Abel Ferrara's The Addiction flops because he wanted to make a movie about vampires that wasn't a vampire movie. Doncha just hate filmmakers who consider that genre to be beneath them? (Hey, anyone who makes a frozen turkey like Fear City has no right to sneer at time-honored bloodsuckers.) Michael Almereyda's Nadja is another story. Nadja is fun! Let's fa…
For Mike Leigh fans, Naked is a Must-See Movie. For yours truly, it is 131 minutes of talking, only 11 minutes less than Secrets and Lies. It's the story of a man named Johnny (David Thewlis) who talk-talk-talks his way through the flick and eventually is beaten up. See Secrets and Lies review for the reason why I am the Last Person on Earth to be writing one syllable about AN…
The Naked Kiss is a genuinely schizophrenic film noir. Kelly (Constance Towers) is a sympathetic character, but capable of extreme violence. She makes a career change from hooker to nurse and wavers between two men, Officer Griff (Anthony Eisley) and a rich guy named Grant (Michael Dante). Griff knows about her, Grant doesn't. When she tells Grant a…
The Nasty Girl is an irreverent film about a serious (and true) subject: how one Bavarian town reacted when a young girl tried to investigate its history during the Third Reich. Lena Stolze is an enchanting presence as Sonja, a much-loved and much-honored young scholar who is vilified when she starts digging into her hometown's past. Initially, she believes her community to be…
This festival favorite tells the story of teenage cook Boni (Gregoire Colin), who sublimates his sexual fantasies about La Boulangere (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) by kneading pizza dough as if it were the object of his desire. She's married to Vincent Gallo as Le Boulanger (once again leaving me mystified regarding whatever spell Gallo is supposed to have on w…
This low-key little film was released without fanfare and has no reputation whatever, but it offers an intelligent look at child molestation, especially for its era. Janina Faye and Frances Green play Jean and Lucille, two nine-year-old girls who dance naked for Mr. Olderberry after he promises to give them candy. When Jean tells her mother (Gwen Watford) about it that night, her fat…
Another depressing movie about a youth gang. This group steals cars. Although praised for its realism, the film depicts all the cops as (white, male) villains and all the car thieves as unrepentant criminals, so there's no one you can really root for. The acting is good (Gabriel Casseus received a nomination for his debut performance as Midget at the Sundance Film Festi…
While watching Susanne Ofteringer's Nico Icon, I kept asking myself, “Why the heck did she make a documentary about THIS thumping bore of a mannequin whose chief distinction was looking good in designer originals and whose toneless singing voice appealed mainly to audiences who must have been as strung out on heroin as she was?!” If you're going to make a movie about a …
If you see Night of the Hunter when you're too young, you'll have recurring nightmares for the rest of your life. Robert Mitchum, who'd been so sexy and heroic in most of the 53 movies he made prior to this one, IS Preacher Harry Powell, one of the scariest bad men of all time. (Mitchum would return to the well of evil seven years later when he played a chilling Max Cad…
Until 1995, rental videos of this classic horror movie were dupey, contrasty, grimy copies of the original film. That's when Anchor Bay Entertainment released a special collector's edition that was digitally remastered from the 35mm negative. Don't even think about buying or renting anything else! This was the way George A. Romero intended Night of the Living Dead to be seen. …
Jim Jarmusch shows five different taxi drivers and their passengers in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki, all on the same night on Earth. Winona Ryder as Corky the cabbie and Gena Rowlands as Victoria Snelling the Los Angeles casting agent work extremely well together in their segment, as do Giancarlo Esposito as YoYo the Brooklyn cabbie and Armin Mueller-Stahl as his East German pa…
If the ‘60s had been the ‘40s and Curtis Harrington had had his way, he would have become a film director in the dark, brooding style of his idol, Val Lewton. With the explosion of color film in the mid-'60s, that didn't quite happen, and Harrington did the best he could with television movies like How Awful About Allan, The Cat Creature, and Killer Bees, plus the occas…
Eva Hart (1905–96) thought that of all the movies made about the Titanic, A Night to Remember came the closest to capturing those last few hours aboard the “unsinkable” ship, and Miss Hart ought to know; as a seven-year-old child, she was saved from drowning by her no-nonsense mother, Esther, but her father Benjamin went down with the ship. The large cast is upst…
The essence of the very British Night Train to Munich is captured in the comic performances of Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, reprising their roles in The Lady Vanishes as Charters and Caldicott. Working with a tight script by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, Carol Reed skillfully reveals how ordinary people react to war. Faced with an international crisis, Charters tries to call Berlin to retr…
There's a very old joke that bartenders still tell sometimes about the real identities of their weekend clientele. If by some extraordinary chance you haven't heard the joke, Nina Takes a Lover may seem like a fresh take on the ancient concept of the wife having a fling while her husband is out of town. The title character tries to explain to a nosy journalist that “it'…
Here's irony for you—in the year of three kings (Edward VIII plus Georges V and VI), British producer Michael Balcon (Daniel Day-Lewis’ grandfather, by the way) assembled this lavish production set in 1553, ALSO the year of three monarchs (Edward VI, Lady Jane Grey, and Mary I). Did Balcon (and the Americans) know somethi…
Marta Meszaros is a fine writer and director who makes a number of important universal statements in Nine Months. Widely praised for her award-winning 1975 movie, The Adoption, Meszaros has a sharp eye for the details that determine the direction of her character's lives. Why does her strong, brave, self-reliant heroine (Lili Minori) fall for the violent tactics of the foreman…
To make a movie like 1984 IN 1984, as Michael Radford did, is to make a quaint period piece by default. It's bleak, it's interesting, but the whole raison d'etre for the film (to scare us out of our wits at what COULD happen!) is missing. When the novel was written in 1948, fears about the future had many people wondering if any of us would survive until 1984. Se…
The difference between a Jerk and a Good Guy is not a Heartbeat, but a Decision. That's what Rufus Wild (Dan Futterman) discovers in an end-of-the-millennium party and that's what all self-deceptive Jerks (and you know who you are) have to learn, the hard way, more often than not. We can change jobs and friends (girlfriends and boyfriends) an…
Two old men (Don Washington and Kevin Willmott as Bebo and Huddie) reminisce about how Junction City, Missouri, went downhill from a thriving jazz mecca during World War II to a dilapidated, crime-ridden street during the Vietnam War.
Love hurts, and Cassie (Rosanna Arquette) is finding out just how much it hurts as Nobody's Fool begins. She hates her job as a waitress in a bar (except for her friend Pat, nicely played by Mare Winningham), she hates being dumped by her boyfriend Billy (Jim Youngs) when she told him she was pregnant, she hates that she had to give the baby up for …
Non-Stop New York was directed by Robert Stevenson, who went on to direct many of Walt Disney's greatest hits. Its star, Anna Lee (Mrs. Stevenson), wasn't much of an actress in 1937 and her onscreen teaming with John Loder produced no sparks. Also in the cast as a musical prodigy is 18-year-old Desmond Tester, heartily disliked by so many male audience members that you …
When Dylan McKay came back to Beverly Hills 90210 in November 1998, the show's devoted followers were thrilled, but the more cynical looked at his return and said, “Ah Hah! If he were Number One at the Boxoffice he wouldn't even consider episodic television.” Now who's saying this? Certainly no one who actually IS Numero Uno. Superstars are more aware than anyone…
Why do we love Nosferatu, F.W. Murnau's German classic from the year 1922? Let us TRY to count the ways: When we see the captain's records for the doomed ship, the Demeter, we always get a shiver at this chilling indication of the blood-sucking horrors yet to come. And when the horrible-looking vampire played by Max Schreck gazes at the bleeding hand of Jonathan Harker, he leers, &#x…
Gillian Armstrong's Not Fourteen Again is rather a distaff version of Michael Apted's acclaimed 7–14–21–28–35 Up series of documentaries.
Remember Not of This Earth, the 1957 Roger Corman movie about an alien vampire? Well, the movie you tried to forget is also the movie Jim Wynorski was born to remake. Following in Beverly Garland's footsteps is Traci Lords, reportedly writing a cautionary book about her experiences making adult films in real life. In the movie, she plays a nurse and Arthur Roberts inherits the role that sho…
A sincere, well-meant film about a black worker in Alabama, Nothing but a Man was among the first 250 American films selected for preservation by the National Film Registry. It is still an important film for its era, but if you turned down the sound, you might mistake it for a British kitchen-sink drama. The characters are SOOO serious, like they've got the weight of the world on their shou…
At 42 minutes, Number One just barely qualifies as a feature film, but Dyan Cannon packs quite a number of astute observations about kids and sex into the brief running time.
Nuns on the Run with Eric Idle and Robbie Coltrane is pretty funny, although any movie with that title and those stars deserves to be VERY funny. One reason it isn't is because Nuns on the Run is set up almost exactly the same way as the great Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot. In that movie, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon play two characters who hide out from gangsters by pretending to b…