Remember when Hitchcock played a cameo in Blackmail as a subway passenger being bothered by a little boy? In Sabotage, he created considerable suspense by showing a young boy as he dawdled through the city streets while carrying a bomb timed to explode. By creating tension through rapid cross-cutting and then relieving it with horror, Hitchcock tried to do something that was quite a few decades ah…
Safe is an unforgettable viewing experience in a theatre. I don't know that I'd want to see it on the small screen, though. Writer/director Todd Haynes makes no concession to his film's eventual release on video. Protagonist Carol is frequently shown in extreme long shots, the better to emphasize how engulfed she is by the threatening environment. This perspective works…
k.d. lang wants to be an actor in the worst way. And she's succeeding…in the worst way. Anyone catch her on ABC's historic Ellen episode April 30, 1997? Okay, so that was a bit. But she had entire sequences in Mario Puzo's The Last Don on May 13–14, 1997, yelling about art as Daryl Hannah's movie director. (CBS claimed a national audience of 30 mill…
Salut Victor! was a wonderfully appealing opening night entry at 1989's San Francisco's Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.
If for no other reason than the hilarious sequence where James Woods as Richard Boyle pays his first visit to the confessional in 32 years, Salvador would be ingrained in my consciousness forever. But Salvador, co-written by Boyle and based on his own experiences as a photojournalist in El Salvador, gets underneath my skin for its entire 123-minute running time. Boyle is unsparing of his own flaws…
Stephen Frears’ Sammy & Rosie Get Laid is every bit as unsettling to viewers as its title was to theatrical exhibitors. This is a densely plotted story about a London couple whose unconventional life is changed when the husband's father arrives on the scene from Pakistan. The father, played by Indian star Shashi Kapoor, is responsible for atrocities back home, but he is unprep…
Forget H.R.H. Charles, The Prince of Wales, and return to the days when H.R.H. Prince George-Louis of Hanover was so mean to his wife Sophie-Dorothea that he divorced her 20 years before he ever became H.M. King George I and imprisoned her in the castle of Ahlden for the last 32 years of her life. She was forbidden to see her children after the divorce, and her ex-husband hated the future King Geo…
Even more so than the Americans, the British seem particularly vulnerable to sex scandals. Sex is essential for producing heirs, but the preservation of appearances often seems to be far more essential. Not that it matters, but the Profumo scandal of 1963 has always seemed like much ado about nothing. It certainly didn't deserve to lead to suicide, betrayal, exile, social ostracism, and pol…
The Scarlet Pimpernel must have been Margaret Truman's favorite film while her father Harry was President; she arranged for it to be screened no less than 16 times, according to Guinness’ Movie Facts and Feats. This picture has absolutely everything. Leslie Howard is exactly what a stylish dandy AND a shrewd renegade should be. Even with all the swashbuckling, Howard as Sir Percival …
The runaway hit of 1974's San Francisco International Film Festival was this searing entry by Ingmar Bergman, originally made for Swedish television. In spite of its length (168 minutes, cut down from 360 minutes), Bergman uses every second, exploring the hardest of truths about the relationship between two people. Sven Nykvist's flawless camera work doesn't let …
Viewers who see Paul Bartel's Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills will either love it or hate it. I hated it, even though it wasn't worth hating. There's a mean-spirited streak to this self-styled “restoration comedy,” something that might seem hilarious to Bartel and his aficionados. And for all Bartel's efforts to outrage, stale situations ar…
Once again, I'm giving a movie an extra half bone for the presence of Illeana Douglas, because she's such a scene-stealing treat to watch. (And that's no mean feat in a flick that co-stars Dennis Hopper, Christopher Walken, and John Turturro.) Until 1996's Grace of My Heart was released, I combed the video shelves for ANY movie with Douglas in it: 1991�…
Seclusion is about a family and their efforts to obtain a summer cottage.
This West German film is essentially a simplistic fairy tale, but so well acted, scripted, and directed that its many implausibilities can be forgiven. Tina Engel, in the title role, commits a “political” robbery with a pair of male cohorts when her kindergarten becomes strapped for funds. The rest of the film shows how she deals with the consequences of her crime. Her colleagues ref…
When I saw Second Coming (with its creator in attendance), it was a total embarrassment, wasting its talented cast, and deserving of every BOO it got.
As a woman without much money or power, I confess to more than mild curiosity about what happens when rich and powerful men gather in the Bohemian Grove and do whatever it is they do. In an era when tabloid scribes scavenge celebrity dust bins in search of gossip, the Bohemian Grove remains a secret. No one crawls on his or her stomach with precious cameras and recording devices to violate the inv…
Based on Rosalie K. Fry's novel, Secret of the Ron Mor Skerry, The Secret of Roan Inish is a charming and gentle fable, featuring a delightful performance by newcomer Jeni Courtney as 10-year-old Fiona. Fiona is enchanted by her grandfather's stories about her baby brother, Jamie, who once drifted out to sea, and about the lovely selkie Seal/Lady, who once came on land to live…
Mike Leigh became the darling of international film festivals and archives in 1986. I dutifully attempted to watch a selection of the Leigh oeuvres at that time. 1976's Nuts in May was nothing special, but okay; at least I could make out the dialogue in that one. Then, in rapid succession, I found myself chain-drinking endless cups of tea and coffee after walking out on a string of Leigh fl…
British playwright Terrence Rattigan specialized in intricately crafted dramas about ordinary men and women whose interior worlds were shattered when they were forced to face themselves truthfully for the first time. Unsurprisingly, many of his plays, like The Winslow Boy and The Browning Version, became splendid film vehicles for Britain's finest actors and actresses. When Separate Tables …
There comes a time in every femme fatale's movie life when she looks at the scripts she's being offered and realizes, “Hey, no one's offering me parts where I get to say lines like, ‘I never forget a face once I've sat on it.’ I'd better start thinking about my next career move.” In the case of Kathleen Turner, then 39, 1994's S…
Bruno Gantillon focuses on a sadomasochistic relationship between a housekeeper-turned-heiress and a diplomatturned-butler.
Stony (Jada Pinkett), Cleo (Queen Latifah), single mom Tisean (newcomer Kimberly Elise), and bank teller Frankie (Vivica Fox) have shared similar miserable experiences with bosses, boyfriends, and the police. They decide to team up and pursue a life of crime by robbing banks. Their internal friction is complicated by the constant threat of th…
A single act of violence executed on a grand scale—how does it fit into the fabric of people's lives? Why does it happen? What manner of person commits the act? Lina Wertmuller demonstrates the foolishness of such a killing in Seven Beauties. Her protagonist (Giancarlo Giannini) kills his sister's pimp to avenge his honor, but makes the mistake of improperly sett…
No question about it, sex, lies and videotape is an impressive first feature for writer/director Steven Soderbergh, then 26. The movie was lionized at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival, where it won two major awards. I can't help feeling, though, that there was an “Oh, those funny Americans” factor about its lavish reception. Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, a far mor…
You haven't LIVED until you've seen the ultimate sleazeball classic of 1955: Ed Dein's Shack Out on 101. Yep, the Commies are it again and who is their recruit of choice but grungy Lee Marvin, cast to type as a slob, and warming up for his Academy Award acceptance speech some 10 years later? Female viewers can admire the gutsiness of Terry Moore's character as a waitres…
Deeply troubled teenagers were the focus of quite a number of the entries at 1995's Mill Valley Film Festival. Aline Issermann's Shades of Doubt accurately reflects the confusion a 12-year-old victim of incest experiences when she tries to bring the truth out into the open. Alexandrine's story begins in the most idyllic of settings: a family outing in beautiful surroundings. B…
Shag is a pleasant summer comedy about four teenage girls enjoying a fling in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, circa 1963, a plot only its English producers would consider “a rarity.” Phoebe Cates, a star of high school films since 1982, finally graduates in this one. She's clearly had some theatrical training: her performance as a future bride attracted to a one-night stand name…
If Tom Stoppard had written nothing else in his life but Arcadia (a brilliant play about my two least favorite subjects, mathematics and gardening), his name would be engraved on my heart forever. He has, of course, written much more than that, including Night and Day (starring Diana Rigg, John Thaw, and David Langton), which I, despite being the world's worst ai…
In 1992's Strictly Ballroom, competitive dancing was an obsession for its amateur contestants. In 1996's Shall We Dance, it functions as a key to unlock deeply hidden dreams and emotions. Shohei Sugiyama (Koji Yakusho) is a middle-aged married businessman with an adolescent daughter. His spirit has been ground down by years of repetitive routines. And then he sees the s…
Shallow Grave is a nasty little tale about three flatmates looking for a fellow occupant to share their living space. As they grill prospective tenants, we learn that Juliet, David, and Alex have the sort of darkly humorous relationship that excludes nearly everyone else. Until Hugo arrives on the scene. He creates an interesting and rather charming first impression. And then they discover his bod…
Shelf Life bears the surprising imprint of director Paul Bartel. Fans of Bartel's more outrageous works such as Eating Raoul, Lust in the Dust, and Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills may not know what to make of this modest stage-to-screen transfer of the play written by its three stars, the story of what would happen to the kids in a family that were whisked into a bomb shelte…
Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns) is having an affair with Jamie Overstreet (Tommy Redmond Hicks), who thinks he can tell her what to do. Nola is also having an affair with Greer Childs (John Canada Terrell), a rich male model who's more in love with himself than with her. And finally, Nola is seeing Mars Blackmon (Spike Lee), a bit o…
Edward Burns, Mike McGlone, and newcomer Maxine Bahns return in the so-so follow-up to Burns’ so-so breakthrough film, The Brothers McMullen. This time, they're surrounded by familiar television faces (John Mahoney from Frasier, whose career will neither be helped nor hindered by this picture, and Jennifer Aniston from Friends, who might do well to consider a new movie agent&#…
I rarely meet anyone in San Francisco who bores the hell out of me, but—in She's Vintage, I spent 100 minutes with the four staggeringly dull flat mates whose less-than-spellbinding lives make up Mulan Chan's narrative for Peter M. Wilson's indie. All four are the subjects of rambling interviews that seem to lead nowhere. Sam (Danyel Roberts) is a blond bi…
Geoffrey Rush deservedly won a Golden Globe and an Academy Award for his full-throttle performance as David Helfgott, and Noah Taylor really deserved a nod, too, as adolescent David. Armin Mueller-Stahl was SO creepy as Helfgott's control freak father that he probably freaked out the Academy members who voted for Cuba Gooding Jr. instead. Shine basked in a 90 something-day glow until some n…
The 1997 miniseries may have had Stephen King's seal of approval, but nothing beats the eyes and ears of a world-class filmmaker. As I was nearly driven into a coma while Steven Weber and Rebecca DeMornay had a LOOONG chat about whether or not they should have sex, I knew that this would never happen in the original Stanley Kubrick movie starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall. They won&…
Surprise! Thanks to writer Willy Russell and actress Pauline Collins, Shirley Valentine emerges as one of the most charming mid-life crisis sagas ever. The plot revolves around a 42-year-old Liverpudlian housewife who's tired of talking to her kitchen wall. She leaves her husband with two weeks of frozen dinners and flies away to Greece with a friend. On the sunny island of Mykonos, Shirley…
There are actors who reach the stage in their careers when they telephone in their performances. Then there is Michael Caine, who tackles each new role with the hunger of a beginner whose career depended on every movie he makes. Jan Egleson's A Shock to the System is vintage Caine. Surrounded by an excellent supporting cast, he outacts everyone on screen with fine character shadings and tot…
There is probably no filmmaker alive who is more expert at capturing the pulse of a community than Robert Altman. He examined the world of country music in Nashville with humor and affection, and the motion picture industry with savagery and wit in The Player. Now, in Short Cuts, he casts a dark gaze at the sunny world of Los Angeles where sex is plentiful and joyless, where wrongful death is take…
Andrei Konchalovsky strikes out with Shy People, a witless film about Cosmopolitan writer Jill Clayburgh, who drags teenage daughter Martha Plimpton off to the backwoods to visit their cousins for the purpose of a magazine article about families. The cousins are presided over by Barbara Hershey, whose husband is an omnipresent ghost, whose sons are violent and strange, and whose pregnant daughter-…
This tribute to the sidewalk entertainers who performed outside London theatres is a good early showcase for Vivien Leigh as Libby. The lion's share of the attention goes to Charles Laughton as a street performer who befriends Libby and makes her part of his act. Libby has greater ambitions for herself. She wants to be a star and, through her connection with the young songwriter played by R…
The conclusion of Silent Tongue is abrupt for a reason; reportedly, the original ending was scrapped because of the uneven quality of some of the performances. Watching the rest of the film, it isn't too difficult to identify the weakest cast members: Dermot Mulroney and River Phoenix, both of whom acquitted themselves with distinction in many other ensemble showcases. Mulroney is simply in…
Oral histories about the Holocaust are offered by Harriet Wichins’ Silent Witness, a 1994 Canadian documentary.
If you've never seen Rock Hudson's Home Movies or From the Journals of Jean Seberg, The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender isn't a bad introduction to the films of Mark Rappaport. But if you have, watching Rappaport's latest effort is like sitting through movies you've already seen with the person you've seen them with—you know all the observations, p…
It's been so long since I've seen contemporary movies with sexual themes free of violence or devastating consequences that I was beginning to wonder if they were still being made. Sirens is certainly the most low-key sexual fantasy film that you're likely to see from the year 1994. It's partly based on the life of Australian artist Norman Lindsay, who died in 1968 at th…
While it's by no means flawless, Sister My Sister has it all over The Maids. Based on a true French murder case, set in Le Mans, the story revolves around the Papin sisters, Christine, 28 (Joely Richardson), and Lea, 21 (Jodhi May). The two maids are treated like dirt by their employer Madame Lancelin, changed to Ranzard for the film (Julie Walters)…
Slacker is the sort of movie that will either make you laugh hysterically or switch theatres when the manager isn't looking.
A prison film with a difference: poetry, not violence, can set you free. The fact that two of the cast members are poets in their own right gives Slam a sincere, eloquent quality, enhanced by the documentary skills of director Marc Levin, making his fictional feature film debut here. Saul Williams is Ray Joshua, a small-time pot peddler who is present when his supplier Big Mike is shot. Ray is sen…
In 1963, Vittorio Gassman starred as Bruno Fortuna, a jerk who introduces a kid portrayed by Jean-Louis Trintingnant to The Easy Life. In spite of the fact that Bruno had virtually no redeeming qualities, he gave Roberto the kid the best time he ever had in his life, and with the charismatic Vittorio Gassman as his guide, the reasons why were abundantly clear. In 1989's The Sleazy Uncle, Ga…
It's been a while since Billy Bob Thornton wrote and starred in 1992's One False Move. At the time, his dialogue was better than his acting. But in Sling Blade, Thornton has written himself a role that any actor worth his salt would walk barefoot on ground glass to play, and son of a gun if he doesn't make the most of the chance. Thornton IS Karl Childers, a mentally disabled …
Not too many people know about The Slipper and the Rose and that's a shame. To be sure, there's a surfeit of Cinderella movies on video shelves competing for our attention, but this version has always been among my favorites. It was originally released at 146 minutes, an uncomfortable length for children, and reissued in 1980 at 127 minutes. The late 1970s were not a particularly rec…
François Truffaut's movies are filled with sweet observations, invariably from a detached viewpoint.
This charming Basil Dearden comedy focuses entirely on the management of a dilapidated movie theatre. The elderly ticket taker (Margaret Rutherford as Mrs. Fazackerlee) is used to accepting barter as the price of admission from many of the patrons, the elderly projectionist is an alcoholic named Percy Quill who occasionally muddles the reels (Peter Sellers was only 32 at the t…
Movies change our lives, for better and worse. Smoke is the movie that broke my heart after I saw it with a male viewer I respected and considered a friend. We got a lift from someone who asked me what I thought of the movie, so I told him. For the guy who saw the movie with me, the friendship ended right there, although it took me three years to believe it. I'm a fatalist, so I'm co…
Smoke Signals played at the Bridge theatre on my block for MONTHS. Not since Strictly Ballroom did I recall seeing such long lines, lured mostly by enthusiastic word-of-mouth praise rather than print advertising. It's a road movie about two mismatched traveling companions from the Coeur d'Alene Indian reservation. Victor Joseph (Adam Beach) isn't thrilled by the …
When Smooth Talk first played at Wheeler Auditorium at the University of California at Berkeley, the resounding hisses and boos were heard clear across campus; it was politically incorrect for a movie to show a teenage girl (Laura Dern) apparently asking to be raped by a stranger (Treat Williams). A closer look reveals that this is neither the point of Joyce Chopra�…
You may have vague memories of The Vanishing Lady, a 1955 Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode starring his daughter Pat. Originally titled Into Thin Air, it was reportedly based on a true story of 1889's Paris World Exposition: a young woman checks into a hotel with a relative who immediately becomes quite ill. A doctor is called, he sends her to fetch the medication and when she comes back, …
A title like Look Beautiful and Shut Up won't win Sois Belle et Tais-Tois a rampaging horde of female fans, although there is much of interest for both men and women who discover this by chance on a video shelf. When this flick was first released in the summer of 1958, Jean-Paul Belmondo, then 25, and Alain Delon, 22, somehow escaped critical attention, although they're both quite go…
My particular favorite at 1995's Jewish Film Festival was Eytan Fox's Song of the Siren, based on Irit Linur's best-selling novel.
Sorceress, directed by longtime François Truffaut–collaborator Suzanne Schiffman, is an immaculate film about a 13th century French village and the priest who confronts their “heretical” superstitions.
Another one-joke movie with a weird-looking cast and cinematography to match PLUS comic book ambiance, substandard sound to match the level of the dialogue, and uniformly wretched acting by everybody.
The three Moynihan sisters grew up in Sorrento Beach, but only Hilary (Caroline Gillmer) stays there as an adult, raising the adolescent Troy (Ben Thomas) and tending to her dad, Wal (Ray Barrett). Pippa (Tara Morice) lives in New York, and Meg (Caroline Goodall), who lives in London, is the acclaimed author of Melancholy, an il…
Why include this ABC telefeature that aired in a 180-minute time slot in the fall of 1979 before it was released theatrically overseas in the spring of 1980? How many more movies do we need to see about this maritime catastrophe, anyway? Except for A Night to Remember, they all have the same plot: two-thirds fictional dramatizations of the lives of characters who may or may not have existed in rea…
This is a good guy's movie, which is not damning it with feint praise.
Mary Pickford was the only woman among the original founders of United Artists. (Her three co-founders were D.W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin.) Since all four wanted to make movies free of studio interference, their original goal in 1919 was to release movies they produced themselves. Sparrows, for which Pickford served as star AND producer, was one of several att…
They can do anything to Sophia Loren: strip her of makeup, stuff her in dumpy dresses, rip her stockings, frazzle her hair—anything, and she'll still take your breath away. In A Special Day, she plays an unappreciated housewife who befriends a disgraced homosexual (played by the late Marcello Mastroianni in an imaginative casting coup that led straight to an Oscar nomination&#…
I can never tell whether director Larry Cohen is putting everyone on or not. Just when I'm convinced he's made one of the funniest FBI movies of all time (1977's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover starring the late Broderick Crawford), he'll come up with a genuinely scary film like 1982's Q starring Michael Moriarty. 1985's Special Effects …
As a preview screening of Spice World made abundantly clear, it doesn't really matter what's on the silver or small screen OR on the tweaked soundtrack as long as the five Spice Girls themselves can be seen and heard by millions of their rampaging fans. The fact that only Sporty and Scary (the two Melanies, Chisholm, then 24, and Brown, then 22) can really sing, dance, …
Spider Baby is a movie to cure anyone's blues.
Little Ana Torrent has a wistful, appealing quality, with sinister undertones.
Alison Elliott may not be my first choice for Peter Gallagher's femme fatale in The Underneath, but she is THE best possible Percy Talbott in Lee David Zlotoff's The Spitfire Grill. Actually, there are three breathtaking performances here. Ellen Burstyn does a beautiful job as Hannah Ferguson, the owner of the Spitfire Grill, and Marcia Gay Harden turns the role of an unsophisticated…
I saw three movies in a row where kids were well along on the road to self-destruction before the closing credits. Squeeze looked like it was going to be the fourth variation on the same thing, only it wasn't. Director Robert Patton-Spruill is an acting teacher in Boston and he wrote the screenplay specifically for three young actors who star in the film, including Eddie Cutanda as Hector a…
In Stacking, Megan Follows, Christine Lahti, Frederic Forrest, Peter Coyote, and Jason Gedrick turn in remarkable performances, but this low-key film failed to find its proper audience. It's a shame because Victoria Jenkins’ wise, cliche-free screenplay reveals that she knows her rural characters through and through. Sensitively directed by Martin Rosen and shot by Richard Bowen, the…
Stand and Deliver began life as Walking on Water when it was first shown at 1987's Mill Valley Film Festival. Jaime Escalante (Edward James Olmos) is a mathematics teacher at an East Los Angeles high school where half the students fail to graduate. Knowing that education is the only way that his students can escape a lifetime of low-paying jobs, Escalante is tough and demandin…
Star Kid is the movie I watched to cheer myself up after The Sweet Hereafter. It's a wonderful kiddie flick about Spencer Griffith (Joseph Mazzello), a sweet little boy who's constantly tormented at school by Turbo Bruntley (Joey Simmrin). Spencer and his sister Stacey (Ashlee Levitch) have been rather neglected by their workaholic dad Rolan …
We all know that parents don't want their kids to grow up to be wannabe movie stars, but here's a switch: Pimp Pepe (Efrain Figueroa) doesn't want his son Carlos (Douglas Spain) to take a small acting role because it will interfere with his real job, turning tricks. Is Star Maps meant to be a heartbreaker, a side splitter, or both? If it's bo…
So you want to be a rock and roll star? Jim MacLaine (David Essex) starts out broke and happy and winds up rich and alienated. He doesn't want it that way, but isn't offered any other real alternatives. His pay-off in the back of an ambulance, being yelled at by his manager for his habitual selfishness, is wrenching to watch. Stardust could be the story of the Beatles a…
What a difference nearly 30 years makes. When 1970's Start the Revolution Without Me was reviewed by Clive Hirschhorn in The Warner Bros. Story, he dismissed it as “a disappointing farce which squandered the talents of its two leading players.” Hmmph…. Well, it made me laugh hysterically in 1970 and it makes me laugh in 1999. My wise, witty, and wonderful friends Clinto…
Allan Piper certainly had his work cut out for him when he decided to write, direct, edit, and produce Starving Artists PLUS play a klutz named Zach. For some reason, Joy (Bess Wohl) is wildly attracted to Zach. She'd have to be, because in his pursuit of her, he accidentally breaks her nose, burns her, insults her, sets the dinner table on fire, nukes their romantic chicken d…
Steppenwolf is a visually striking and disturbing film, but admirers of Herman Hesse (1877–1962) will probably loathe it; it has a bubble gum quality that undercuts its impact.
Sticky Fingers represents the directing debut of actress Catlin Adams, so perhaps Adams’ intrusive “Look Ma, I'm directing” style will acquire more discipline on future projects. Adams wrote the script with actress Melanie Mayron, who co-stars in the movie with Helen Slater and a cast of mostly women: Shirley Stoler and the late Gwen Welles plus Oscar nominees Eileen Br…
The Story of Fausta is a sexy, hilarious romp from Bruno Barreto and Betty Faria, his Bye, Bye Brazil star.
Peasant Qui Ju (Gong Li) is expecting a baby, but nonetheless fights for justice when her husband Liu (Liu Pei Qui) is kicked in the groin by their village head (Lei Lao Sheng). Arbitrators say the chief must compensate Qui Ju's husband, but she wants him to say he's sorry for what he's done, even when it appears that her relationship …
This would be a fair movie for an adult director, but Matty Rich was only 19 when he made Straight out of Brooklyn, reportedly based on his own life. It's a depressing look at a Brooklyn family who live in the Red Hook Housing Project. Ray Brown (George T. Odom) beats his wife Frankie (Ann D. Sanders). Their kids Dennis (Laurence Gilliard) and Carol…
Since Graham Greene wrote the stories for both The Fallen Idol and The Stranger's Hand, it might be interesting to see them both on a double bill for comparison purposes. Each involves a little boy lost (no parents in sight) who attaches himself to a guilty-looking couple who don't care half as much about him as he cares about them. Roger Court (Richard O'…
A few minutes into David Hare's Strapless, I realized that I would be sitting through yet another long, pretentious movie in which a dense guy tries to explain how women feel (sigh). I suspect that some people think that Hare is cute when he tries to be clever, but he's not THAT cute, not with 99 minutes of my time. Blair Brown plays a 40-year-old doctor who goes on and…
The elderly people living in an old hotel join forces with a young couple to organize a protest that may save their building.
To be a great actor, you have to be able to project real emotion any which way you can. Morgan Freeman is a great actor. Kathy Baker is a great actor. After a dozen movies in ten years, the empirical evidence that Christopher Reeve, then turning 35, was not a great actor was too compelling to be ignored. The same year that Robert Townsend was lampooning how black actors were invariably cast as pim…
Both 1981's Pixote by Hector Babenco and 1984's Streetwise by Martin Bell offer a harsh portrait of the lives led by street children. Streetwise has deglamorized the runaway life for many young people who have seen Bell's movie, but for the Seattle children who appear in the film, life continues to run downhill. Erin, also known as Tiny, was one of the few participants who rev…
Old-time film buffs describe their primal experiences at local Bijous of the ‘30s with such intense passion: “And I paid my dime every day and went to see 42nd Street or Golddiggers of 1933 or Flying Down to Rio over and over and over again; it was magic.” Although movies with that sort of repeat value are indeed rare, we have found one, and so, apparently, have other romance-…
One of the more amusing releases of 1976 failed to win much in the way of audience acceptance. It's a shame, really, because West Germany's Strongman Ferdinand had a great deal to say about the sort of mentality that may have made the Watergate break-in possible. Ferdinand (convincingly played by Heinz Schubert) is the security officer for a large corporation. He soon d…
Movie pioneer D.W. Griffith (1875–1948) couldn't get ARRESTED in 1931, so he financed his $300,000 swan song himself and released it through United Artists, the independent releasing corporation he founded with Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977), Douglas Fairbanks (1883–1939), and Mary Pickford (1892–1979). …
Bo Widerberg's Stubby is such a dear, sweet movie.
It's a day in the life of SubUrbia, as seen by Eric Bogosian! How boring can its inhabitants be? You'll have 118 ennui-packed minutes to find out. The suburbs, at their best and at their worst, are always the cheapest shots and easiest targets in the world. Even with Richard Linklater at the helm, Bogosian's screenplay crawls at its own stagey pace. Kids hanging out at a conve…
A quirky entry at 1996's Mill Valley Film Festival, Sudden Manhattan is nicely written and directed by Adrienne Shelly, who also stars as Donna.
There must be few things more satisfying for a great actor than to play a character who is sedated, inebriated, tied up, and bleeding to death AND to know that he's stealing every frame of the movie from five ambulatory young actors. The part of Carlo (“Charles Barrett”) Bartolucci is a piece of cake for Christopher Walken and the subsequent careers of his young …
When young men play fast and loose with young women, they're only being human, according to the movies. This is the theme of A Summer Story. (When young women play fast and loose with young men, they're invariably monsters, but that's another story.) Upper-class English twit James Wilby shows his bad manners: (1) by falling in love with fetching cou…
Suture is all about two guys who are almost identical twins, the “almost” being the centerpiece of another one-joke movie although it most certainly does not qualify as a deliberate comedy (at least I don't think so). In any event, I didn't get the joke. The film's conceit is that no one notices the extremely obvious difference between the two of th…
It is hard to imagine that anyone could recall the Third Reich with affection and nostalgia, but this 1973 British film by Philippe Mora did infuriate many who first saw it at the Cannes Film Festival that year. The most stunning portions of the film feature color home movies shot by Eva Braun at Berchtesgaden. Mora retained a lip reader to determine what Hitler and his friends were saying to each…
I got no sleep the night I saw The Sweet Hereafter. It's an immeasurably sad movie about the aftermath of a tragic bus accident and it demands tremendous concentration, so this is not the movie to watch while doing taxes, homework, or crossword puzzles. Attorney Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm) is on the job after 14 Canadian children are killed when their bus swerves off the road…
Fledgling filmmakers generally throw everything they know, including the kitchen sink, into their early movies, and so does Melvin Van Peebles. When he plays around with what he can do visually on film, the results are striking and unforgettable; four bone potential, actually. The Black Community (billed just like that) generally deliver strong, gritty performances, considerably enha…
If anyone had told me what this movie was about before I saw it, I wouldn't have made it past the popcorn stand. Gorgeous Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato are stuck together on a Mediterranean island; he treats her terribly, even beats her up—and she loves it, and him, and doesn't want to leave. In anyone else's hands but Lina Wertmuller's, it would have …
Once upon a time when a writer like William Somerset Maugham wanted to write about the games guys play with each other, he'd turn one of the guys, like Mildred Rogers in Of Human Bondage, into a girl. Swimming with Sharks explores the S&M relationship between a Hollywood executive named Buddy (Kevin Spacey), and Guy, his assistant (Frank Whaley). There�…
Quentin Tarantino dug this Jack Hill oldie a lot, so he re-released it for audiences of the 1990s to reappraise. The plot revolves around the lives of girl gang members. The leader of the Debs is Lace (Robbie Lee). Maggie (Joanne Nail) gets into the gang, but Patch (Monica Gayle) is jealous and tries to diss her to Lace. The Debs get into a rumble with the…
Swoon is an irritating intellectual exercise allowing filmmaker Tom Kalin to say in his movie what Richard Fleischer and Alfred Hitchcock didn't say in Compulsion and Rope, that Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were homosexuals. Fleischer and Hitchcock didn't have to SAY it, they SHOWED it. How can there be any doubt when you watch the interactions of the two fictional but clearly fac…