The Road Home is the tenth feature from Zhang Yimou, still the mainland Chinese director best known to international audiences. (His closest competition is Chen Kaige, who made Farewell My Concubine and Temptress Moon.) His latest film has a couple of things going for it: It represents a synthesis of…
Alan Cumming is, in no particular order, the following: an actor, a pop icon, a Renaissance man, a sex symbol, a bon viveur and the boy next door. “I am a combination of all those things,” insists the 36-year-old Scot, who punctuates every other sentence with a sly giggle that…
Who would have imagined that at this late date — more than half a century after the end of World War II, after The Diary of Anne Frank, Schindler’s List, Au Revoir, Les Enfants, Pierre Sauvage’s documentary Weapons of the Spirit, and Jan Kadar’s amazing The Shop on Main Street…
If internal combustion ever becomes obsolete — that is, if the auto industry ever allows internal combustion to become obsolete — whatever will movies do for heart-stopping drama? Hoof beats are dramatic, and the chug of a steam engine is suspenseful, but the roar of a gasoline-powered vehicle stirs the…
For the next five days, Richard Lewis will seldom leave his North Dallas hotel room, hidden away at the far end of the top floor with a view of overpasses, office buildings and distant dark clouds. He will venture out only to visit a couple of radio and television stations,…
In the annals of social change, Alma Schindler is strictly small potatoes, and Bruce Beresford’s new biopic, Bride of the Wind, unwittingly threatens to erase her altogether. For those who don’t have the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at their fingertips, Alma (Sarah Wynter) was an outspoken party girl from…
Up for a quick trip across the United States? If you can’t spare the time and gas money, an alternative might be the “road” movies currently screening as part of the Reel America Film Series at the Wolfsonian-FIU in Miami Beach. The idea behind the minifestival is to “explore travel…
At this moment, Baz Luhrmann, control freak and self-proclaimed ringleader of conspirators “who conspire to something greater than ourselves,” is not in control at all. The cameraman trailing behind him, like a faithful puppy awaiting treats, does not work for the director; rather, he is in the employ of the…
When he was in his thirties, Ivan Reitman made comedies like a young man. His early movies, among them Stripes, Meatballs, and Ghostbusters, were messy, cocky, charming, daffy, and restless; they did anything for a laugh, even if that meant dousing John Candy in mud or Bill Murray in a…
Now here’s a tricky one. Start with a busload of familiar and appealing stars shacked up together for a couple of weeks in a house in the Hollywood Hills. Assign them their mission: to emulate themselves — sort of — while dutifully reminding us that human relationships can be complicated…
Tamra Davis is bound by contract not to discuss the film that, at this very moment, she’s editing for release next year. “I’m officially not supposed to do any press for it,” the director says sheepishly, so she offers a few off-the-record comments about the movie, a road-trip comedy-drama starring…
Just when we culturally deprived, mystery-starved Americans were convinced that that most delicious of movie genres, the French thriller, was dead and buried, a literate and exciting new filmmaker named Dominik Moll has emerged to revive it — and set our nerves exquisitely on edge. It’s a minor miracle that…
Chalk up another one for George Dubya. A few weeks ago the U.S. Immigration Department refused to allow acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, director of both the Oscar-nominated The White Balloon and the Venice Film Festival Golden Lion winner The Circle, to change planes in New York on his way…
“Now wait a minute,” you may ask yourself during the setup of Ken Loach’s new film, Bread and Roses. “Is that Tom Green? Because it sure looks like Tom Green, and judging by the way he’s climbing into that garbage can, he certainly acts a bit like Tom Green….” Well…
The publicist asks if I’d like to speak to D.A. Pennebaker to commemorate the 60th birthday of Bob Dylan, which falls on May 24. She asks this because, during the spring of 1965, Pennebaker made a documentary about Dylan’s tour of England, Dont Look Back, which captured a drained, cagey…
Welcome to the movies of summer 2001! Of course whether you’ll actually feel welcome is another issue: Hollywood is doing its usual stuff to attract the most dollars, which may not always mean your dollars … unless you belong to that centrally crucial demographic — males, ages 13 to 25…
Chopper, the first feature from Australian video director Andrew Dominik, is a strong, effective, but often stomach-churning portrait of notorious Aussie criminal Mark “Chopper” Read. It can be characterized as sensational — in both the positive and negative senses of the word. According to the filmmakers, Chopper Read is a…
There are not many stories left buried in James Ellroy’s past. In 1996, at the age of 48, he penned his memoirs, in which he paired his life story with that of his dead mother, Jean Ellroy, a nurse found strangled and beaten in the bushes of suburban Los Angeles…
ids might well be amused by the frenetic pacing of Shrek, the latest computer-animated film from DreamWorks, which moves so quickly it’s nearly a blur, though they need not get the jokes to enjoy frolicking in the muck (and the maggots) with a green, snaggletoothed ogre who wants only to…
With his hangdog face, rumpled overcoat and black beret, Tobias Schneebaum looks like one of those wild-eyed old men you find in, say, Prospect Park, absentmindedly feeding the pigeons and ranting on to exactly no one about Leon Trotsky, nuclear physics or the ’52 World Series. Time has taken its…
Heath Ledger, wearing the scowl of the anxious and uneasy, is having trouble standing still. He most certainly would rather be anywhere but here: killing time in a TV studio, waiting to be interviewed during a live afternoon newscast. Waiting to promote his new movie. Waiting to assume the guise…
Irish. Sex. Farce. These are not three words you see snuggled up together very often. Given the ironclad no-no’s of the Catholic Church, the preoccupations imposed by political troubles for the past eight centuries or so, and frequent commutes to the local pub, the Irish probably haven’t had much time…
