Habit Movie Review
Vampires on a budget (!), only this time they're in color (unlike The Addiction) and glorious Pixelvision is nowhere in sight (unlike Nadja).
Independent Film Guide - H
Hackers Movie Review
In the beginning, hackers were, well, sort of geeky. They could be supporting characters in the movies, the experts that the cool heroes went to see when they needed help. But they rarely left their computer terminals. Iain (Backbeat) Softley's movie, Hackers, is the latest cinematic effort to lionize hackers and turn them into the cool heroes. The protagonist hacker is state-…
Halloween Movie Review
Halloween, made on a budget of $300,000, brought in over $47 million in boxoffice receipts, which stunned the motion picture industry. It made John Carpenter and Jamie Lee Curtis famous and it became a model for countless other horror directors, not all of whom actually understood why Halloween quickened viewer's pulses. Carpenter recognized what Alfred Hitchcock, another grea…
Halloween: H20 Movie Review
In entertainment value, Halloween: H20 (Twenty Years Later) delivers four bones worth of fun; I was laughing for the last 35 minutes. Is this what Steve Miner et al had in mind? It raked in $55 million at the boxoffice within four months of its release, so maybe it is. Anyway, we're back with Laurie Strode at age 37 (inimitably played by Jamie Lee Curtis, 39�…
Hand in Hand Movie Review
This touching story of the friendship between a Roman Catholic boy (Philip Needs as Michael O'Malley) and a Jewish girl (Loretta Parry as Rachel Mathias) could easily have been heavy handed with the wrong director. Philip Leacock, who guided the very young Vincent Winter and Jon Whiteley to Academy Awards in 1953's The Little Kidnappers, was clearly the ri…
A Handful of Dust Movie Review
Many feel the reason for the transatlantic success of Dynasty and Brideshead Revisited is that nothing delights Britishers and Americans more than watching their overseas cousins commit upper-class suicide. It makes sense, especially when you realize that hours and hours devoted to poverty-stricken characters in unphotogenic surroundings seldom pack the same visual wallop. Nope, if we're go…
The Hands of Orlac Movie Review
When The Hands of Orlac was first shown in Vienna, grown women fainted and their male companions complained to the theatre manager. The manager asked Conrad Veidt if he would say something to the crowd to circumvent a riot. Reportedly, Veidt so moved the audience that, not only did he receive an ovation, but the movie went on to enjoy spectacular success (and with good reason). Is th…
Hangin’ with the Homeboys Movie Review
Because Hangin’ with the Home Boys starred a cast of talented unknowns and New Line Cinema did not heavily promote it, the film needed (and deserved) favorable word-of-mouth reviews to do well at the box-office. It's exactly the TYPE of movie I ordinarily detest: four guys hang out together one night every week, preferring their own company to anyone else's, and …
Happiness Movie Review
After watching 90 minutes of Happiness on a screening room floor, our esteemed colleague Andrea Chase sensibly announced that she'd had it and left. I stuck it out for the remaining 49 minutes and staggered out into the sunshine, desperate for fresh air and for Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. It is reassuring for me to think about Andrea Chase instead of Todd Solondz's Happiness, because …
Happy Together Movie Review
Happy Together looks great and Wang Kar-Wai aficionados will appreciate this movie that's about everything BUT the story of a relationship. For me, it was like flipping through the travelogues of strangers. It shows Hong Kong stars Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai as gay lovers in Buenos Aires, Argentina, who are together, then apart, then sort of but not really together again. Instead…
A Hard Day's Night Movie Review
Yes, A Hard Day's Night was a Brit indie, made quickly to cash in on the Beatle's surge in popularity after their February 1964 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Producer Walter Shenson hoped that Beatlemania would last at least through June, when the movie was due to hit theatres. The selection of Richard Lester as director was by no means a guarantee that the movie would be a blo…
Hard Eight Movie Review
Sydney (Philip Baker Hall) is a man of mystery from the moment we first lay eyes on him. He's about 64 and he looks it. He's led a tough life which he doesn't discuss. He knows the rules of every game, but doesn't say how he learned them. He meets John (John C. Reilly) sitting outside a coffee shop and picks him up like a stray dog. John, who…
Hard Traveling Movie Review
Alvah Bessie (1904–85) wrote Bread and a Stone in 1941 and then watched his promising career as an Oscar-nominated screenwriter turn to ashes when he was interrogated by the House Un-American Activities Committee as a member of the Hollywood Ten. He went to jail for contempt of Congress and continued to write, although not in Hollywood. (He did adapt his novel The Symbo…
Having a Wild Weekend Movie Review
The Dave Clark Five, as anyone knows who devoured 16 magazine between the spring of 1964 and the summer of 1967, were the leading proponents of the Tottenham Sound, which meant that the group had been formed there (in 1960) instead of Liverpool. After the obligatory stint on The Ed Sullivan Show they recorded a series of hit songs, including “Glad All Over,” “Bit…
Hawks Movie Review
In 1969, Timothy Dalton outraged everyone with the statement that he intended to be an even better actor than Laurence Olivier. Hawks is the first time I've been able to agree that Dalton might finally be on the way to achieving that goal. Anthony Edwards and Dalton play two dying patients who escape from a British hospital and steal an ambulance. They flee to the Netherlands for a holiday …
He Ran All the Way Movie Review
A 19-year-old guy asked me who John Garfield was the other day and I nearly died! There must be at least 15 of the movies he made between 1938 and 1948 on the shelves of most neighborhood video outlets. Unfortunately, Nobody Lives Forever, The Breaking Point, and his swan song, He Ran All the Way, are not among them. Garfield, who began his career with the Group Theatre, was like a breath of fresh…
Hear My Song Movie Review
The career of actress Shirley Anne Field says a great deal about the motion picture industry in Britain. The beautiful and talented Field began playing small roles in the mid-'50s while still a teenager. Within a few years, she was attracting attention in international hits like The Entertainer with Laurence Olivier and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning with Albert Finney. She seemed to be …
Heartland Movie Review
Conchata Ferrell is quite wonderful as a widow in her 30s who accepts a position as Rip Torn's housekeeper in Wyoming in the year 1910.
Heat and Dust Movie Review
In the summer of 1963, there were few 22-year-old actresses on the planet with more charisma than Julie Christie when she popped up as Liz, luring Tom Courtenay's Billy Liar. Sparkling with health and joie de vivre, Christie starred in a dozen major films over a 15-year span, then was offscreen for nearly five years, an eternity for an actress in her 40s. Heat and Dust was the vehicle she s…
Heat and Sunlight Movie Review
This boring improvisational exercise won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1988.
Heathers Movie Review
Three years before Heathers, Winona Ryder only had eyes for Corey Haim as Lucas. Heathers turned Ryder and Christian Slater into full-fledged teen stars, although Slater's Jack Nicholson imitation wore thin for this viewer by his second line of dialogue. Ryder is wonderful, though, running the full gamut of teen angst, first as the virtual slave of the three nastiest Heathers in high school…
Heavenly Creatures Movie Review
Peter Jackson's remarkable film tells the true crime story of Pauline Parker, 16, and Juliet Hulme, 15, two schoolgirls who beat Pauline's mother to death with bricks wrapped in stockings after visiting a tea shop with her in Canterbury, New Zealand. The motive: Pauline and Juliet were about to be separated and they believed that the murder would keep them together forever. For some …
Heavy Movie Review
One hundred and nineteen minutes is a long time to spend at a pizzeria where you'd normally get a meal to go because you don't want to eat it there. But since James Mangold put a lot of thought into this one, here's the story. Victor (Pruitt Taylor Vince) is fat, shy, and lives with his mother, Dolly. Dolly (Shelley Winters) is ailing, in her early …
Heavy Petting Movie Review
Heavy Petting is a dry hump of a movie, with all the assets and liabilities of early sex: the promotional teaser might be a turn-on, but the experience itself is something of a letdown. Obie Benz's shapeless movie is strongly reminiscent of Philippe Mora's Brother, Can You Spare a Dime, a 1975 documentary that attempted to reveal the 1930s with period newsreels and movie clips but wi…
Helen's Babies Movie Review
I have yet to see this movie, but not for lack of trying. When I heard that a print had surfaced in a Moscow archive, I sent letter after letter, trying to track it down. I tried asking a film archive if there was any way it could be shown there. No dice! But I WILL see this movie some day. Helen's Babies first surfaced as a very funny children's book by John Habberton, focusing on t…
Help! Movie Review
Help! was Great Britain's top moneymaker of 1965, but over the years, there's been some grumbling over the fact that the plot was contrived, that it was in garish color, and that it wasn't A Hard Day's Night. Well, you can only do something for the first time once and, as pop musicals go, the Beatles could have done much worse than Help! How many times have you seen Fer…
Hester Street Movie Review
When Hester Street was first released, major stardom was predicted for its star, Carol Kane, and a glorious future as a world-class director awaited Joan Micklin Silver…I'll be back after I beat up a few pillows to spare everyone the institutional sexism rant. This beautiful film knocked everyone sideways in the mid-'70s. Carol Kane's look was so right for this period f…
Hidden Children Movie Review
Oral histories about the Holocaust are offered by John Walker's Hidden Children, a 1994 Canadian documentary.
The Hidden Room Movie Review
Naunton Wayne turns detective in this war of nerves between Dr. Clive Riordan (Robert Newton) and his lovely wife's American lover, Bill Kronin (Phil Brown). Clive wants to dissolve Bill in an acid bath, but he wants to choose just the right moment when he's under the least suspicion. Meanwhile, Clive's lovely wife Storm (lovely Sally Gray&#x…
High Art Movie Review
Lisa Cholodenko's High Art is well made, but so effing depressing that I was in tears afterwards. It was almost as sad as Brian De Palma's Sisters when Margot Kidder's sweet boyfriend brings her a birthday cake and she goes psycho and I ran out of my flat and hung out in the lobby until the rental video was Off The Premises. I can't be objective about movies that are do…
High Heels Movie Review
Pedro Almodovar's early films had so many outrageous trappings that it was easy for many to overlook the fact that his scripts have always been fairly conventional. His concerns as a storyteller are pretty basic: who did what, who loves whom, how do we get from here to there? It is because of Almodovar's genius for exploring the raw emotions that ignite many gnarled relationships, th…
High Season Movie Review
Admirers of Jacqueline Bisset will be pleased at the fact that the actress has finally been cast in a well-above-average movie, High Season. This fine comedy is the first feature directed by writer Clare Peploe, who works with husband Bernardo Bertolucci. It's about survival on a Greek island, which is not the same as survival on Skid Row. The scenery is gorgeous enough to make anyone forge…
High Stakes Movie Review
Without that cast, High Stakes would be just fair. It's the old story (by Amos Kollek, son of Teddy, then Jerusalem's mayor) of a hooker named Bambi (Sally Kirkland) who meets a John (Robert LuPone) who falls in love with her and helps her break free from her pimp, Slim (Richard Lynch). But it does have that cast, which elevates…
His Picture in the Papers Movie Review
Movie lore has it that Anita Loos sold a script to D.W. Griffith for the Biograph film The New York Hat (starring Mary Pickford and Lionel Barrymore) while she was still a teenager. Since Loos was just four foot eleven, it wouldn't have been that hard to convince Mr. Griffith that she was only 19 in 1912, unless he'd picked up a copy of San Francisco's Sunday Cal…
Hollywood on Trial Movie Review
Hollywood on Trial is the story behind The Front. It doesn't make for pleasant watching or listening, yet it is certainly a long-overdue account. In October 1947, Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo were among the top writers and directors in Hollywood. One month later…
Hollywood Shuffle Movie Review
Hollywood Shuffle created quite a splash when it was first released in 1987. Not only did it offer a funny and accurate perspective of what it's like to be a young black actor eking out a living in the film business, but it also supplied other wannabe directors with tremendous inspiration. Robert Townsend, who wrote, directed, and starred in the film, had previously played a supporting role…
Homage Movie Review
They don't give Academy Awards to little gems like Homage, but if they did, Blythe Danner would most assuredly deserve one. Danner, who's been quietly working her magic in indies and quality television specials over the last 25 years, steals great blocks of screen time away from co-stars Sheryl Lee, Frank Whaley, Bruce Davison, and the breathtaking landscapes of New Mexico. A low-key…
Hombres Armados Movie Review
Like Lone Star, Hombres Armados wound up on quite a few lists of Ten Best Films. As always, the filmmaker's heart is in the right place. Federico Luppi (Time for Revenge, Funny, Dirty Little War, Mayalunta, Killing Grandpa, A Place in the World, Cronos) plays widowed old Dr. Humberto Fuentes, who has spent his life teaching young doctors to go out into the villages of his �…
Home of the Brave Movie Review
After his death in 1998, everyone remembered Lloyd Bridges fondly, but I heard distinct rumbles that there was no such thing as a Lloyd Bridges movie. Home of the Brave comes damn close, though. This tough look at racial prejudice in an army unit during World War II was an adaptation of Arthur Laurents’ 1945 Broadway play. Onstage, the target of the abuse had been Jewish, but in the 1949 fi…
The Homecoming Movie Review
Vivien Merchant (1929–82) was a wonderful actress who left behind far too few examples of her brilliant work on film. She met her future husband, Harold Pinter, in repertory and they were married in 1956. A full decade later, Merchant, then 37, first attracted the attention of international audiences as Lily, opposite Michael Caine's Alfie. Merchant was seen the followi…
Hoop Dreams Movie Review
Hoop Dreams is nearly three hours long, but the men and women who made it spent nearly five years on it, accumulating an average of an hour's worth of footage every week. It focuses on William Gates and Arthur Agee, two black Chicago teenagers, and their heartrending efforts to become professional basketball players. When you think of the obstacles that must have occurred during a project o…
Hot Millions Movie Review
This very funny sleeper came and went in the summer of 1968. Within six months Maggie Smith would become an international star, but no one knew that yet. Those who did see Hot Millions in theatres or who catch it now on cable television can see what stage buffs knew very early on: that Maggie Smith is among the funniest comediennes of her generation. She certainly has plenty of chances to show her…
The Hours and Times Movie Review
Die-hard Beatles fans may quibble with the historical accuracy of Christopher Munch's 1992 movie, but The Hours and Times is in fact inspired by an authentic 1963 incident in the lives of John Lennon and Brian Epstein while they were on a Barcelona holiday. It has attracted rave reviews all over the world, and the look of the film is exactly right for the period. But since both Lennon and E…
A House in the Hills Movie Review
Chances are that you missed A House in the Hills on the big screen. I'm still trying to figure out whether or not I would have liked it if I'd seen it in a theatre instead of on video. Like many contemporary thrillers, it deals with the menace of everyday phenomena in 20th century life. In A House in the Hills, the very appealing Helen Slater is a waitress by day and an actress in he…
House of Cards Movie Review
Rule Number One for today's screenwriters is “Write lean.” You'd think that a 109-minute movie like House of Cards would be long enough to say just about everything it had to say about the efforts of a mother and a psychiatrist to help a troubled child recover from the trauma of her father's sudden death. But let's say they cut—oh—11 minutes …
House of Games Movie Review
Writer David Mamet made his directorial debut with House of Games starring his then-wife Lindsay Crouse. The sequences with Crouse in action as a psychiatrist really do not work, but once she starts investigating the world of con artists, the plot really starts to hum. Screenwriter Mamet seems more interested in the psychiatrist's dark side than he is in her professional veneer. Crouse is i…
The House of the Spirits Movie Review
Readers with warm memories of Isabel Allende's classic 1982 novel, La Casa de los Espiritus, are well advised to treasure them and skip Miramax's ILL-advised screen translation with an award-winning international cast. From the moment you see the horrifyingly miscast Jeremy Irons trying to look like a poor suitor from Chile, you KNOW that every second of this 138-minute mess is going…
The House of Yes Movie Review
Parker Posey is an indie diva, and deservedly so, for few actresses worked harder to secure a niche in low-budget American movies of the ‘90s than she did. But The House of Yes? I can only wonder at the ventilation systems at the Sundance Film Festival for this gloppy mess to have been such a crowd pleaser. Lucretia Garfield and Ida McKinley were spared the indignity of becoming sexual icon…
The House on Carroll Street Movie Review
The House on Carroll Street is an old-fashioned political thriller directed by Peter Yates, who began his career directing television episodes of Danger Man and The Saint. There is very little gore in the film and much more emphasis on the tension created by soft sounds, shadows, and atmosphere. Yates’ approach actually suits the material quite well, giving the film the look and feel of the…
House Party Movie Review
Any comedy about a party without grown-ups is my idea of a fun flick.
Household Saints Movie Review
I can see why Household Saints intrigued non-Catholic audiences, but for me, it fell into the “Oh, Those Crazy Catholics!” file. Actually, it reminded me of the morbid stories the nuns used to tell us in Catholic school, which we were almost positive Never Happened. We heard the grisliest one from our second grade teacher and I have to admit we egged her on. Two nurses put an amputat…
How to Get Ahead in Advertising Movie Review
Once upon a time, Bruce Robinson was an actor. He played Benvolio in Romeo and Juliet and co-starred with Isabelle Adjani in The Story of Adele H…. Many years later, he won an Oscar nomination for writing The Killing Fields and in 1987 he directed his first movie, Withnail and I, starring Richard E. Grant. That film, like How to Get Ahead in Advertising, was produced by George Harrison. If …
Hu-Man Movie Review
Hu-Man may call itself a “visual feast,” but it's SOOO boring.
Hugo Pool Movie Review
Hugo Pool is a mess. There are moments during the 92-minute flick, especially when Thelonious Monk is on the soundtrack, that you wish it were in black and white so you wouldn't have to see in crystal clear Foto-Kem color what a fool so many professional actors are making of themselves. Take Malcolm McDowell as Henry Dugay, complete with lookalike hand puppet, trying to kick his heroin habi…
Hundred Per Cent Movie Review
It's too late now, but if Eric Koyanagi wanted to make a film worthy of its title, he'd scrap two of its three segments and keep the focus on the plight of Asian actor Troy Tashima (Star Trek: Voyager's Garrett Wang) and his girlfriend Cleveland (BH90210's Lindsay Price). As it is, Hundred Per Cent looks, sounds, and feels like three differen…
The Hungarians Movie Review
Zoltan Fabri tries to make The Hungarians a more substantial film than it really is.
Hurricane Streets Movie Review
This intensely sad film shows how quickly a young boy's life can turn to ashes when he lacks love and guidance from anyone. Marcus (wonderfully played by Brendan Sexton III) is only 15, but his father is dead, his mother is in prison, and his grandmother has to work. He thinks he knows how his dad died and why his mom's in prison, but he's mistaken, and when he r…