Last week I fretted that a nice, small film such as A Pure Formality would get lost in the stampede of ticket buyers in the throes of Batfever. I was half-right. Over the weekend of June 23-25, A Pure Formality registered as a mere blip on the winged rodent’s radar…
Amazing, really, the similarities between the brooding superhero of Batman Forever and the Priscilla-meets-Woodstock inhabitants of the documentary Wigstock: The Movie. Start with the obvious parallel: Batman patrols the mean streets of Gotham City in a tight batsuit that exaggerates his padded muscles; Wigstock’s drag queens strut their stuff in…
Well, Batman did it again. Swooped down just in time to save the day. An aura of resignation had started to permeate the superhero’s stomping grounds. (Gotham City? Get real. We’re talkin’ Hollywood, babe.) Just as surely as he dispatched nefarious supervillains Two-Face and the Riddler, the Caped Crusader laid…
What summer movie season would be complete without at least one film based on a Michael Crichton novel? Welcome to Congo, a shamelessly derivative jungle adventure that attempts to cross Jurassic Park and Raiders of the Lost Ark with King Kong but ultimately feels more like a bad Tarzan movie…
The South Beach Film Festival presents a juried showcase for small independent films (made-in-the-U.S.A. offerings predominate) that would not otherwise see the light of a projector in South Florida. Last year’s inaugural SoBe Fest included two outstanding features — Spare Me and The Making of “…And God Spoke” — and…
A handsome man in a snappy gray suit lies crumpled A unconscious? dead? A on a cobblestone street. A mysterious woman in black carrying a bright red purse to match her flaming crimson lipstick rounds the corner and cautiously approaches the body. She jostles the man with her foot. He…
I know a lot of women who proclaim loudly and often that men are dogs, but this is the first time I can recall seeing a film that takes the accusation literally. The main character in Carlo Carlei’s Fluke is a family man who dies in a car crash as…
I’m writing a screenplay. The first and second acts are finished, but I’m not sure how to end it yet. Help me out. FADE IN INTERIOR — MOVIE PRODUCER’S OFFICE — DAY A fat, cigar-chomping MOVIE PRODUCER sits behind an opulent desk. He rises to greet MEL GIBSON as the…
The topic of political asylum has generated much heated debate in recent weeks. When should you grant it? When should you say no? Politicians will ultimately decide the issue when, if you ask me, the job would be better left to experienced professionals. I’m thinking, of course, of those masters…
“We’ll always have Paris.” Those immortal words, uttered by Humphrey Bogart to Ingrid Bergman in the suspense-filled final moments of Casablanca, endure to this day as one of the most unabashedly romantic farewells of all time. Director Billy Crystal’s Forget Paris, as its title — a riff on the classic…
It’s hard to imagine Pulp Fiction without the key performances of Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson. Yet the two actors never actually played a scene together (although their respective characters briefly crossed paths). Willis and Jackson more than make up for that oversight in the mildly disappointing actioner Die…
Nothing in writer-director Christopher Monger’s filmography provides a clue that he was capable of spinning a yarn as enchanting as The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain. Prior to this release, the high point of Monger’s career was 1990’s diffuse comedy Waiting for the Light,…
Well, at least those idiots at the Motion Picture Academy (MPA) got this one right. Last month Nikita Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun copped the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. It’s a damn good film — I still prefer Before the Rain, but why quibble? And yet I swore…
Like The Perez Family, Steven Soderbergh’s new film, The Underneath, ultimately underachieves despite flashes of brilliance. Soderbergh tries his hand at film noir with disappointing results, largely because all the clever editing, time-frame juggling, droll dialogue, and unconventional camerawork cannot conceal a pencil-thin narrative that boils down to this: A…
It probably won’t do any good to preface this review with a disclaimer, but here goes: I wanted to like The Perez Family. I really did. May has been a sad month for movies about Latin Americans with the word family in the title. Last week I panned director Gregory…
I don’t know how I’d go about making the ultimate film about the Chicano experience in the U.S. without resorting to cliches and stereotypes. But I don’t feel so bad; Gregory Nava didn’t have a clue, either, and somebody gave him a pile of money to tackle the job. In…
Gerard Depardieu may well be the greatest actor in the world, but you can’t blame American moviegoers for doubting the veracity of that claim if their only familiarity with Depardieu’s work stems from his three strikes at cross-Atlantic stardom: Green Card (1990), 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), and My Father,…
I hope all the hue and cry over David Caruso’s decision to bolt from TV’s NYPD Blue to pursue a career as a leading man in Hollywood does not muffle the bang made by Nicolas Cage in Caruso’s first film since the split. Cage is in peak form in Kiss…
Any credibility the film version of Jim Carroll’s raw, seditious, autobiographical 1978 book The Basketball Diaries may have hoped to establish flies right out the window the first time you see Carroll’s Hollywood surrogate, Leonardo DiCaprio, attempt to dribble a basketball. In the literary Diaries, Carroll lives for the game…
Forrest Gump’s momma said it best: Stupid is as stupid does. Too bad Pauly Shore didn’t grow up under her care, as well. Stupidity is not just another word to Totally Pauly. It’s a vocation. Dumber than Dumb and Dumber, Pauly’s latest exercise in pointless poppycock and narcissistic nonsense is…
“Gluttony is not a secret vice,” lamented the late great writer-director-actor-bon vivant Orson Welles, a man as well-remembered for his prodigious girth as for his oversized talent. Marlon Brando, who vies with Welles for the distinction of being the most feared, respected, influential, and caricatured figure in post-World War II…
Far be it from me to second-guess the platinum-plated producing tandem of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. Money talks, and nowhere does its voice carry more weight than in Hollywood, where the Simpson-Bruckheimer team churn out sleek but vapid entertainments that regularly rack up spectacular box-office returns. Since their initial…
