The Sum of Us is an Australian vessel from stern to bow. David Stevens, an award-winning Aussie screenwriter (Breaker Morant) and filmmaker (the TV miniseries A Town Like Alice) scripted it. Jack Thompson, a fixture in Australian cinema as well as a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for Refugees and a…
Straight, middle-age widower Harry Mitchell just wants to make his gay son, Jeff, happy. Nothing wrong with that. But Harry tries so hard to encourage Jeff’s alternative lifestyle that he becomes a well-meaning nuisance. Eventually Harry learns that no matter how pure your motives or how badly you want to…
Here’s my fatal flaw as a film critic: After more than three decades of moviegoing, I still walk into a theater expecting the filmmaker to show me fairly quickly why I should give a damn about his protagonist. Experience has taught me that if I’m not hooked within the first…
During a question-and-answer session with the audience following the screening of the film Exotica at the Miami Film Festival in February, someone asked writer-director Atom Egoyan whether a closing shot of a troubled young woman entering an ominous-looking house signified that the woman was a murderer. Egoyan raised an eyebrow…
“I grew up in a town like Porpoise Spit,” confides Muriel’s Wedding writer-director P.J. Hogan. The Aussie auteur, who got his start in TV commercials and short features before landing a job as second-unit director on the 1991 gem Proof (which was directed by Hogan’s wife and Muriel producer Jocelyn…
Oh, to be the Dancing Queen. You can dance, you can jive, having the time of your life. See that girl! Watch that scene! Digging the Dancing Queen. Forgive me. I just get so carried away every time I hear those magic words, and I heard them a lot in…
Say this for Bye Bye, Love: A quick look at the title and the cast list and you have a very good idea of exactly what to expect A a glorified TV sit-com wrapped up in feature-film clothing. Paul Reiser, flush from the success of his popular TV series Mad…
How could anyone not pull for earnest, do-it-yourself filmmakers such as John Sayles and Maggie Renzi? Sayles tackles serious, challenging subjects — a coddled actress rediscovering her will to live after a paralyzing accident, violent labor union-management conflicts in West Virginia coal-mining country during the Twenties, the “Black Sox” World…
Why do men still run the world? Look at their track record: Millenniums have passed and they still haven’t figured out ways to avoid warfare, clean up the environment, eradicate poverty, and generally make the planet a better place to live. Along the way, technological advances have rendered their edge…
Rade Serbedzija, the actor who plays the doomed photojournalist Aleksander in Before the Rain, is quick to point out the irony of the powerful antiwar movie’s setting. The first major film about the ethnic conflicts that have torn apart the former Yugoslavia, Before the Rain takes place in Macedonia, which…
Writer-director J.F. Lawton is on the verge of creating a whole new subgenre of films: action movies for people who don’t really like action movies. Lawton authored the screenplay for 1992’s Under Siege, which accomplished the nearly impossible feat of making Steven Seagal look good. As a Cajun chef, no…
New ideas, new inventions, new fashions, new freedoms. A world on the verge of incredible medical and technological breakthroughs, yet still struggling with timeless bugaboos such as poverty, prejudice, and overpopulation. A rising tide of intolerance toward immigrants. Cynics, mystics, reactionaries, and charlatans vying for power, publicity, and pocket money…
“Trust and friendship. These are the things that matter, that help you on your way,” declares conservative accountant David Stephens in a heartfelt voice-over that opens the dark, demented Scottish comedy Shallow Grave. The statement will prove remarkably ironic. Helping David on his way are Alex, a glib newspaper reporter,…
Okay, I admit it. Sometimes, just like you civilian moviegoers, I succumb to the hype and convince myself to see a flick when I really should know better. For example, take the new Sean Connery vehicle, Just Cause. I like Connery because A) he is, was, and always will be…
You can’t get much of a feel for any of the films in Polish auteur Krzysztof Kieslowski’s three-colors trilogy from an examination of their respective plots. It would be like trying to guess the color of a man’s eyes by looking at his skeleton. Red is the final installment in…
Somebody please shoot me the next time I decide to attend a Herbert Ross movie. It seems like a century ago that the veteran hack made his best film, 1971’s Play It Again, Sam. And even then the picture’s success was undoubtedly attributable in greater measure to Woody Allen’s contributions…
Last year, my first as the movie reviewer here at New Times, the Miami Film Festival almost drove me crazy. I went berserk running to last-minute critics’ previews of festival offerings and fretting over the films I had yet to screen as my deadlines loomed. The logistics of transporting a…
The twelfth annual Miami Film Festival opens this Friday with local resident David Frankel’s sleek and smart Miami Rhapsody. Second-guessing the festival’s opening and closing selections has become an annual rite. I already have heard grumbling that a “deeper” film should have kicked off the schedule, something less facile and…
It’s a measure of the success of Roman Polanski’s screen adaption of Ariel Dorfman’s suspenseful, provocative play Death and the Maiden that by the end of the film one is not as troubled by the concept of WASP-y Sigourney Weaver playing a Latin woman named Paulina Escobar as by the…
On September 29, 1992, presidential candidate Bill Clinton publicly announced his support of a repeal of the ban on gays and lesbians serving in the U.S. armed forces. The public outcry was immediate. Opinion polls revealed a nation split fairly evenly on the subject. In January 1993, after taking office…
I have a number of bones to pick (sorry) with Demon Knight, a supposed horror movie from the perpetrators of HBO’s Tales From the Crypt anthology series. But the most damning criticism is the simplest: It just isn’t scary. Gross is another story. The filmmakers have trucked in barrels of…
One thing there’s no shortage of in this country is monitoring. Jesse Helms’s people monitor painters and photographers for homoerotic imagery or anti-Christian iconography. School boards monitor classic books for obscenity. There are even quasi-religious organizations out there that can tell you how many times Joe Pesci uttered variations on…
