Wes Craven’s Scream, which opened almost exactly a year ago, was the surprise hit of an overcrowded Christmas season. The success was a triumph partly of counterprogramming: In the midst of a glut of classy Oscar contenders, Scream was the only teen horror film. It was also helped by the…
Steven Spielberg’s Amistad is being given the Big Picture treatment — Schindler’s List big, not Jurassic Park big. Last week’s Newsweek featured the film on its cover, calling it “Spielberg’s controversial new movie,” even though it had not yet been released and the only “controversy” was a legal one about…
What does it take to be an independent filmmaker? A few credit cards to max out, a few friends willing to work cheap, and a little faith in your own talent are about all you need to make a movie in the United States. But in China, to be any…
First, The Heiress was unofficially remade as Washington Square, then Ace in the Hole as Mad City, and The Day of the Jackal as The Jackal. But now we get The Absent-Minded Professor all dressed up in new threads as Flubber. In this frenzy of plundering the past, is nothing…
You can’t exactly call Alien Resurrection a pleasurable experience, but then again, you wouldn’t say that about its predecessors either. Directed by the Frenchman Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who previously co-directed (with Marc Caro) Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, this fourth installment in the Alien onslaught is once again designed…
Miramax held on to the Spanish comedy Mouth to Mouth (a.k.a. Boca a Boca) for better than a year before releasing it early this fall — usually a bad omen. (The film did screen locally as part of this year’s Miami Film Festival.) But although this romp from director-cowriter Manuel…
Over the past three years, 20th Century Fox has built an ambitious new animation studio in Phoenix, putting the promising Don Bluth and Gary Goldman in charge. The two were obvious choices. Since the animators defected from Disney Studios in 1979 to form Don Bluth Productions, they’ve turned out the…
John Grisham’s The Rainmaker lulls you into the mindset you get while reading a best seller at the beach. What a sad thing to say about a Francis Ford Coppola movie! Rather than heighten your awareness the way The Conversation or The Godfather did, The Rainmaker makes you feel lazy…
Documentarian Errol Morris is by far best-known for his 1988 feature The Thin Blue Line, which is often described as the only film that ever got an innocent man off death row. But he got his start with very different sorts of material: His first two films, Gates of Heaven…
This final dispatch from the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival begins with a pair of French imports, the first of which, Pour Rire! (translated as Just for Laughs), could have been nicely paired with last week’s Love, Etc. on a double bill titled “What Is This Thing Called Love?” In…
Continuing my rambles through the world’s longest-ever film festival, I couldn’t resist a peek at a tiny bit of the glitz that seems to be almost as important to these enterprises as the films themselves. I attended the opening night of the Boca Mini-Fest at a posh mall, Mizner Park…
Once more unto the breach: It’s film festival time yet again! But this one promises to be a Biggie; in fact, it’s being hyped as one of the world’s Ten Best, and definitely the longest. What are we talking about? Our own Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival, of course, scheduled…
Stylishness without substance can become wearying real fast. Twenty minutes into A Life Less Ordinary, the new movie from the producing-directing-writing team of Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, I was already into overload. It’s not that director Danny Boyle doesn’t have imagination. It’s just that occasionally imagination is all he has…
The true-life story of the Cottingley fairies is so full of possibilities, so thought-provoking and hilarious at once, that it’s amazing it has never been filmed before. Making up for lost time, two films have suddenly appeared, on the 80th anniversary of the purported sighting of these ethereal creatures. Photographing…
Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights opens with a sinuous, breathlessly extended tracking shot that swoops us into a San Fernando Valley disco and then does a curlicue around a succession of faces. In the discotheque’s low-lighted luminescence, these people pop out like jack-o’-lanterns. They have the look of trashy…
Jennifer Jason Leigh follows up one of her smallest, and weakest, roles (in A Thousand Acres) with a far more challenging, and formidable, performance in Washington Square, the new film version of Henry James’s 1880 novel chronicling the courtship of a wealthy girl with no obvious attractive qualities. But the…
It’s hard to fault The House of Yes, the wry toast of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, for its limitations as a film. In fact, it’s hardly a film at all — rather, it’s a barely staged, five-handed farce that trails its amiable cast around a looming Victorian mansion over…
Seven Years in Tibet feels more like Seven Days in the Movie Theater. It refuses to come to life — even when Brad Pitt, hirsute as a yak, wanders the frozen Himalayas with an Austrian accent that probably gave his dialogue coach the hives. The film’s an epic about how…
The Seventies were so awash in Fifties nostalgia that it’s surprising Going All the Way, the 1970 best seller by South Beach resident and FIU writing professor Dan Wakefield, is only now turning up in big-screen form. Of course, not all Fifties coming-of-age stories are the same: Unlike The Last…
Oliver Stone’s low-budget, hopped-up film noir U-Turn is being billed as a change of pace for the Conspiracy Dude, but actually it looks quite at home in the maestro’s hothouse. After all, aren’t conspiracies and the workings of fate what noirs are all about? Stone’s JFK pulped history with the…
Janeane Garofalo plows right through The Matchmaker with the same disgruntled sarcasm that typifies her testy, standard-bearer-for-the-underdog persona. Yet, try as it might to cast “America’s favorite anti-star” in a “romantic comedy for people who don’t like romantic comedy,” this film is a wholesale retread of Local Hero (which, in…
Critics and audiences outside France have been going on for so long about the decline in French cinema that it’s fun to see a French film — Irma Vep — that says much the same thing. The rap is, of course, somewhat unfair (most raps are), but there’s no question…
