This is not the film the cognoscenti were expecting from Steven Soderbergh after sex, lies and videotape, so they raked it and him over the coals. I thought it was pretty interesting and definitely the work of a free spirit. It's set in 1919 Prague and Kafka (1883–1974, Jeremy Irons) is leading a pretty drab life, clerking by day, scribbling by night. He gets mixed up i…
The flat voiceover narration gives us the road map for Kalifornia. A writer (David Duchovny) and his photographer girlfriend (Michelle Forbes) are en route to California, doing a word-and-picture tour of the locales of famous American murders along the way. To share expenses, they accept, sight unseen, the companionship of serial killer Brad Pitt and his deliberately ob…
For reasons that are beyond me, Kama Sutra received a critical roasting. It's a Tale of Love—well, 16th century sexual politics, really—through the eyes of women who are trained from childhood to please men. Sarita Choudhury is Princess Tara, fated to marry a king, Raj Singh (The English Patient's Naveen Andrews). But Tara is cruel to her maid Maya (…
Robert Altman and Jennifer Jason Leigh are like the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead; when they are good, they are very, very good, but when they are bad, they are horrid. For Kansas City, both are at their worst: Altman rambling and out of control, Leigh meticulously creating a role from all the non-essential externals and losing the heart and soul of her character in the p…
A very grim look at the lives of depressingly young children. Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick) is terminally incapable of zipping it up. He will succumb to AIDS eventually but he doesn't know it yet. However, Jennie (Chloe Sevigny), who's tested HIV positive, DOES know it. She was among a long line of virgins who had sex for the first time with Telly. Telly seduces…
Pedro Almodovar thrived in the post-Franco era, directing a series of nine films that challenged our ideas of how sexuality, violence, comedy, and tragedy could be conveyed on-screen. His tenth film, premiering at 1994's San Francisco International Film Festival, reveals evidence of an unmistakable and, I hope, temporary decline. Almodovar's best films have always dealt with his own …
She is a “greedy, two-faced bitch.” He is a member in good standing of the Dumb Dicks of America. As played by Joanne Whalley and Val Kilmer, they are a match made in a casting director's heaven. I first saw Kill Me Again at San Francisco's Geneva Drive-in on a double bill with the Judd Nelson movie Relentless, a film which makes Kill Me Again look like The Maltese Falc…
This one-joke movie deserves a single bone for the script, but the acting and cinematography elevate it another bone. Director Rome (Zen Todd), Cinematographer One Eye (Christian Leffler), Scriptwriter Max (Emmett Grennan), and Musician Buzz (Creighton Howard) would and do kill to make a movie. Love Interest Tess (Kathleen Walsh)…
Ever since the Creative Arts Book Company in Berkeley began re-printing Jim Thompson's novels in its Black Lizard series, I've been trying to track down the movies that were inspired by his books, and it hasn't been easy. 1979's Serie Noire based on A Hell of a Woman, for example, was made in France by Alain Corneau, and if it's shown up on cable or at a video ou…
After 1955's Killer's Kiss, Stanley Kubrick received $200,000 to make The Killing for United Artists. There were only two strings attached: he had to cast a star as Johnny Clay and U.A. had to like his script. Sterling Hayden turned out to be perfect as a grizzled small-time convict in hot pursuit of the big time and who WOULDN'T like the masterful screenplay by Kubrick…
How does a single act of violence, executed on a grand scale, fit into the fabric of people's lives, why does it happen, and what sort of person commits such an act? These are some of the questions explored in John Cassavetes’ 1976 film, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. The main source of Cosmo Vitelli's validation is his strip club, the “Crazy Horse West.” When …
When the industry makes gazillions of movies about nothing but straight characters, it can afford to show many of them in a negative light without upsetting anyone too much, because there are positive images to counterbalance all those Up Close and Personal portraits of Sexual Numbskulls. But in the few flicks made about uncoded gay characters through 1968, most of the on-screen images we saw seem…
Kind Hearts and Coronets is a cynical comedy about money, beautifully narrated by Dennis Price as Louis Mazzini, who would do anything to get it. He murders one member of the d'Ascoyne family after another, all played by Alec Guinness. Unfortunately, Louis is tried for a crime he didn't do—killing the boring husband of his longtime sweetheart, Sibella (Joan Greenwood&#x…
Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly succeeds in creating such a grimy atmosphere that you want to take a bath after seeing it. When Ralph Meeker as Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer leaves a room, tough guys say, “Open a window.” Yet Hammer is the HERO in this violent 1955 blend of hard-boiled detective yarn and atomic bomb paranoia, plus all the corny poetic ramblings Spillane…
Molina (William Hurt) and Valentin (Raul Julia) are cellmates in a South American prison. Only his fantasies of grade-Z Hollywood flicks keep Molina going over the long haul. At first, revolutionary Valentin disdains the gay Molina, but gradually, the Spider Woman (smoldering Sonia Braga) becomes absolutely real to them both. Hurt won an Oscar and Julia &#…
Daniel Goldberg's A Kiss to This Land shows how Jewish immigrants of the 1920s and 1930s were able to build new lives in Mexico.
We were glutted with gangster movies in the fall of 1990, a fact of life certain to affect the reception of a film like The Krays, starring Gary and Martin Kemp of Spandau Ballet fame. The Kray Twins owned a succession of nightclubs in the ‘60s. They made it their business to be seen and photographed with the right people, some of whom ironically appear in this film. Portions of a 1963 Brit…
Nick Broomfield has a lot of nerve calling Kurt and Courtney a documentary. Without a budget, however small, he would be standing on a street corner, telling all and sundry the “conspiracy” theories even he doesn't believe about the “murder” of Nirvana's Kurt Cobain (1967–94). What “evidence” does Broomfield offer to supp…