Face to Face is an unrelieved downer, but a brilliant one. Liv Ullman plays Jenny, a psychiatrist with a dull, mean family, who tries to kill herself. She is saved by a fellow doctor (Erland Josephson) with problems of his own: his young male lover just left him for a wealthy female patron. Jenny's world is SO unpleasant: her grandmother leaves her alone when she is ill, her h…
It's hard to imagine that there are two more adorable little actresses than Florence Hoath and Elizabeth Earl as Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, two delightful amateur photographers who may or may not have captured real fairies on film. The filmmakers of FairyTale: A True Story more or less take the account at face value, showing contradictory evidence but preserving the pure enchantmen…
Baines and Julie (Ralph Richardson and Michele Morgan) are having an affair, and mean Mrs. Baines (Sonia Dresdel) doesn't like it. Meanwhile, Phillipe (Bobby Henrey, then 9) is bored and lonely (no parents in sight), so he hangs out with his hero Baines and with Julie, and steers clear of Mrs. Baines. Then Phillipe believes that he�…
False Weights lumbers along for 145 minutes.
Fargo was 1996's sentimental favorite, according to longtime admirers of the Coen brothers’ amazing body of work. From 1985's Blood Simple to 1987's Raising Arizona, from 1990's Miller's Crossing to 1991's Barton Fink, the Coen brothers have thrust their black comedies into the American consciousness in bold and inventive ways. The good-hearted poli…
To see three voluptuous evil pussycats do bad things onscreen was an experience not to be missed in 1965! In fact, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! continues to play to packed art houses and commercial theatres to this day. It's a guaranteed rent payer! Tura Satana (The Astro Zombies, The Doll Squad) IS Varla, Haji (Motor Psycho) IS Rosie, Lori Williams IS Billie, P…
The Favor, the Watch, and the Very Big Fish might have been a screwball comedy for the early 1990s, if anyone had drifted into movie theatres to see it. It stars three endearing actors, Bob Hoskins, Jeff Goldblum, and Natasha Richardson, as three strangers who drift into an intriguing romantic triangle. Along the way, writer/director Ben Lewin (who based his film on the Marcel Ayme s…
Fear begins promisingly and even features a low-budget earthquake sequence.
The posters for A Feast at Midnight are evocative of the heady days when Christopher Lee reigned supreme at Hammer Studios: “A 500-year-old school. A prehistoric form master…And a 10-year-old chef.” The 10-year-old chef is Freddie Findlay, who is introduced as Magnus with this film. Lee is Major Longfellow (AKA Raptor), his mean Latin professor. And the 500-year-…
Ralph (Nicholas Turturro), Nicky (Anthony De-Sando), Frank (Michael Raynor), Bobby (Jason Andrews), and Joey (Robert Turano) are longtime Italian buddies in Providence, Rhode Island, and they still meet at Joey's every week to play cards. Ralph (a thief) and Nicky (a drug dealer) are best frien…
With 27 days to go in the 1992 presidential campaign, Kevin Rafferty and James Ridgeway's Feed could not have been released at a better time. Here are the candidates as they would rather you had NEVER seen them, getting ready to go on television and trying to create a Presidential impression. Only Jerry Brown just can't seem to cover that dang bald spot of his, no matter how much he …
The Feldmann Case represents the outstanding debut of director Bente Erichsen, who wrote her screenplay after reading the novel Echo from Scream Pond, based on a true World War II story about the Norwegian underground.
Female Trouble is John Waters’ favorite movie.
I got yelled at for enjoying this movie and grilled afterward: “Wouldn't you rather watch a GOOD movie than a BAD one?” Not necessarily! Fire Maidens from Outer Space, which looks like it was shot in someone's backyard, revolves around the efforts of five astronauts to save the Fire Maidens of Jupiter's 13th moon from this whatchamacallit in wrinkled long underwe…
Rene Feret's First Communion is a portrait of a family over a 100-year span; it has much the same effect as the spinning pages of a huge scrapbook filled with the faces of people who may mean a great deal to each other, but not to a stranger who casually picks up the scrapbook.
If you're looking for a pattern in the career of Oscar-winning screenwriter John Patrick Shanley, try to figure out what Moonstruck, Five Corners, The January Man, Joe Versus the Volcano (which he also directed), Alive, We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story, and Congo have in common. That isn't a trick question, because heck if I know, either. Shanley is capable …
There's something about Ben Stiller in a movie that just makes me go AAARGH. He shows up in Reality Bites: AARGH. He shows up in this one: AARGH. He may be a terrific guy offscreen, but onscreen he reeks of Yuppieville. Maybe he should grow a beard. Get a growl in his voice. Anything to give him an edge. David O. Russell's movie has so many edges, you might think that one of them wou…
Slapdash, skin-deep look at a couple of rappers who team up with a third (authentic rapper Darryl Mitchell as Rich's cousin Kayam) to achieve fame.
For a Lost Soldier was San Jose's opening night selection at the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in 1993. It arrived with an impressive award from a festival in Turin. A grownup choreographer (Jeroen Krabbe) reminisces about those good old World War II days when he was a boy of 12 or so and had a fling with a grown-up soldier. Their fairly explicit romps in bed are shown as warm…
For Queen and Country is bogged down with good intentions and by characters who function as symbols rather than as people. The thrust of the film is that Great Britain does not care about the lower classes, and if the country makes use of a poor man in wartime, he can expect a life of hopelessness when he returns home. Denzel Washington is so good in the central character of Reuben that he grabs o…
Yeah, if I made a fictional indie with a moniker like The Beans of Egypt, Maine, I'd consider giving it a catchier title, too. It sounds like a National Geographic documentary instead of the soap opera that it is. Actually, that IS the title of Carolyn Chute's novel and it IS about the Bean family who live in Egypt, Maine. The head of the Bean family of nine is Reuben (Rutger …
François Boyer wrote the screenplay for Les Jeux Interdits in 1946, but World War II was over and no one wanted to see another war movie. So he turned it into a novel and producer Robert Dorfman WAS interested in making a movie of a successful book. An entirely new screenplay was drafted by Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost with director Rene Clement (1913–96), who decided …
Peter Jackson's Forgotten Silver may be an eyelash too clever for its own good. It looks like a documentary of a forgotten New Zealand filmmaking pioneer named Colin McKenzie, but it's essentially a reconstruction of silent movie history if an obscure bloke, rather than D.W. Griffith, had been responsible for early cinematic innovations. (If you've ever seen The Missing…
Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud) is one troubled 12-year-old kid. His mother (Claire Maurier) wanted to have an abortion when she learned she was expecting him and Antoine knows it. She is unfaithful to his father (Albert Remy) and both are indifferent to Antoine. He skips school, steals, and lies about the cause of his behavior by saying that his mother…
Like 1992's Strictly Ballroom, Four Weddings and a Funeral is the sort of delicious confection that actually improves with repeat viewings. It's the story of a dashing bachelor named Charles (Hugh Grant) who goes to wedding after wedding, screwing up left and right (he loses vital wedding paraphernalia LIKE THE RING, has a severe case of foot-in-mouth disease, is…
Alain Corneau's France, Incorporated offers a shattering sci-fi speculation on what life would be like in the year 2222 if hard drugs were legalized.
At the beginning of Frankenhooker, we see the extremely pretty Elizabeth, whom boyfriend Jeffrey Franken thinks is too fat. On the other hand, Jeffrey looks and is just plain weird. He wants Elizabeth to be perfect and when she meets her demise in a freak garden accident, he makes careful plans to reassemble her. And so yet another Frankenstein variation is born. This one is pretty good, probably …
There have been close to 100 movies made about Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, so why not yet another variation on the legend from the one and only Roger Corman, directing his first film in decades? This is the third film in four years to make use of the Byron-Godwin-Shelley triangle (Gothic and Haunted Summer were the others) but they're mainly in this picture as atmospheri…
Frankie Starlight was among my favorites at 1995's crop of films at the San Francisco International Film Festival. The stars on the record are Anne Parrillaud, Matt Dillon, and Gabriel Byrne, but the real stars are Alan Pentony and Corban Walker, who play the title character as a child and as an adult. The film shows what led up to Walker writing a novel about his tragic mother (Parr…
The Free Tibet movie is a lot like the Free Tibet concert of June 1996: One Big Blur. To truly enjoy the two-day event at the Polo Fields in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, you didn't have to be 14 years old, but it helped. You didn't have to be bombed (I wasn't), but it helped. You didn't have to be an amnesiac about better concerts of the ȁ…
To me, THIS is the golden age of the movies. To be sure, Hollywood studios are still the same cumbersome, second-guessing, bandwagon-climbing monstrosities they've always been. But in the bad old days, actors who wanted to try something different in the low-budget independent arena found themselves in professional coventry for the duration. Some of their careers never recovered from the ind…
A BORING movie starring Jeanne Moreau and Marie-France Pisier? Sad, but true.
After Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock made The Birds and Marnie with Tippi Hedren, a beautiful former model with serious limitations as an actress, then Torn Curtain, with the miscast and mismatched Paul Newman and Julie Andrews, then Topaz, which is so boring that it hardly seems like a Hitchcock movie at all. When Frenzy, his first British film since 1950's Stage Fright, was released in June 197…
Twelve-year-old “Fresh” (Sean Nelson) is a New York drug runner, working for heroin dealer Esteban (Giancarlo Esposito) while living with his Aunt Frances (Cheryl Freeman) and his many female cousins. He isn't supposed to see his down-and-out dad Sam (Samuel L. Jackson), but does so anyway, and learns how to play speed ch…
This is THE babysitter movie to watch when you're alone with a baby whose parents have gone out for dinner and your boyfriend wants to keep you company and you suspect that the baby's mother might have a homicidal ex-husband lurking about the house. This is Amanda's (Susan George) dilemma, and what she faces when nice Dr. and Mrs. Helen Cordell (John Gregs…
The Frightened City has oodles of repeat value because the plot will zoom out of your head five minutes after you see it. Herbert Lom and John Gregson star as Waldo Zhernikov and Detective Inspector Sayers, and Sean Connery is billed third as Paddy Damion. His hairline is quite high here, so I suspect that IS a rug he's wearing in 1962's Dr. No and all the subsequent Bond films. All …
An interesting blend of humor and the private eye genre can be found in Rex Pickett's From Hollywood to Deadwood.
Jean Seberg was a pretty blonde from Iowa who was voted “most likely to succeed” when she graduated from high school in 1956. The following year, she was the first teenager to play Saint Joan onscreen. She received enormous publicity prior to the film's release, but both Seberg and director Otto Preminger were raked over the coals by critics and audiences alike. (The Ha…
Even if avant-garde film isn't your favorite type of movie, I highly recommend what Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi have done with From the Pole to the Equator. These two filmmakers from Milan assembled their film from 35mm nitrate originals shot in 1910 by early Italian cinematographer Luca Comerio. Comerio traveled with an adventuring baron named Franchetti and captured some ext…
There were a number of feel-good date movies in 1997: The Full Monty and Good Will Hunting were among them. They were both mainly about guys, but gals didn't mind going to see them because the male stars were so cute, did cute things, et cetera. In The Full Monty, they had cute butts. The word I heard over and over again from delirious fans about this Brit indie is “original.”…
The past and the future are in color in Fun, the present is in grim black and white. The protagonists are two very young girls who share confidences and cuddle after spending the most fun day they'll ever have together. What's their idea of fun? Going to malls, hanging out, playing games, ringing doorbells, and yelling at the occupants. Oh, and brutally stabbing to death a sweet litt…
Johnny Tempio (Vincent Gallo) has been murdered, and as Ray (Christopher Walken) and Chez (Christopher Penn) recall their brother's short life at his funeral, they are obsessed with avenging his death. Whodunit? Gangster Gaspare Spoglia (Benicio Del Toro)? Ray's and Chez's wives (Annabella Sciorra and Isabella Ross…
For me, the jewel of 1995's San Francisco International Film Festival was Peter Chelsom's Funny Bones, about which the less said the better. Funny Bones really must be seen to be believed and appreciated. This very black comedy stars young American character actor Oliver Platt and young Britcom newcomer Lee Evans. The film's extremely dark undercurrents aren't just plot…