Am Cuba I Movie Review
Agitprop Russian-Cuban co-production illustrates different aspects of the Cuban revolution from the toppling of Batista's decadent Havana to idealistic soldiers and student revolutionaries.
Independent Film Guide - I
Bury the Living I Movie Review
Richard Boone (1917–81) was born to be an independent filmmaker at a time when few ventured into Indie Land. He did his best, though: 1963–64's The Richard Boone Show was a noble attempt to create a stock company (Boone, Robert Blake, Lloyd Bochner, Laura Devon, June Harding, Bethel Leslie, Harry Morgan, Jeanette Nolan, Ford Rainey, Warren Stevens, and Guy…
Have Killed I Movie Review
It wasn't easy sustaining a career as a Japanese matinee idol, yet Sessue Hayakawa (1889–1973) was able to avoid the stereotypical roles that most Asian actors of his generation had to play. Even when he was assigned to a part in which the racism was taken for granted, Hayakawa invested the role with such strong sensuality that the racist message was subverted through s…
Just Wasn't Made for These Times I Movie Review
The Beach Boys dominated international music charts between 1962 and 1969 as living proof that the California sun, the Pacific ocean, and non-stop “Good Vibrations” could keep five Hawthorne surfer boys frozen in time as teenagers forever. Dennis Wilson's 1983 drowning and Brian Wilson's 1991 autobiography Wouldn't It Be Nice revealed that, long before their rise…
Like It Like That I Movie Review
I Like It Like That is not an indie, but deserves inclusion here as the first feature written and directed by a black woman (Darnell Martin) for a major studio (Hail Columbia!) in Hollywood. There are only two well-known stars in it, Griffin Dunne as Stephen Price, a recording industry executive, and Rita Moreno as Rosario Linares, a nagging mother-in-law. The best perf…
Love You Not I Love You I Movie Review
For 19 hours between August 25, 1994, and January 26, 1995, Claire Danes had the role of a lifetime. As moody Angela Chase in My So-Called Life, she created a role so on target that those 19 hours are still played constantly on MTV and they even received their own video release in 1998. Since 1995, Danes has kept busy onscreen, but is mainly a “cool teen” star on magazine covers with…
Married a Witch I Movie Review
One of the coolest movie stars between 1941 and 1947 was…Veronica Lake (1919–73) AND I Married a Witch is one of her coolest movies. Along with her father, Daniel (Cecil Kellaway, 1893–1973), she is burned at the stake during the Puritan era. For their part in this nefarious deed, the male descendants of the Wooley family are doomed forever to be th…
Met a Murderer I Movie Review
James Mason was years away from achieving international stardom when he made I Met a Murderer in 1939 with Roy Kellino as director and cinematographer and his future wife Pamela Kellino as co-star.
Shot Andy Warhol I Movie Review
Valerie Solanas is not a historical figure for whom one automatically feels a great deal of sympathy. Until I saw Lili Taylor's take on her, I always thought she was a precursor of would-be assassins like Squeaky Fromme or Sara Jane Moore. If you compare her story with the one told in Basquiat, you wonder why she would even want to solicit Warhol's approval, every card in his deck wa…
Think I Do I Movie Review
If we watch too many movies, we might believe that the boy we left behind is our soul mate, destined to run off into the sunset with us where we'll live happily ever after. For most of us, he isn't, of course, and we know exactly why (or think we do). But suppose we're wrong? That's the premise of Brian Sloan's I Think I Do, or, as the Internet Movi…
The Ice Storm Movie Review
How do you make an absolutely riveting movie about the colossal boredom of life in a small town, circa 1973? Ask Ang Lee, director of The Ice Storm! All of the ingredients of suburban malaise are here, from anesthetizing affairs to children's doctor games, from distracted and/or deliberate shoplifting to Thanksgiving gatherings that no one really wants to attend. It's cold in …
The Iceman Cometh Movie Review
The idea for the American Film Theatre was laudable: the very best American plays, interpreted by the very best American actors, and helmed by the very best American directors. Season tickets would be sold in advance to subscribers who presumably cared about the preservation of American theatrical classics on film… whoa, let me stop right there. It sounds rather elitist, doesn't it? …
If… Movie Review
I was so desperate to see a movie one winter in Venice that I watched a revival screening of If…, dubbed in German and with Italian subtitles (neither of which I can understand or read). It was still every bit as subversive as I remember, and a bracing antidote to so many schoolboy sagas, where the status quo is rigidly maintained at any cost. Malcolm McDowell is pretty scary …
If Had It to Do Over Again I Movie Review
Who's going to believe that Anouk Aimee, attractive as ever at 44, would fall for the 14-year-old son of her best friend, especially with the shady past her character has had? Moreover, Catherine Deneuve (at 33, but looking much younger) is absolutely unbelievable as a woman who's been in prison for 16 years.
Impact Movie Review
Ella Raines (1921–88) was a cool, green-eyed brunette (with auburn highlights) who twice made the cover of Life magazine when she starred in two ‘40s noir films for Universal, Phantom Lady and Criss Cross. Two years before her 1943 film debut, a stove exploded in her face, fortunately resulting in just temporary damage to her hair and eyebrows. (The…
Impromptu Movie Review
It's holiday time in the 1830s and the Duke and Duchess d'Antan (Anton Rodgers and Emma Thompson) have invited a glittering array of guests to their mansion: Frederic Chopin (1810–49, Hugh Grant), Franz Liszt (1811–86, Julian Sands), Marie d'Agoult (Bernadette Peters), and Eugene Delacroix (1798ȁ…
In a Wild Moment Movie Review
In a Wild Moment is Claude Berri's view of a March-September affair.
In Celebration Movie Review
Three successful brothers return to the old homestead for their parents’ 40th wedding celebration.
In Possession Movie Review
In Possession was one of a series of 26 self-contained films that legendary Hammer Films made between 1980 and 1984. Although the pictures were lensed in Britain, they often teamed an American star with a British star to intrigue audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. (Simon McCorkindale and Kathryn Leigh Scott in A Visitor from the Grave, David Carradine and Stephanie Beacham in A Distan…
In the Company of Men Movie Review
Two women I know went to see In the Company of Men. One seemed to like it, the other came back spitting cotton. I was prepared for the worst, but wound up liking all but one sequence of Neil LaBute's biting first film, and I especially appreciated its ironic conclusion. In the Company of Overgrown Infants would be a more accurate description of the friendship between Chad (Aaron Eckh…
In the Name of the Father Movie Review
If U.S. audiences have a difficult time understanding the paternalistic relationship between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, In the Name of the Father reveals the deadlock in sharp relief. While huge land masses like Australia and Canada are successfully and peacefully breaking away from the British Empire, tiny Northern Ireland remains painfully tied to a government determined to keep it unde…
In the Soup Movie Review
Adolpho Rollo (Steve Buscemi) wants to be a filmmaker in the worst way. Scam maestro Joe (Seymore Cassel) says HE'LL be the producer! For the next 93 minutes, Joe shows Adolpho how to con his way through life and into feature film production. Buscemi and Cassel are great together, and Cassel's splashy role recalls his glory days of 1971 when he co-starred …
In the Spirit Movie Review
In the Spirit's inept promotion campaign must have killed it at the boxoffice. It probably didn't help that Peter Falk, who is terrific in the first half of the film, vanishes mysteriously and never comes back. He is so good that you wish he would return for a line or two at film's end, but no! Jeannie Berlin, playing the world's most boring hooker, wrote an often-hilar…
The Incident Movie Review
The first 10 minutes of Larry Peerce's The Incident draw us into the grim world of two sadistic jerks played by 31-year-old Tony Musante and 27-year-old Martin Sheen in their film debuts. Then we meet a series of couples who are about to board a New York subway. Diana Van der Vlis wants to take a taxi but her husband (Ed McMahon, in a surprisingly effective performance) grumbl…
Independent's Day Movie Review
When media rags pick up on the bright lights of any arena, they usually give three white guys three full-color pages plus a lot of words, and women and minorities get “The Best of the Rest” sidebars. I once watched a verrry depressing documentary about Sundance; it looked like the Boy Scouts. I know it isn't because Sundance helps both male and female filmmakers, but that was …
The Innocents Movie Review
The Innocents lingers in your mind long after you see it. We are used to being on Deborah Kerr's side whenever she's cast in a film, but HERE, well, she's high-strung and obsessive as Miss Giddens, the new governess. Is it because her little charges Miles and Flora are playing with lascivious ghosts or is it because she's in love with their Uncle (Michael Redgrav…
Inside Monkey Zetterland Movie Review
Surprise: Monkey Zetterland (Steve Antin) is the son of a Jewish smother mother (Katherine Helmond as Grace). I can't imagine Helmond being married to Bo Hopkins (who plays Monkey's rarely seen father, Mike), but she is, and her other kids are hairdresser Brent (Tate Donovan), and Grace (Patricia Arquette), who jus…
Interlude Movie Review
The interesting thing about Interlude, released within a couple of months of the Summer of Love, was that it showed a couple being passionate, rather than casual, about love; it made at least as persuasive a case for romance in 1967 as When Tomorrow Comes (with Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer) had in 1939 or the first Interlude (with June Allyson and Rosanno Brazzi) had i…
The Interrogation Movie Review
As always, 1990's Mill Valley Film Festival was jam-packed with the sort of movies that help to make it my favorite of all the festivals I go to each year. One Polish entry you won't want to miss is The Interrogation. Krystyna Janda plays Tonia, a nightclub performer and good-time girl who's taken in for questioning by the security police and winds up with a grueling five-year…
The Intimate Stranger Movie Review
Blacklisted director Joseph Losey (1909–84) seemed to dodge the issue of blacklisting when he made The Intimate Stranger in the relative safety of Britain in 1956. In it, Reggie Wilson, the filmmaker played by Richard Basehart (1914–84), is blacklisted by a spiteful colleague for something he didn't do. Although the guilty culprit is eventually disc…
Iphigenia Movie Review
At the risk of sounding facile, Agamemnon emerges as a real clod in Michael Cacoyannis’ Iphigenia.
Isadora Movie Review
Isadora, quite literally, saved my life. The sequence in which Isadora Duncan meets her death when her scarf wraps around the spokes of her car wheel is so final, so graphic, and so horrifying that I remembered it when MY scarf wrapped around a piece of metal as I was going up an underground escalator. One word, Isadora, raced through my brain and I tore off the scarf in an instant, grateful to be…
The Island of Dr. Moreau Movie Review
The Hawaiian island antics in the lightweight A Very Brady Sequel are far more cerebral than anything I saw in the 1996 remake of The Island of Dr. Moreau, directed by John Frankenheimer. Although Burt Lancaster and Michael York did their best in 1977 to re-create the terror of H.G. Wells’ 1896 novel, nothing since 1933 has come along to surpass or even equal the chills in Island of Lost So…
Island of the Lost Movie Review
I spent forever trying to figure out the family relationships in this movie. Richard Greene (1914–85) is Josh MacRae, the father of Sharon (who looks 30), Stu (Luke Halpin, then 21), and Lizzie (Robin Mattson, 12). There is no mother. No one talks about Mother. There is, however, a lovely assistant named Judy Hawilani (Irene Tsu…
It Takes Two Movie Review
My Chauffeur wasn't seen by too many people when it was released to theatres in 1986, but it introduced me to the films of director David Beaird, who seems attracted to conventional comedy plots, although he approaches them in a decidedly offbeat way. It Takes Two, for example, tells the old story of the kid who suffers from pre-wedding jitters and who pours all his anxieties into symbolic …
It's All True Movie Review
“On my desk in a script of the film was a long steel needle. It had been driven entirely through the script and to the needle was attached a length of red wool. This was the mark of the voodoo….” Yep, that was Orson Welles describing one of the many disasters that made the 1942 film It's All True impossible to complete in his own lifetime. If Welles were alive today, ac…
It's My Party Movie Review
Yes, there are parties like the one in this movie; I know folks with enough stamina to handle that much grief. Eric Roberts plays Nick Stark, a young man dying of AIDS, who decides to throw a party “celebrating” his own suicide. His former lover Brandon Theis (Gregory Harrison) turns up, much to the resentment of Nick's other friends who feel that Brandon abandon…