Titus, Julie Taymor’s gorgeous film version of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, with Anthony Hopkins as the doomed title character, may be the most opulent release of the year… and also the most perverse, on nearly every front. It’s easy to see why there has never been a feature version of this…

Merchant/Ivory Productions has long been America’s quintessential purveyor of classy “literary” films. At its best the team of director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant has given us A Room With a View (1986) and The Remains of the Day (1993); at its worst Slaves of New York (1989) and…

It’s not a startling breach of conventional wisdom to apply the term masterpiece to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 Rear Window, which is being reissued this week in a nice restored print that, if memory serves, is better (though not that much better) than we’ve seen before. But critical reputations can be…

Three decades after Rosemary’s Baby, two decades after The Tenant, and after a series of five non-horror films, Roman Polanski returns to the supernatural thriller with The Ninth Gate. What could be more promising? Regardless of what one thinks about Polanski’s personal life or legal status, the man is clearly…

The first thought you’ll have while watching The Next Best Thing is “Was Madonna always this bad an actress?” It’s a question that will soon fade from consciousness, to be replaced by “Was Rupert Everett always this bad an actor?” and “Was John Schlesinger always this bad a director?” Since…

In the last 30 years, Woody Allen has written and directed something like 28 movies — “something like” reflects the confusion of how to count his contribution to New York Stories — a remarkable productivity record for a major filmmaker and one that’s even more impressive when you consider how…

The 1995 film Friday is best remembered as the film that brought actor Chris Tucker to audiences’ attention. A modest hit, it would seem an odd choice for a sequel, but Ice Cube — who cowrote the original with DJ Pooh, as well as produced and starred — is back…

Top Ten of 1999By Andy Klein Film critics are by nature a sour lot, so it is with truly great pleasure that I suggest that 1999 has been the best year for cinema — certainly for American cinema and even for the major studios — in my 15 years on…

How do you make a sequel to a nearly perfect film? Toy Story, the 1995 hit from Disney and Pixar, was not only the first fully computer-animated feature, it was also as brilliantly written and directed a film as any of the classic Disney releases. Pixar did nearly everything right…

Luc Besson, director of La Femme Nikita, The Professional, and The Fifth Element is not the first name that would leap to mind to helm a biopic of Joan of Arc. Sure, he’s French, and sure, most of his films have a woman or girl as protagonist or savior; but…

Ever since the mid-’80s release of Emir Kusturica’s first two features — Do You Remember Dolly Bell? and When Father Was Away on Business (which was nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar) — Kusturica has been the most internationally visible figure in Yugoslavian cinema. (That includes all the former…

Steven Soderbergh may have had some rocky times after his 1989 breakthrough with sex, lies, & videotape, but these days he’s on a roll. Last year he produced Pleasantville and directed Out of Sight, two of the year’s most praised films. This year he has The Limey, a complex, introspective…

Word processing has made life easier for screenwriters. No need to retype some old classic with your own little changes, nowadays you can just download the screenplay for, let’s say, The Exorcist, search for adolescent girl, replace with twentysomething single woman, and — voilà! — you have a brand new…

Since his TV show ended, Martin Lawrence has gotten more ink for his off-camera life than for his movie career. There’s nothing about Blue Streak that is likely to change that. It’s a shame, because the basic plot — which sounds like something from one of Donald E. Westlake’s Dortmunder…

As a filmmaker, John Turturro clearly believes in drawing from personal experience: The actor’s directorial debut, the 1992 Mac (which won the Camera D’Or at Cannes), was avowedly based on his father’s life. For his second feature, Illuminata, Turturro takes a look at the theater, showing us the ambitions, fears,…

You can tell the first wave of summer blockbusters has shot its wad when the studios start tossing out their second- and third-string films. Back in the old days, these would have been called “programmers” — thoroughly competent entries that reiterated all the conventions of their reliable, easy-to-market genres. Such…

The animated TV show South Park was the big sensation of the 1997-98 season — or at least as big a hit as a cable channel like Comedy Central can manage. It was almost inevitable that creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone would take their batch of foul-mouthed eight-year-olds to…

Anthology films are an odd-duck genre: Although there once was a time — now long gone — when books of short stories were published with nearly the frequency of novels, their cinematic equivalent has never amounted to even 1 percent of the fictional films released. You could argue that Pulp…

The Love Letter has the dubious distinction of being the other studio film to open this week. In a week when all the other majors have run for cover, Dreamworks has taken a gamble with a classic bit of counterprogramming — in nearly every way, this sweet romance/ romantic comedy…

We seem to be in the middle of one of those thematic blitzes that happen every now and then in the film world. Last year we had Dark City and The Truman Show; this year, so far, we have had EdTV, The Matrix, and David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ. Coming up in…

Has any major American director had quite so many career swings as Robert Altman? Maybe not, but if there’s one thing the last 30 years have made clear, it is that it’s never safe to count Altman out. The mid- and late ’90s have been particularly unfriendly to him. After…

Back in 1993 Disney released Swing Kids, a dead-earnest portrait of rebellious German jazz fans during the Third Reich. This bizarre hybrid — a blend of Footloose and Schindler’s List, of Dead Poets Society and The Diary of Anne Frank — pitted big bands versus arm bands; it was a…