“Ingmar Bergman is, in my most carefully considered opinion, the greatest filmmaker the world has seen so far.” (The italics are mine.) Those words were written by critic John Simon in 1972 in what remains the definitive book in English about the Swedish director, Ingmar Bergman Directs. But twenty years…
Pulitzer or no Pulitzer, David Mamet’s 1984 play Glengarry Glen Ross is not a masterpiece. Its salient metaphor, the ritualistic hard selling of worthless marshlands with quasi-poetic names such as Glengarry Highlands and Glen Ross Farms, is bludgeon-heavy in the extreme, this despite the recessionary economy of the Bush years…
Mbongeni Ngema’s agitprop musical Sarafina! enthralled American audiences during its long Broadway run: The stark contrast between the infectious mbaqanga rhythms straight out of South Africa’s embattled black townships and the cruelties of apartheid made it a political placard you could tap yourfoot to. The movie version is admirable but…
With one Eighties-chic, progressively atmospheric TV series on his resume (Miami Vice), another (Crime Story) applying the music-video aesthetic to the Sixties, a feature film about a techno-burglar with a heart of gold (Thief), and another (Manhunter) introducing the cannibalistic serial killer, few in their right minds would offer Michael…
The under-the-table political ethic of LBJ, Richard Nixon, and Watergate, the ascent of the Gipper in 1980 preaching the gospel of “morning in America,” the still unresolved legacy of Iran-contra, Bush and “read my lips,” right up to the current presidential campaign, with the models of Bush, Bill Clinton, and…
Woody Allen has spent the past fifteen years since Annie Hall prolifically staking a claim for cinematic greatness. Hardly a year has gone by without one or two films from the myopic, diminutive writer/director/performer, who wants as much to be a great artist as Richard Nixon wants to be a…
With Mel Brooks on the skids, Eddie Murphy retooling as Mr. Romantic, and Woody Allen all tied up in divorce court, somebody in the movies had to pick up the slack…yukwise. Enter Andrew Bergman, the fellow New York Magazine dubbed “The Unknown King of Comedy” back in 1985. Unknown no…
The fictional hamlet of Lumbertown in Blue Velvet, with its “sound of the falling tree” radio jingle, Eisenhower-era veneer of community values, and visions of singing robins overcoming the real — though often surreal — forces of darkness as personified by Frank Booth, Dorothy Vallens, and their fetishistic underworld cronies,…
Made in 1980 on a shoestring budget — and looking every bit as dirt-cheap as John Waters’s deliciously trashy Baltimore chronicles of the early Seventies — Pedro Almodovar’s Pepi, Luci, Bom has the courage and outlandish invention of new discovery. For not only was Spain enjoying a honeymoon with life,…
Many ignorant critics have lately waxed enthusiastic over what remains a questionable kinship between E.M. Forster’s “Italian” novels — the early Where Angels Fear to Tread and later A Room with A View, both adapted to film within the past five years, and directed, respectively, by Charles Sturridge and James…
There is a stateliness and repose, a stillness even, in the shots of the land in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven that persuasively evoke the pervasive mood of the film — melancholy — and help underscore its predominant theme: death. The majestic vistas of Alberta, Canada, have served Eastwood’s generous, retrospective glance…
Speaking of genres, the woman-in-jeopardy movie has been getting quite a working-over lately, from Sleeping With the Enemy to A Stranger Among Us. Whispers in the Dark is a fairly fluent example of this stereotypical crowd-pleaser: The film is tension-packed, mystery-laden, and ably acted. And there’s a bonus: Psychiatrists will…
Bill Cosford of the Miami Herald, a dependable critic who has had to sit through his share of turkeys over the course of a long tenure covering movies in this area, hinted at a pervasive problem when he assessed 1992’s films in a column last Thursday. After dutifully clumping together…
The title sequence of Robert Zemeckis’s Death Becomes Her promises a much funnier and more adept black comedy than what eventually comes to pass. On the Broadway stage in 1978 (the year is important), Madeline Ashton (Meryl Streep), a waning theatrical diva, stars in a musical production adapted from Tennessee…
Never having been a great admirer of Jean-Luc Godard, aging daddy of the French nouvelle vague, I was rightly suspicious with his showering praise on the little-known Jon Jost, naming the latter the current best among America’s independent directors. Given the source, it is certainly a dubious tribute, as complimentary…
To any casual moviegoer, it comes as no surprise that a starlet now growing quite long in the tooth like Melanie Griffith should show up in an embarrassment such as A Stranger Among Us. From 1988’s passable Working Girl to this year’s abominable Shining Through, Tippi Hedren’s problem child has…
When it opened in 1989 — the same week as Batman — I was delighted by Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and its Lilliputian adventure set in a suburban back yard teeming with giant blades of grass, ants, puddles, bumblebees, and scorpions. “An adventure yarn in the tradition of Fantastic…
When Sinclair Lewis received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930, one bemused onlooker, George Bernard Shaw — a winner of the same award in 1925 — made the following observation: “I have defined the hundred percent American as ninety-nine percent an idiot.” No doubt Shaw’s scintillating wit would be…
Eddie Murphy’s metamorphosis from foulmouthed ghetto comic into suave leading man is now almost complete, but so far it’s been about as successful as Woody Allen’s bumbling reincarnation as a lox-and-bagel Cary Grant. Because at least when Murphy was talking dirty and raising feminist hackles, he brought some hyperkinetic energy…
Set in a hazy, non-specific, post-apocalyptic future, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s black-hearted satirical comedy from France, Delicatessen, makes no attempt to conceal its sources of inspiration, pictorial and thematic: A predominant one is Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (which, of course, drew from wide literary sources such as Orwell’s 1984 and…
One False Move is a knuckleheaded title for a diminutive detective thriller — particularly as, both in its plot and the filmmaking in general, there are about as many false moves as barbecued ribs at a wild hog jamboree. Directed by former actor Carl Franklin and written by another actor,…
A work of mesmerizing lyrical power and profoundly human dimension, Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust celebrates the bond of women, the richness of culture and tradition, and the mystery of nature with bracing, impressive authority. Unlike so many of our contemporary media products passed along the popular-culture conveyer belt,…
