Admirers of Juzo Itami (The Funeral, Tam-popo, A Taxing Woman, A Taxing Woman's Return) will want to see his 1991 film, A-Ge-Man: Tales of a Golden Geisha, featuring a nicely shaded performance by its star Nobuko Miyamoto as Nayoko the geisha. Watching the sympathetic Nayoko do everything in the world for some of the biggest jerks in Japan can be a bit taxing after 108 minutes…
I wanted to include Nightmare Alley in this book, but there's no way it qualifies as an indie. How 20th Century Fox allowed Tyrone Power to sacrifice his spectacular good looks to play a carnival geek and how Edmund Goulding managed to make a movie that uncompromising under the studio system is one of the great mysteries of Hollywood, circa 1947. So I'm including this Brit flick prod…
Abel is a weird little Dutch film written and directed by its star, Alex Van Warmerdam, who plays a 31-year-old child still living at home with his parents.
Julien Temple's underrated Absolute Beginners provides an unsettling portrait of London circa 1958. The film has been criticized for its lack of character development and for its last-minute attack on racism, and although these flaws are real, there is much worth seeing and hearing in this flashy study of the emergence of the British teen. Magnetic performances by David Bowie and Sade, amus…
Reviews for Acting on Impulse were decidedly mixed, but it's a hoot! Linda Fiorentino IS angry scream queen Susan Gittes, who's had it with her Hollywood “career” and walks off the movie set. She checks into a hotel (as “Dee Dee Slaughter”) where a convention for pharmaceutical sales representatives is being held (zzzzzz…)…
Actors and Sin is HALF of a very good movie, produced independently by Ben Hecht (1893–1964), who adapted two of his short stories for the silver screen. Hecht shared directing chores with cameraman Lee Garmes (1898–1978) and cast Edward G. Robinson (temporarily on the Hollywood grey list) and blacklisted Marsha Hunt in “Actor's…
Abel Ferrara's The Addiction is to Ms. 45 what Francis Coppola's The Cotton Club was to The Godfather: a structural re-tread only worshippers at directors’ shrines could love.
Adoption focuses on a pair of women, one 42, one 17, both of whom are entrapped and want to free themselves.
It isn't everyday that I receive pawtographed press releases from a dog and a cat, so I have to admit I was more than a little curious about The Adventures of Milo & Otis, a 1989 Japanese blockbuster with obvious international appeal. I think that grown-ups will enjoy the picture as much as their kids, although I did notice three exhausted fathers snoozing during a Saturday morning m…
When 1992's Strictly Ballroom became an international hit, exhibitors were eager for MORE offbeat Australian movies that would do as well. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert fit the bill. Who would ever imagine Terence Stamp, the Oscar-nominated, impossibly gorgeous Billy Budd in Peter Ustinov's superb 1962 film of the same name, would EVER play a drag queen named Berna…
Okay, so this is no Fritz Lang masterpiece, but for science-fiction buffs, it's a genuinely intriguing curiosity. Made the year that Lenin died and Stalin took over, it looks like the production team had fun with this one, especially the three art directors and the costume designer. Even then, was anyone taking the script all that seriously? For instance, who gets to go to Mars? One invento…
If you were born into a violent alcoholic family, Affliction is the last movie you'd want to see on a dark and rainy Monday night. Even strong men who watch action flicks without flinching find Affliction a deeply painful film to watch. That said, the sight of Nick Nolte sitting very still on Oscar night, March 21, 1999, while many of his colleagues gave director (and friendly HUAC w…
John Huston cooperatively made films under the studio system between the ages of 35 and 45: five for Warner Bros., one for Columbia, and two for MGM. After chafing at the bit for a full decade, he wanted to make movies his way and without interference. (Huston's The Red Badge of Courage ended the 27-year reign of MGM's Louis B. Mayer, who lost a production dispute with Dore Sc…
Jim Thompson's tightly written novels grab you by the throat and never let go until you finish reading them, usually about an hour later. I wish I could say the same thing about James Foley's movie version of After Dark, My Sweet. But alas no, and definitely no. This is a clear case of aficionados being so in love with the original source material that they attempt a meticulous �…
Actor Griffin Dunne reportedly abstained from sex while making After Hours because director Martin Scorsese wanted to maintain the tension of his character throughout a long Soho night filled with weird experiences and strange prowlers-who-only-come-out-when-it's-dark. Dunne plays a Manhattan computer guy with no money who's confronted first by Rosanna Arquette, Linda Fiorentino, and…
This featherweight variation on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is only partly redeemed by the fact that the always-good Nick Nolte and the ever-charismatic Julie Christie are in it. Lara Flynn Boyle's character is so vapid, it sounds as if she were modeled after a single blind date in Hell. As for Jonny Lee Miller, I can take him as a trainspotter, as a hacker, but not as some roman…
The best scripted film of 1978's San Francisco International Film Festival may well have been Robert M. Young's Alambrista!, a compassionate study of the Mexican immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally in the late 1970s in search of better employment. Focusing on one unmarried father named Roberto (touchingly played by Domingo Ambriz), Young reveals the frightening, n…
In 1965's The Ipcress File, Michael Caine as Harry Palmer made ordinary blokes with glasses seem as sexy in their own way as Sean Connery did in the James Bond films. In 1966, he won an Academy Award nomination for best actor in the title role of Alfie, as a rake who outsmarts himself. Alfie fancies himself a man about town. He wants to be free and easy, but he's as trapped by the se…
Alice has been identified by the folks at Roxie Releasing as “militant surrealism.” It was one of the San Francisco International Film Festival's rare treats in the spring of 1988, and although it is certainly an unusual adaptation of the Lewis Carroll Wonderland classic, it is not as obsessive and scary as many grown-ups might have you believe.
All Over Me opened to mostly favorable reviews because of its sympathetic treatment of gay themes, and its fine cast, even though it's much clunkier than producer Dolly Hall's 1995 breakthrough release, The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love.(Hall also produced High Art in 1998, which drew the best notices of Ally Sheedy's career.) This one's …
Allonsanfan stars the wonderful Marcello Mastroianni as a grudging revolutionary, circa 1816.
When film lovers conjure up memories of strong women in the 1940s, they may recall Joan Crawford with her thick lipstick and Jesse huge shoulder pads, but my favorite unsung actress of that era is Lynn Bari. Bari was a cool brunette with a deep hypnotic voice who glided through 70 films for 20th Century Fox between 1934–56. In the early days of her career, she would pass in and out of the p…
The presence of Eric Roberts in a movie like Larry Cohen's The Ambulance shows how his career has changed from the heady days when he was an Oscar contender. The Ambulance has all the trappings of an old-fashioned mystery: Roberts plays a cartoonist who falls for a mystery woman (Janine Turner) on the street. Before she passes out and is taken away in an ambulance, she slips h…
Canadian writer/director Sandy Wilson came up with this sequel to her 1985 hit, My American Cousin.
Take a good look at Jeff Bridges’ performance as Jack in American Heart and then ask yourself what this three-time Oscar nominee has to DO to win an Academy Award. Bridges deservedly received recognition as Best Actor at the Independent Spirit Awards for his lived-in performance as an ex-convict, filled with despair and forced by circumstances to care for his adolescent son, Nick (su…
American Matchmaker is an archival treasure filmed in Yiddish by legendary cult director Edgar Ulmer in 1940.
The big name cast may lure you, but you'll be chafing at the bit within the first few seconds of Michael Covert's American Strays.
Soupy Sales as Moses, Eve Plumb as Mrs. Noah, Lou Ferrigno as Cain; yeah, those are the first actors you think about when casting a Biblical epic, right? …And God Spoke is a mockumentary on the making of the nonexistent movie of the same name. It focuses on the trials and tribulations of two independent producers (Clive Walton and Marvin Handleman, played by Michael Riley and Stephen…
In spite of all the hands that have clearly fiddled with And the Band Played On, it is still as good a film as we are likely to get anytime soon about the early years of the AIDS epidemic. And if millions decide to watch it only to see dozens of big stars acting their hearts out in cameos, they may still learn more about AIDS than they have from the guarded sound bites that represent their major s…
Jane Campion's An Angel at My Table began life as a three-part series on New Zealand television, which (dare I say this?) is the best way to see this 157-minute movie. After all, it is based on three different autobiographical novels by Janet Frame, To the Island, An Angel at My Table, and The Envoy from Mirror City. Kerry Fox plays Frame, who was misdiagnosed as a schizophren…
This strange movie about two little girls growing up with a depressed mother (who somewhat resembles Marilyn Monroe) was written and directed by Rebecca Miller, the daughter of Arthur Miller.
We know that something's off from the very beginning of Angels and Insects; Paul Brown's surreal costumes are a dead give away. In spite of or, perhaps, because of them, William Adamson (Mark Rylance) determines to marry Eugenia (Patsy Kensit). Eugenia is lovely, but vague. There's something wrong with the marriage from the start, and William isn&#x…
Anna is a showcase for Sally Kirkland, who tears into the role of a neglected Czechoslovakian actress with all the passion of a neglected American actress who has no time to waste reserving her energy. Kirkland gets down and dirty with this part, and she has the artistic courage to sacrifice her own good looks in order to create a more believable portrait of Anna, who has both good and bad days. L…
There were two prior movies of Lucy Maud Montgomery's (1874–1942) classic novel, but Kevin Sullivan's version starring Megan Follows is far and away the best. In 1911, William Desmond Taylor (1877–1922) directed Mary Miles Minter (1902–84) in a Paramount film scripted by Frances Marion (1886–1973). Mi…
One of the saddest things about 1987's Less Than Zero (besides watching the way-too-believable performance of real-life substance abuser Robert Downey Jr.) is realizing that the director of that abysmal flick, Marek Kanievska, had helmed one of my favorite films of 1984. How could the man who made Another Country, one of the most sensitive films EVER about homosexuality, appea…
This is the most accessible film by Marleen Gorris, whose previous efforts include 1983's A Question of Silence and 1985's Broken Mirrors. It's a family saga revolving around matriarch Antonia (Willeke Van Ammelrooy) and her large clan. The male characters are mainly utilitarian necessities here, but that's a step up from the murder victim/serial ki…
What do movie buffs do in the daytime? Some people wonder, but not for very long. If you go to the same theatre night after night, you'll see the guy who wears the same shirt every night and switches his seat six times during the movie, the guy who routinely arrives an hour late (or 23 hours early), the guy who chain smokes in between features and never looks at or talks to an…
I once knew a character who joined a monastery to atone for his sins. The notion of making peace with the people he had hurt didn't occur to him. I thought he was full of hooey and wasn't surprised when he left the monastery to start a “new” life with an entirely different cast of supporting players. Not long into the 134-minute running time of The Apostle, Texas Preach…
The Applegates is the story of a colony of misguided Amazonian arthropods who believe that their only chance for survival depends on the extermination of the human race. They send a family of four bugs to Ohio. Their mission: to impersonate a nuclear family of humans named Dick, Jane, Sally, and Johnny, and then blow up a nuclear power plant. Ed Begley Jr., Stockard Channing, Camile Cooper, and Bo…
I've listened to DOZENS of after-the-fact stories from teenage girls seduced by adult males and from adult males who seduced teenage girls. The girls always seem to affect a cynical tone about experiences that clearly turned their lives upside down. The men are more flip; it was no big deal, she wanted it, she was screwed up anyway, yackety-yack. So Jennifer Montgomery's Art for Teac…
If you want to watch Zbigniew Cybulski (1927–67) when he helped to put Polish films on the international movie map, don't miss Ashes and Diamonds. For marketing purposes, American publicists referred to Cybulski as the Polish James Dean, an over-convenient but apt comparison. Cybulski wore tinted prescription glasses throughout Ashes and Diamonds because of vision probl…
Cinda Firestone made this documentary with her folk's money (the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company).
For a film buff, discovering a movie like Aventurera is better than finding buried treasure. Before I saw it, I'd never heard of its star, Ninon Sevilla, and now I can't wait to see some of her other movies (like 1949's Senora Tentacion and 1956's Yambao) even without subtitles and cut up with commercials on Spanish-language television channels. The pace o…
An Average Little Man is two films in one, really: half wildly funny, the other half gratuitously violent. Alberto Sordi, Shelley Winters, and Vincenzo Crocitti deliver superb performances as an excited family preparing for the son's (Crocitti) first examinations for employment. Their lives are normal enough until something goes hideously wrong, and the family crumbles for rea…
After Four Weddings and a Funeral, everyone wanted Hugh Grant to be exactly like Charles, the eligible luvvie he'd played in the film, for the rest of his natural life. That's quite a severe sentence, when you think about it. And then An Awfully Big Adventure came out and Grant suggested (undoubtedly with tongue firmly in cheek) that he was more like evil Meredith Potte…