premiered in one of New York’s off off-Broadway theaters or cabarets, run for a couple of weeks, and remained the pleasant memory of a select few. But when John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig…
Matt Stone has little time to talk. It’s Tuesday, July 17, 1 p.m. in Los Angeles, yet Stone and Trey Parker have yet to finish a television show that will debut some 30 hours from now–an episode of South Park titled “Terrance and Garfunkel,” in which the farting, fighting Canadian…
Get ready to sit. The busy summer film season in Miami continues with two remarkable events. The FIU-Miami International Film Festival will present the area premiere of Apocalypse Now Redux, the long-awaited director’s cut of the acclaimed Vietnam War film by Francis Ford Coppola. The multi-award winner featured those performances…
Robert Scott Crane insists he had no idea that people would be so fascinated with his famous father’s penis (or is that his father’s famous penis?). “We knew it would be big,” Scotty Crane says, “but we didn’t know how big.” He’s talking not about the member in question–of its…
Summertime supposedly is the slow season in South Florida, but you wouldn’t know it from the sudden explosion of film news and events happening or about to happen around Miami. There doesn’t appear to be a specific reason for this cineblitz, but the situation suggests both the pros and cons…
“I want you to suck my big dick. I want you to lick my balls.” Thus begins Larry Clark’s Bully, a return to Kids territory, following a forgettable detour into adulthood titled Another Day in Paradise that apparently didn’t kick up enough of a fuss for the guy. So he…
Back in her early teens, Reese Witherspoon proved herself a terrific actress in her big-screen debut, Man in the Moon (1991). Since then she’s done first-rate work in critical hits such as Pleasantville, cult faves including Freeway and Election, and underrated gems like Best Laid Plans. So how is it…
In the movies dead husbands and dearly departed boyfriends have an irksome habit of revisiting the women who once loved them — usually at inconvenient moments. Consider Demi Moore in Ghost. Poor thing had to put up with the dramatically challenged shade of Patrick Swayze, who droned on and on…
Originally, this was to be a story about how Stan Lee, the industry icon who ran Marvel Comics for decades and co-created Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, wound up remaking archrival DC Comics’ most venerable heroes in his own image. The 12-part miniseries, Just Imagine Stan Lee Creating, was set…
Even more than the recent Depression-era comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the turn-of-the-century drama Songcatcher is an absolute treasure trove of old-timey, traditional folk music. Set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia in the year 1907, the film follows city-bred musicologist Dr. Lily Penleric (Janet McTeer) as she…
A ragtag group of travelers, one of whom is a violent man prone to aggressive outbursts, rides in a ramshackle transport on a journey through dark terrain. Mostly they sleep peacefully, until an error in their navigation equipment becomes apparent and their vehicle breaks down in the middle of nowhere…
By his own definition, Bruce Campbell is a “midgrade, kind of hammy actor”–a B-movie star, in other words, a man whose career unfolds, like a Swedish porn loop, on Cinemax in the wee small hours of the morning. When I mentioned to a handful of people I was writing about…
For almost two decades, Stanley Kubrick wanted to make a film based on Brian Aldiss’s 1969 short story “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long,” about a robot child named David who wants only to be “real” so Mummy and Daddy will love him. The late director of 2001: A Space Odyssey…
