Who would have imagined that at this late date — more than half a century after the end of World War II, after The Diary of Anne Frank, Schindler’s List, Au Revoir, Les Enfants, Pierre Sauvage’s documentary Weapons of the Spirit, and Jan Kadar’s amazing The Shop on Main Street…
Welcome to the movies of summer 2001! Of course, whether you’ll actually feel welcome is another issue: Hollywood is doing its usual stuff to attract the most dollars, which may not always mean your dollars… unless you belong to that centrally crucial demographic — males ages 13 to 25. You…
Given the autobiographical impulse, it’s not surprising that there is a disproportionate number of movies about filmmaking. But Shadow Magic, Ann Hu’s fictional feature debut, is different from most in two ways: It’s set in China; and it’s about the very earliest days of cinema, some 50 years before the…
French director Patrice Leconte is a chameleonic talent: Among his films to reach American screens are the psychological thriller Mr. Hire, the period satire Ridicule, and the offbeat comic romance The Girl on the Bridge. But in truth all Leconte’s films are romances at heart, though they are often complex…
As its title suggests, Spy Kids is an action fantasy aimed primarily at the preteen/early-teen audience. For all its thrills — and it has plenty — it’s strictly a PG film. That fact is all the more surprising when one considers its source: Robert Rodriguez, master of bloody gunplay and…
Director John Herzfeld’s 1996 feature, the droll and underrated 2 Days in the Valley, was a more than adequate counterbalance to the catastrophe of his first feature, Two of a Kind, a 1983 John Travolta vehicle (which, together with Moment by Moment, put its star on the fast track from…
With In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wai solidifies his stature as the subtlest and most idiosyncratic of Hong Kong directors. In an industry best known for its accessible, crowd-pleasing comedies and action films, Wong has turned out a series of increasingly risky dramas that make little or no concession…
Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, with a screenplay by David Mamet and Steven Zaillian, is being released ten years after The Silence of the Lambs, the film that established Hannibal Lecter as an iconic villain in our culture, right up there with A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger, Friday the 13th’s…
Thirteen Days is a suspenseful look at the American government in the grip of a crucial, minute-to-minute, real-life crisis that threatens to destroy the country. No, it is not — as the relatively brief time span referenced in the title makes clear — about the recent election struggles… or the…
For slightly more than a decade, Chinese martial arts films have directly and indirectly gained a growing audience in the United States. Now the genre may find its greatest breakthrough coming from an unlikely source: director Ang Lee, best known for comedy-dramas of social manners such as Sense and Sensibility,…
Finding Forrester is the latest film from director Gus Van Sant, one of the true American originals to emerge in the ’80s and ’90s. When Van Sant is at his best, he gives us stories and images we’ve never seen before. Finding Forrester, however, is not Gus Van Sant at…
The current release of French director Nicole Garcia’s Place Vendôme — which was nominated for 11 César Awards when it debuted in France two years ago — is yet another sign that the drop-off in French imports that has plagued U.S. screens in recent years is reversing: This is roughly…
November may mean Thanksgiving to most of you, but in the film biz it means a rush of “serious” films trying to gouge an impression into the short memories of Oscar voters. This shouldn’t be a bad thing, but because the relationship between “Oscar” and “actual interesting filmmaking” is nearly…
It’s a sorry fact that what everybody in Hollywood — writer, actor, best boy, and caterer alike — really wants to do is direct. This has led, over the years, to some embarrassing debuts and some unexpected triumphs. For many the notion that Sally Field — after Gidget and Sister…
It’s a pleasure to say that Clint Eastwood reverses his recent downward slide — A Perfect World (1993), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Absolute Power (1997), and True Crime (1999), each of which has seemed less satisfying than its predecessor — with Space Cowboys, his latest. It isn’t an…
Canadian documentarian Ron Mann, who previously examined aspects of pop culture in Comic Book Confidential (1988) and Twist (1992), takes on a broader and more controversial subject in Grass, a history of America’s second-favorite smokable substance. As he has done before, he provides a sugarcoated crash course on a huge…
Director Alison Maclean, from Canada by way of New Zealand, turns her camera on the American landscape — or more accurately the underbelly of the American landscape — in Jesus’ Son, an uneven but often effective adaptation of Denis Johnson’s autobiographical book. Billy Crudup stars as a thoroughly marginalized character…
Why is the film called Disney’s The Kid? Is it really possible that the studio was so concerned that someone might actually mistake the film for an update of the Chaplin classic that the brand name had to be formally incorporated in the title? Or was this an attempt to…
Sixty years after Walt Disney’s original plans to expand on the 1940 Fantasia, Walt Disney Pictures has finally gotten around to making new musical segments for a reprise of the film’s classical-music-cum-animation concept. Fantasia/2000 has seven new sequences, with that old favorite, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” thrown in for old times’…
Early on in Mission: Impossible 2 (or M:i-2, as the confident Paramount now calls it), hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) complains to his boss about his new assignment: “It’s going to be difficult.” “It’s not mission difficult, Mr. Hunt,” the boss icily replies, “it’s mission impossible. ‘Difficult’ should be a…
Woody Allen is back on screen in Small Time Crooks, a bittersweet comedy that in many ways could have been lifted straight from the ’30s. For the most part, it’s Woody Allen Lite, which is not at all a bad thing. While one doesn’t want to penalize Allen for his…
