The Twentieth Century is replete with examples of unconscionable crimes carried out in the name of some quasi-political, military, or religious cause — acts of such misguided judgment and mindless brutality that they seem to cross an invisible threshold of decency, morality, and understanding. The My Lai massacre of 1968,…
Film has always turned to classic literature for inspiration, but rare is the film adaptation that dodges the Scylla and Charybdis of the trade: too much reverence leads to inert moviemaking, too little results in parody. In Time Regained Chilean director Raoul Ruiz has taken on the Mount Everest of…
Eddie Izzard knows precisely why he wanted to become a performer, be it an actor or stand-up comedian or, for that matter, a street performer entertaining passers-by for spare change. When he was 6 years old, Izzard was living in South Wales with his parents and older brother. Before that,…
Watching this film is like watching a donkey being beaten for 90 minutes, so egregiously is the titular character treated and so powerless does she appear against her offenders. That the abuse is treated in a comedic fashion for a good part of the film makes it even more unacceptable…
Have you heard? Beauty’s only skin deep. Pay attention now: When it comes to love, experience is the best teacher. And just in case you didn’t know: Youth is wasted on the young. Such are the banalities director Tonie Marshall dispenses, more or less, in Venus Beauty Institute, a French…
Outside avant-garde or experimental showcases, short dramatic films used to be little more than a means to an end — a risky route to an uncertain mainstream future. Getting one made usually was easy enough, as these things go. The hard part was getting it shown, especially if you were…
Quick, what gonzo visionary is a prime inspiration for many American directors, including Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, and Julie Taymor? The answer is Jan Svankmajer, an obscure Czech puppet master and filmmaker whose latest feature, Otesánek, makes its Florida premiere (and second U.S. screening) at the Mercury Theatre on Saturday,…
That anyone should consider making a film of Reinaldo Arenas’s memoir Before Night Falls is curious. That the person to do it should be painter-turned-film director Julian Schnabel truly is unusual. And that the results should be as good as they are is most remarkable of all. But it would…
The doomed often are a remarkably energetic and productive lot, especially when it comes to creating portraits of their personal horrors. Themes vary in intensity between slow self-destruction and grand devastation, but in vampirism the full spectrum of ghastliness may be covered, because the imbalance represents so much to so…
For 17 years, Dorothy Swanson has waged the loneliest battle: keeping good shows on television, a medium that exists as if only to taunt her. You can hear in her voice the toll such a struggle has taken on her. Her voice breaks and softens when she speaks about the…
Israeli writer-director Amos Gitai’s last film, Kadosh, was a claustrophobic tale of two sisters living in an ultra-Orthodox religious community in Jerusalem. The 1999 picture moved at a snail’s pace and turned an already rigid, divisive belief system into a completely alienating experience. In contrast the director’s most recent work,…
With the canon of Jane Austen all but exhausted, literary filmmakers continue their assault on Edith Wharton, another sharply observant writer of yore with something timeless to say about the plight of women. Terence Davies’ The House of Mirth, from Wharton’s beautifully detailed, ironically titled 1905 novel about a mannerly…
If M. Night Shyamalan makes movies to be seen twice, then Joel and Ethan Coen make films to be pawed over a dozen times. O Brother, Where Art Thou?, an opulent and often slapstick updating of Homer’s The Odyssey by way of Preston Sturges, Robert Johnson, and Clark Gable, sneaks…
At the time, it was meant to be read as a great compliment: Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez create comic books for people who don’t read comic books! A publisher or pitchman couldn’t have come up with a more glorious phrase, one magical sentence that would reel in the literate and…
For slightly more than a decade, Chinese martial arts films have directly and indirectly gained a growing audience in the United States. Now the genre may find its greatest breakthrough coming from an unlikely source: director Ang Lee, best known for comedy-dramas of social manners such as Sense and Sensibility,…
The war on drugs has become this generation’s Vietnam, the unwinnable conflict that will, in the end, destroy the innocent and reward the guilty. That, in a coke vial, is the premise of Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, a film that gives flesh and face to bloodless government statistics and statements seldom…
“You’re right! I quit!” Until this moment–this shrill outburst that comes out of nowhere and startles both interviewer and subject–Marisa Tomei had been speaking in hushed tones, like someone making funeral arrangements. Every so often, she would punctuate her sentences with giggles–some nervous, some delirious–but suddenly, she is laughing uncontrollably…
Welcome to the cinema, the great communal meditation chamber, circa 2000. Okay, now throw open all the exit doors, because some of our communal celluloid putrefied over the course of this year, and we’re going to clear the air by dispensing with the top offenders first. Whether it was the…
Thank God for old Jews with shaky hands and the inability to tell this word (G-O-R-E) from this one (B-U-C-H-A-N-A-N). Without them–and Survivor Richard Hatch, that self-proclaimed “fat naked fag” who, as is turns out, is just a really concerned parent and not at all, uh, abusive–it would have been…
Finding Forrester is the latest film from director Gus Van Sant, one of the true American originals to emerge in the Eighties and Nineties. When Van Sant is at his best, he gives us stories and images we’ve never seen before. Finding Forrester, however, is not Gus Van Sant at…
It’s where Walter Huston found paradise at the end of The Treasure of Sierra Madre, where the murdering lovers Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw rode into the sunset at the end of The Getaway, and where Thelma and Louise were headed when they ended up at the Grand Canyon. There…
If you consider Northern Ireland to be part of Ireland proper, then An Everlasting Piece easily may be the best Irish film of the year (not that the competition was too stiff — anyone remember The Closer You Get?). If, on the other hand, you consider the six counties to…
