I'm always leery of movies with the proviso “Patient viewers will be rewarded.” That usually means that I will feel bored and guilty for 90 to 120 minutes, wondering what in the world is happening onscreen that is so blazingly wonderful. Cabeza de Vaca has received some nice notices from Daily Variety, the Village Voice, the L.A. Times, and Time magazine, but I felt like I wan…
Based on the true story of an anonymous woman who raised her two children alone after her husband ran off with her best friend, Caddie makes a hopeful statement for strong, resilient women who don't spend their lives waiting for a romantic prince to sweep them off their feet, but make the best of circumstances, even when they're dreary. Unable to find any other job but as a bar maid,…
John Knoop's 45-minute documentary Cafe Nica is too short to do justice to its subjects, the Nicaraguan people affected by war.
Regardless of the budgetary constraints of Caged, which were clearly considerable, the stakes in this San Francisco indie by first-time director Rand Alexander are way too low for a feature. Charlie Caine (Michael Todd) has visions of being a director of commercials rather than the legal depositions his job requires him to record on video. But Charlie's life is as clueless as …
The life of Camille Claudel offers several good answers to the age-old question (probably asked by a man!): “Why are there no great woman artists?” For one thing, many make the mistake of sleeping with great male artists! For another, artistic cliques, standards, and histories are dominated by men. When I first tried to look up Camille Claudel, only recognized as a majo…
Dead of Night initiated a long line of horror movies in which a framing device of people telling stories to each other turned out to be even scarier than the stories. Campfire Tales continues that esteemed tradition over half a century later and while not in the same league as its classic inspiration, it's still pretty scary. “The Hook” is a black-and-white nod to drive-in fod…
Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death was my favorite of all the movies I rented in the month of March, 1990. It features a change of pace role for Shannon Tweed, who was then featured on the Playboy Channel in Barbi, Shannon and Candy, a tribute to three former Playmates. In Cannibal Women, she plays a feminist anthropology professor. My favorite character in the movie is Bunny, her worst…
Careful is receiving the sort of ecstatic (and strategically placed) reviews that assure it a place in cult movie circles for many years to come. On the basis of its unique visual style alone, it is well worth a look, but whether Careful succeeds in luring you into its spell may depend on your ability to accept the artistic choices of its director, Guy Maddin. Careful is a movie I fo…
Carmen Miranda. The name alone conjures up memories of Technicolor Fox musicals of the ‘40s at their zenith. Carmen Miranda was a bundle of energy and mischief, and the first Brazilian entertainer to become an international superstar. She was also to solidify the Latina standard for the silver screen. As Rita Moreno, who won an Academy Award six years after Miranda's death, observed …
For many years, Carnival of Souls was my idea of a genuinely scary movie, far more frightening than Frankenstein or Dracula. In fact, if I watched Carnival of Souls while babysitting, I wanted to wake up all the kids so they could protect me from its terrors. Carnival of Souls was the only feature ever made by Herk Harvey, who was stiffed by distributors in 1962 and never made a dime on the film&#…
Watching movies can be DANGEROUS! No, really. I read a decent review of this movie and went dashing out to see it before it closed. The first thing that happens, there's this jagged metal THING in the seat in front of me that gashes my knee and I'm bleeding all over a sticky theatre floor littered with dried-up popcorn and trampled-on bubble gum. Drat, and I left my hydrogen peroxide…
People who say that a woman is ahead of her time are usually men. Since so little is expected of them, women often follow paths that make more sense to them as individuals than to anyone else, including many of their male biographers. Dora Carrington was an early 20th century eccentric and a wonderful painter. She fell in love with the witty, sickly, and broke gay writer Lytton Strachey. Although …
The advertisements for Castaway promised romance on an idyllic island. This sort of promotion may be a publicist's dream, but audiences expecting a Harlequin-style fantasy won't find one in this 1987 Nicolas Roeg film starring Oliver Reed and newcomer Amanda Donohoe. Instead, the film asks author Lucy Irvine's question, “Why do I have to be stuck on an island with him o…
Cat and Mouse is a straightforward murder mystery, graced by the presence of gorgeous Michele Morgan.
Admirers of Inspector Thomas Pitt had to wait nearly 20 years to see him on film, and red-haired Eoin McCarthy fills the detective's shoes as if he'd been born to solve unspeakable crimes. One of the best things about The Cater Street Hangman is that the first credit reads The Inspector Pitt Mysteries, which means that we can expect Callendar Square, Paragon Walk, Resurrection Row, R…
Caught is about Nick (Arie Verveen), a youthful drifter who gets caught up in the lives of a middle-aged couple, Betty and Joe (Maria Conchita Alonso and Edward James Olmos), who own a Mom-and-Pop fish store in Jersey City. When Betty and Joe's adult son Danny (Steve Schub), now a married parent, comes home, he is angered by the fact that his place …
Australian writer/director Ann Turner offers one of the few honest depictions of the dark side of childhood, as seen by a nine-year-old girl growing up in the 1950s. Rebecca Smart is remarkable as the little girl who turns to voodoo magic in an effort to cope with unfair grown-ups, unyielding politicians, and cruel playmates. The character of Celia has been compared by some critics to Rhoda…
Michele Soavi's Cemetery Man played at selected Landmark Theatres in the spring of 1996 to generally grumpy reviews, but for goofball entertainment, I thought it was a kick to watch. It was certainly a helluva lot more fun than Paul Schrader's My Dinner with Androids, I mean, The Comfort of Strangers, which came and went in 1991. Rupert Everett stars again as a bit of an idiot, but a…
In spite of the fact that portions of Center Stage were shown out of sequence at the Berlin Film Festival, Maggie Cheung still won a much-deserved Best Actress Award for her breathtaking performance as Ruan Ling-Yu. Variety's review was just a tad chilly, although its critic neglected to mention the mixed-up reels at the screening in his report, tsk-tsk. He did describe the “inadequa…
Century is everything The Age of Innocence wanted to be and wasn't: an atmospheric recreation of the mood and feeling of a vanished time. Martin Scorsese tried to accomplish this with an extravagant budget and extended close-ups of lavish meals. But money and food, however useful in real life, shouldn't have the burden of stealing scenes from the actors. With a much smaller budget, w…
Remember Max Ophuls’ classic 1950 film La Ronde, based on Arthur Schnitzler's play? The one in which just about everyone in an all-star cast (Anton Walbrook, Serge Reggiani, Simone Simon, Simone Signoret, Daniel Gelin, Danielle Darrieux, Fernand Gravet, Odette Joyeux, Jean-Louis Barrault, Isa Miranda, Gerard Philipe) had affairs with each other? So did Roger Vadim, who …
I wonder if the real William Douglas Street ever saw 1960's The Great Impostor, in which Tony Curtis as Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr. teaches school without a credential, impersonates a novice in a Trappist monastery, works as a prison warden's deputy, and performs a successful operation as a Canadian naval lieutenant without a medical degree. At any rate, Street (Wendell B. Harr…
Ring Lardner's bitter short story about the lionization of a loser who bullied his way to the top of the fight game was transformed into a larger-than-life portrait of an anti-hero by the soon-to-be-blacklisted screenwriter Carl Foreman. Many of the illustrations that made the original yarn so cynical are included in the film, but the approach changed completely. Midge Kelly is a jerk becau…
Chan Is Missing is the first movie I saw in a theatre that I remember trying to press the pause button so I could rewind the film to see a favorite sequence twice (I got my first VCR in May, 1982). Obviously, I couldn't do it, but the impulse was there. It's about a couple of taxi drivers in San Francisco who hunt for Chan after he vanishes with their five grand meant t…
With Richard Attenborough at the helm, Chaplin promised to be yet another overblown movie biography, and that it certainly is. However, it is largely redeemed by the truth that its gifted cast succeeds in conveying onscreen. The centerpiece of the movie is Robert Downey Jr., who is nothing short of superb in the title role. Moira Kelly also delivers absolutely beguiling performances as Chaplin�…
Sydney Chaplin (1885–1965) is the whole show in this delightful silent comedy. Charlie's handsome older brother is a charmer as Babbs (AKA Lord Fancourt Babberly), and he's even better as the sweet little old lady who's supposed to be “Charley's Aunt from Brazil, where the nuts came from.” The REAL Donna Lucia D'Al…
After the award-winning Clerks and the critically panned Mallrats, writer/director Kevin Smith worked hard on his third film. The result, Chasing Amy, is his best effort to date. It certainly contains a beautifully written, star-making role for Joey Lauren Adams as its central character Alyssa, and two carefully observed male characters (Holden and Banky, played by Ben Affleck and Ja…
When you're looking for a third film to round out a triple feature for an upcoming N.A.M.B.L.A. meeting (the other movies being For a Lost Soldier and Happiness, naturally), Chicken Hawk is sure to fit the bill. Its filmmakers offer a platform to male lovers of boys, so you're mostly stuck with their rationales. The most extreme is a spacey older gent who's convi…
Children of Paradise/Les Enfants du Paradis was made in France over a two-year period between 1943 and 1945 during a time when the Nazis had overtaken the country. The Nazis demanded severe restrictions not only on the content of French films, but also on their length. Director Marcel Carne and screenwriter Jacques Prevert envisioned a lavish historical epic that was twice the length of an …
In the fall of 1963, Anton Leader tried to duplicate the success of the original Village of the Damned with Children of the Damned. Ian Hendry and Alan Badel (both wearing obvious rugs) run around town trying to figure out what an international batch of alien-spawned children have in mind. Barbara Ferris is on hand to translate because NONE of those whiz kiddies can act. To make a st…
The Children of Theatre Street marked Grace Kelly's (1928–82) return to the big screen after a two-decade absence.
The Chocolate War gets off to an irritating start. Writer/director Keith Gordon crams its first few minutes with stylistic flourishes that serve to confuse rather than intrigue, especially since this flashy approach is soon abandoned in favor of a straightforward narrative. Then it wrings more dramatic mileage out of the annual school candy sale than you would ever have thought possible. We…
If you enjoyed Jeremy Irons’ performance in Barbet Schroeder's vastly overrated Reversal of Fortune, or even if you didn't, you might enjoy seeing him in A Chorus of Disapproval, directed by Michael Winner. Winner began his career in 1957 by directing This Is Belgium. Strapped for funds, he shot much of the travelogue in the British suburban town of East Grinstead. He achieved…
Elizabeth Hurley is famous today for her boyfriend, her cleavage, her clothes, her commercials, and her delightful comedy performance in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. She also made quite a splash in England as the title character in Christabel, based on a true life story set in World War II. When I was looking for something else on the British Drama shelf at Le Video, I discovered C…
The girlfriend of Cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro) has just left him, and while he drowns his sorrows in a pineapple binge, he tries to see if any of his old girlfriends will go out with him. Then he meets a tough blonde drug dealer (superstar Bridget Lin)! The girlfriend (Valerie Chow) of Cop 663 (Superstar Tony Leung) has just left him, and whil…
If you ever saw the 1979 Thames television series Hollywood: The Pioneers, you already know what meticulous documentarians Kevin Brownlow and David Gill are. Still available on home video, the series revealed the silent movie era, not as creaky, dusty subject matter suitable mainly for museum browsing, but as the vital, hypnotic period for art and entertainment that it really was. Well, Brownlow a…
Cinema Paradiso, Italy's winner in the 1989 Oscar competition, is half of a great movie. Its simple premise is that motion pictures have a profound effect on all our lives. For the first hour, this theme is charmingly illustrated by the evolving friendship between Alfredo, the movie projectionist in a small village, and Toto, a little boy who adores him. Toto also adores flammable nitrate f…
This superb satire takes no prisoners in a razor-sharp examination of both sides of the abortion issue. Laura Dern is terrific as Ruth, a glue-sniffing, pregnant, unfit mother of four who is busted for fetus endangerment, and then learns that the judge will go easy on her if there's no fetus to endanger. Faster than you can count up to 400 bucks, Kurtwood Smith and Mary Kay Place as Norm an…
The story of Russian murderer Andrei Chikatilo and the 52 people he killed may have been too horrifying for the big screen, too horrifying and too difficult to access. No one except criminologists and scientific researchers wants to get inside the mind of such a man, and Soviet Russia denied he even existed between 1982 and 1990. The investigator assigned to the case is Dr. Viktor Burakov (…
Again, no one asked me, but City of Hope was a much worthier contender for Picture of the Year than Silence of the Lambs. John Sayles’ rich portrait of the complexity of urban life offers sharp, revealing performances from Vincent Spano as Nick, Joe Morton as Councilman Wynn, and Tony LoBianco as Nick's father Joe. Sayles exposes the “any means necessary” approach to de…
I'm one of the viewers who said, “Huh?” after watching this movie. Then I heard a much-televised promotion in which a critic described it as “eye candy.” It isn't for children, but it focuses on them, so I guess it's for grown-ups who are on the edge of their seats at the notion of an inventor stealing kid's dreams because he can't hav…
Vince Vaughn wants to play Lonesome Rhodes in a reprise of the role immortalized by Andy Griffith in 1957's A Face in the Crowd. Just thinking about the gifted Vaughn as a sleazy, media-driven character is a mouth-watering prospect, since Vaughn IS Lester Long in Clay Pigeons, the first film for screenwriter Matthew Healy and for director David Dobkin. Both Healy and Dobkin dive into the fi…
Schizophrenic Peter Winter (Peter Greene in a stunning performance) is searching bleak Miscou Island, off the New Brunswick coast, for his young daughter, whom his mother put up for adoption after Peter was institutionalized and his wife died.
Clerks is a promising first film by Kevin Smith about a clerk in a convenience store and a clerk in a video store. It's everything a first film should be: funny, fresh, and original. It was shot in black and white on a budget of $27,000, and its gritty, cinema-verite quality made it seem almost like a slice-of-life documentary rather than the scripted fiction film it really was. Repo…
Four audience members walked out of the advance screening of Closet Land, a heavy-handed and overly stylized film about the psychological torture of a female political prisoner. Closet Land is a “safe” propaganda film produced by Ron Howard with the blessing of Amnesty International. Who is going to be FOR the torture of a pretty young woman in a flowing white dress? Both actress Mad…
Strong performances and mature story lines distinguished many of 1994's entries at the 18th Annual International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. The highlight of Stephen Whittaker's Closing Numbers is a bravura performance by the much underrated Jane Asher, who hasn't had this meaty a role since she made Deep End with Jerzy Skolimowski in 1970. Asher plays a happily married wif…
Tim Whelan's Clouds over Europe/Q Planes, released less than six months before World War II, shows how much Great Britain had changed in the 18 months since 1937's Non-Stop New York. There is a not-so-subtle grim edge to this playful treatment of pre-war espionage. Clouds over Europe made a great impression on 16-year-old movie fan Patrick MacNee, who stored away his impressio…
Award-winning actress Tatyana Vasilyeva stars in Leonid Gorovets’ Coffee with Lemon.
Someone must have had cold feet about making Cold Feet because Thomas McGuane's screenplay sat on the shelf for nearly 13 years. This starring vehicle for Oscar-nominee Sally Kirkland is supposed to be a comedy. The press kit even let reviewers know what the funny parts are and why; if you don't laugh, well, heck, maybe you just don't have a sense of humor. The film is 94 minu…
Lola Albright is a meltingly lovely blonde from Akron, Ohio, who will probably best be remembered for her role as a nightclub singer in television's Peter Gunn series. Although she created a vivid impression in 36 movies between 1948 and 1977, Albright received just one starring role onscreen, in 1961's A Cold Wind in August, based on the Burton Wohl novel. Albright plays a 40-week-a…
The way that critics pounced on Coldblooded, I thought its filmmakers were trying to produce a snuff film or plagiarize Pulp Fiction or both. That's until I actually sat down and watched this low-key satire. Clearly, its original audiences didn't appreciate first-time director M. Wallace Wolodarsky's sense of humor at all, but I did. Jason Priestley is Cosmo Reif, the bookie o…
When we look at early images of television, an atmosphere of false innocence saturates everything we see. We don't think of the real-life Donna Reed, infuriated by relentless male visions of what the perfect wife and mother should be, we don't think of the real-life Robert Young and his offscreen struggles with alcoholism, we don't think of the real-life Nelson family, nearly …
While living in L.A. at the end of WWII, Chinese-American John Lee (Peter Alexander) learns that the Yosemite Valley Railroad is being scrapped and becomes determined to save it, in part as an homage to his grandfather, who emigrated to work as a railroad laborer. A romantic train fanatic himself, Lee arranges financing from wealthy businessman Pinchot (John Diehl) but …
Combination Platter was made by Tony Chan when he was only 23 years old. It gives us a light-hearted, sharply observed look at the immigration experience, as seen from the perspective of Robert (Jeff Lau), who comes to New York from Hong Kong without a green card. Robert's helpful friend Andy (Kenneth Lu) introduces him to women, even though Robert is shocked by …
1961's Last Year at Marienbad has gone begging for the perfect film to round out a double bill suitable for residents of Limbo and/or Purgatory. Now at last there IS one! The Comfort of Strangers, the latest from everybody's favorite divinity school dropout: Grand Rapids, Michigan's own Paul Schrader. Let's hear it! Or to be more precise, let's hear whaaat…
Robin Askwith looks as though someone once gave his face a severe punching. He stars as the “romantic” hero of four London-based comedies, in which he discovers new professions and different sets of women on the job. It's difficult to believe that Askwith could attract such frenzy from his female patrons, but he does have a certain awkward appeal. In spite of the relentless sc…
A chill sets in every time I see the gutless “Conformist” in Bernardo Bertolucci's classic adaptation of Alberto Moravia's 1951 novel. And then, a few years go by, and I'm swept up in the film's spell all over again as if I were watching it for the first time. I suspect that the film would have been unbearable to watch if any other artist than Bertolucci h…
Sylvester Stallone gives the performance of his life in Cop Land, James Mangold's outstanding film noir about a rarefied community of policemen who take care of their own by any means necessary. The story opens with a high-speed police chase on the George Washington Bridge. Young cop Murray Babitch (Michael Rapaport) thinks he sees something in the car of two black kids out fo…
Cosi received a single press screening in San Francisco sometime in 1997, then the theatrical engagement was canceled and I heard no more about it until I saw it on a video shelf. It created quite a splash in Australia in the spring of 1996, so its last-minute yanking is something of a mystery. P.C. jitters, maybe? Who knows? It's about the determination of the residents of a mental hospita…
Jim Thompson was an Oklahoma-born paperback writer who wrote riveting tales about superficially boring people with humdrum routines and hellish interior lives. Thompson wrote two screenplays for Stanley Kubrick, and four of his novels have inspired both American and French filmmakers. In 1982, Bertrand Tavernier made Coup de Torchon/Clean Slate, switching Thompson's Pop.1280 locale t…
From King Kong to Tootsie to Blue Sky to Cousin Bette, Jessica Lange has worked hard on her unusual career. The large range of unconventional roles she has played would never have been offered to any one actress in the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood. Cousin Bette IS a part any full-blooded actress would sacrifice her beauty to portray and Lange is wise to take on character star turns at this st…
One of the most delicious releases of 1976 was Jean-Charles Tacchella's Cousin, Cousine. This tender French offering is a gentle, lyrical story about two distant cousins who meet at various family gatherings and how they gradually fall in love. Marie-Christine Barrault and Victor Lanoux play the lovers with delightful subtlety. They are wonderfully supported by a cast that includes Guy Marc…
No question about it, Crash is one strange flick. Only in the movies do we ever see couples with the same sexual intentions glance at each other for less than ONE second and find themselves in lustful embrace the very NEXT microsecond. In Crash, no one asks anyone, “Voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir?” or “Why don't we do it in the City Dump?” Everyone just KNO…
If you want to make sure your script gets made right, produce it yourself: Hal E. Chester's tough, uncompromising drama of six convicts attempting a prison Crashout is dominated by the no-holds-barred performance of William Bendix as Van Duff, a badly wounded con. Duff has wild dreams of buried wealth, which he says he'll split with the other five if they'll do something about…
One of the best Dario Argento titles available on home video (if you're lucky enough to run across the uncut 109-minute original INSTEAD of the chopped-up 82-minute version) is the 1985 horror classic Creepers. It stars Jennifer Connelly, then 15, whose youthful beauty was strikingly comparable with that of the young Elizabeth Taylor, and who was certainly a much better actres…
Ah, the joys of 1957, when men were men and women twiddled their thumbs. Kathy Ferguson (Barbara Stanwyck) begins this movie with an exciting job as a columnist for a San Francisco newspaper. She even plays a key role in clearing up a murder case. She's en route to Manhattan on a fast-paced career track, when she makes a quick stop in Los Angeles to meet Detective Lieutenant B…
Criminal Law opens with a sequence in which attorney Gary Oldman is shown defending a wholesome-looking killer portrayed by Kevin Bacon. Oldman destroys an eyewitness account because she was wrong about when she last purchased diapers. If she was wrong about the diapers, Oldman contends, why couldn't she wrong about identifying the murderer? Sure, says the jury, and Bacon is a free man. At …
Heck, even half the cast of Critical Care would drag me into a theatre. But the half-baked script by Steven S. Schwartz is crammed with meet cute/evolve cute/resolve cute situations, and in one unbearable sequence, a dry-eyed James Spader as Dr. Werner Ernst actually quivers his lip in the lackluster tradition of Douglass Montgomery. Who? My point, exactly. Let me outta here! The nad…
Sean Penn comes of age as a mature screenwriter and director with this beautifully rendered study of forgiveness. Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston play the divorced parents of a little girl killed by hit-and-run drunk driver David Morse, who has just completed his term in prison for manslaughter. Huston is re-married to a patient, decent guy and has come to terms with her grief over her lost chi…
An American film of Arthur Miller's The Crucible would have to wait until 1996, but the landmark play WAS filmed in 1957 by a French production company in East Germany, which meant that only art house patrons got to see it in America. It starred Simone Signoret (1921–85), Yves Montand (1921–91), and Mylene Demongeot, then 20, and the screenplay was …
Watching Crumb made me think about Grey Gardens, the 1975 documentary the Maysles brothers filmed about the odd mother and daughter who were related to Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. There are so many odd mothers and daughters on the planet; were those two chosen only because they were so closely related to the First Lady? Watching Crumb also made me think about Gates of Heaven, the 1978 documentary …
There's something deeply satisfying about seeing a real menace onscreen. No explanations, no excuses—she's bad because she's bad and that's that! Marcia Gay Harden, who played sultry Ava Gardner in Sinatra and soft-hearted Shelby Goddard in The Spitfire Grill, IS Lane, a genuine Wicked Woman of the Silver Screen. Don't be her friend, don't go to bed…
Amaze your friends! Ask them who was the first singer to make “The Crying Game” a number-five Brit Hit for 12 weeks. They will say, “Boy George, of course,” and you will say, “No, Dave Berry, on August 6, 1964,” and since the entire U.S. of A. was pre-occupied with The Beatles’ first national tour in August, 1964, they will say, “Who?”…
Subtlety is in short supply in Sam Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class, a first effort by director J.
Cutter's Way, by Ivan Passer, was quickly identified as new-age film noir by the few people who actually saw it during its original 1981 run. It is not, however, the comfortable sort of film noir which makes it easy for you to go willingly wherever the hero wants to take you. Cutter's Way is an intensely uncomfortable film to watch and there are no heroes anywhere in sight, just thre…