The first shot in Steven Spielberg’s remarkable World War II epic Saving Private Ryan is of an American flag with the sun behind it. The image is somewhat diaphanous, the fabric having the transparent delicacy of a chrysalis. This is the perfect introduction to a movie about the fragility –…
Unlike Hollywood fare such as Dances with Wolves (1990), the new Smoke Signals is that rare drama about modern Native Americans that was actually written and directed by Native Americans. It feels genuine and heartfelt, quirky and whimsical, with a deft understanding of the characters’ problems. But the film is…
In The Mask of Zorro, Anthony Hopkins plays the eponymous masked man as if he were doing Shakespeare. He’s trying to turn a kitsch hero into a real one, and his efforts are so weirdly off-key that you don’t know whether to cheer him on or titter. This dolorous Don…
High Art is a low-budget, American independent movie about junkie-lesbian photographer Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy), who spends most of her time looking romantically mournful. She’s famished and abrasive and oh-so-world-weary. When she smokes cigarettes, she exhales in a way that can best be described as existential; the smoke curls out…
The winds that sweep across the Sahara kick up ferocious sandstorms. Dunes change shape by the hour, flying particles blind the eye, and all reason and sense of direction can be lost. In such disorienting surroundings, reality and hallucination converge; the most inexplicable, unimaginable events can occur. Passion in the…
Michael Bay is the director of Bad Boys (1995) and The Rock (1996) and the new asteroid-attack movie Armageddon, which should be called The Very Big Rock. He has, I’m afraid, perfected a new form: His movies are trailers for themselves. Every scene is all climax and no foreplay. When…
Armed again with the comedy of despair but with far more focus than the last time out (1995’s Kicking and Screaming), director Noah Baumbach takes on perhaps the most coiled and resilient of the seven deadlies in his bright comedy of manners, Mr. Jealousy. The affable Lester (Eric Stoltz) has…
Too many post-Woody Allen movies have been made about “sex in the head.” The smart, engaging Out of Sight is an action comedy about love in the head. The real thing ignites between bank robber Jack Foley (George Clooney) and U.S. marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) when she stumbles into…
There will always be a Britain, and very likely there will always be movies about the pluck and sacrifice demonstrated by the little people during World War II. Not Billy Barty-type little people — though surely there must have been a few of them involved — but the simple, salt-of-the-earth…
The 1967 screen musical Doctor Dolittle, which starred Rex Harrison, was a commercial disaster for its studio, 20th Century Fox. The new nonmusical Fox version, starring Eddie Murphy, isn’t in the same overblown category as the original film — its disasters are more mundane. It’s a kiddie comedy that really…
The X-Files is a movie that answers questions…. No, wait a minute: The X-Files is a movie that asks questions…. All right, The X-Files is a movie that makes me wanna ask some questions, like: What the hell does “Fight the future” mean? Look, I can understand “The truth is…
Hurricane Streets comes on like a tough cookie but ends up just plain stale. First-time writer-director Morgan J. Freeman (no relation to actor Morgan Freeman) plies the kind of beat-up, trash-can naturalism that went out with Sal Mineo films like 1957’s Dino. Set in New York City’s Lower East Side,…
It’s Christmas vacation, 1958. The movie my dad has chosen for a first-grade pal and me to see is the new Disney live-action adventure Tonka, starring Sal Mineo as a young Sioux named White Bull who traps and domesticates a clear-eyed, spirited wild horse named Tonka. Having seen The King…
Rule number one: When crafting a thriller, make sure the audience can relate to, identify with, or empathize with at least one of the characters. Rule number two: Make sure the characters’ motivations are clear. Fail in either area — or, worse, in both — and you end up with…
Most people associate the disco era with hedonism, homosexuality, a sense of community, tacky fashions, and awful music. But in his new The Last Days of Disco, writer-director Whit Stillman imagines the era as merely a singles bar for romantics in search of soulmates, mostly heterosexual and hardly debauchees. The…
The Truman Show, starring Jim Carrey, is the Zeitgeist movie of the hour. How could it not be? It’s all about the omnipotence of television and how our lives seem scripted by some unseen force — a TV producer, perhaps? Zeitgeist movies, almost by definition, are discussed not only by…
Only one week after lizards crawled across the country’s screens in Godzilla and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, along comes the bloated Hope Floats, toting a barge full of saccharine sentimentality and bogus emotions. Let’s start with the title, two words whose juxtaposition is neither evocative nor yielding of…
The “Size Does Matter” marketing campaign for Godzilla is far more ingenious than the actual movie. It’s also highly annoying, and has spawned a spinoff: The ads for a new film called Plump Fiction inform us that “Width matters too.” Perhaps the best thing about the much-ballyhooed arrival of Godzilla…
It’s the tail end of the 1996 California primary election campaign and incumbent Democratic senator Jay Bulworth (Warren Beatty) is having a nervous breakdown. Sleepless for days, famished, he channel-surfs aimlessly in the darkness of his office. In a rare moment of lucidity, he has an inspiration: He arranges to…
In director Barbara Kopple’s new documentary Wild Man Blues, we follow Woody Allen around Europe as he takes part in a whirlwind concert tour with the New Orleans-style jazz band with which he plays. He kvetches from the get-go. “I would rather be bitten by a dog than fly to…
Most disaster movies would be a lot better if they featured more disaster and less human drama. In Deep Impact the impending obliteration of much of the Earth by a pair of comets is merely the sideshow. The main event is a lot of goopy human-interest stuff: the daughter who…
The Horse Whisperer, the latest from Robert Redford — and the first of his directorial efforts in which he also stars — could almost serve as a compendium of Redford’s best and worst filmmaking tendencies. It features his eye for gorgeous, pictorial vistas, his straightforward narrative approach, and, most important,…
