The independent production-distribution company the Shooting Gallery probably got a lot more attention when Monica Lewinsky showed up in Washington wearing a cap with its logo than it is likely to get from the release of The 24 Hour Woman, a modest, deserving film from writer-director Nancy Savoca. Savoca made…

Writer-director Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, the filmmaker’s adaptation of James Jones’ 1962 bestseller about the World War II battle for Guadalcanal, arrives in theaters with an almost unbearable weight of expectation. After graduating in the first class at the American Film Institute’s Advanced Film Studies program and working…

The past year has been filled with good films… interesting films… worthwhile films. In fact there were many that I think of as being wonderful or droll or whatever. But 1998 failed to produce a single film to which the term “great” might be applied. Most years have at least…

Old-fashioned romantic comedies are an endangered species, and in these generally unromantic days it’s always a pleasant surprise to find a decent one like Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail. Ephron, of course, made her bones five and a half years ago with the huge hit Sleepless in Seattle, but since…

According to the sparse information available in standard reference books, Chilean expatriate director Raœl Ruiz, still in his late fifties, has made more than 100 films since 1960; apparently only 50 or so are features, but that’s still an impressive stat. He’s been a staple on the festival circuit for…

American History X, a hard-edged look at American neo-Nazis, arrives in theaters with a lot of behind-the-scenes baggage: First-time director Tony Kaye has engaged in a protracted, high-profile battle with producer-distributor New Line Cinema over the film’s final form. While Kaye may have a justified grievance, this is not as…

As a professional lamenter of how “they just don’t make ’em like they used to,” I am always thrilled on those rare occasions when someone even tries to make ’em that way. So I am doubly thrilled that, with The Impostors, writer-director Stanley Tucci has tried and richly succeeded. Those…

Back in the early ’70s, when John Waters made his first splash with such low-budget gross-outs as Pink Flamingos and Multiple Maniacs, who would have guessed that someday he’d be making a Hollywood film as benevolent as Pecker? In retrospect maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. If any director has ever…

Jackie Chan’s American fans — and I include myself among them — have suffered through a nervous 1998 so far. The momentum the star earned with the 1996 release of Rumble in the Bronx has seemed to dissipate steadily: An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, the first American production…

After a summer filled with third-rate pulp, Blade arrives with a pedigree that suggests first-rate pulp: characters and situations lifted from Marvel Comics; a screenplay by David S. Goyer, who earlier this year gave us the transcendent pulp masterpiece Dark City; and the presence (as star and producer) of the…

There will always be a Britain, and very likely there will always be movies about the pluck and sacrifice demonstrated by the little people during World War II. Not Billy Barty-type little people — though surely there must have been a few of them involved — but the simple, salt-of-the-earth…

The X-Files is a movie that answers questions…. No, wait a minute: The X-Files is a movie that asks questions…. All right, The X-Files is a movie that makes me wanna ask some questions, like: What the hell does “Fight the future” mean? Look, I can understand “The truth is…

Only one week after lizards came crawling across the nation’s screens in Godzilla and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, along comes the bloated Hope Floats, toting a barge full of saccharine sentimentality and bogus emotions. Let’s start with the title: two words the juxtaposition of which is neither evocative…

The Horse Whisperer, the latest from Robert Redford — and the first of his directorial efforts in which he also stars — could almost serve as a compendium of Redford’s best and worst filmmaking tendencies. It features his eye for gorgeous, pictorial vistas, his straightforward narrative approach, and, most important,…

One of the few seemingly spontaneous bursts of energy at the recent Academy Awards ceremony was provided by motor mouth Dutch director Mike van Diem, who seemed genuinely surprised that his debut feature Character had won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. If the commercial popularity and Oscar sweep for…

Back in the ’60s and ’70s, when its animation unit was in the doldrums, the Disney studio made a number of live-action “family” comedies (1976’s No Deposit, No Return and 1977’s Freaky Friday, among them) that were, within their limited ambitions, genuinely funny. The studio’s most recent film, Krippendorf’s Tribe,…

The science-fiction writing of the late, great Philip K. Dick hasn’t been particularly well served on screen. The most recent adaptation of one of his works, Screamers (1995), was junk; Total Recall (1990) had its moments but was less ingenious by half than the short story on which it was…

After Santa’s overstuffed sack of Oscar qualifiers is disgorged in December, Hollywood follows by dumping its lost-cause features during the first few weeks of the new year. In recent years these have included the airplane “thriller” Turbulence (1997), Bio-Dome and Two If by Sea (1996), and Cabin Boy (1994). This…

With 1994’s Exotica, Atom Egoyan secured his reputation as Canada’s leading director; his new film, The Sweet Hereafter, based on a celebrated novel by Russell Banks, should solidify Egoyan’s hold on that title. Egoyan’s work, in general, is small-scale enough to seem arty and plain enough to be accessible. The…

Now that the Japanese Tora-san series — with 50-odd entries in 30 years — has presumably drawn to a close following last year’s death of star Kiyoshi Atsumi, the James Bond films constitute the longest-running continuous series around. They’ve had their ups and downs, but something about the Bond formula…

Wes Craven’s Scream, which opened almost exactly a year ago, was the surprise hit of an overcrowded Christmas season. The success was a triumph partly of counterprogramming: In the midst of a glut of classy Oscar contenders, Scream was the only teen horror film. It was also helped by the…

Documentarian Errol Morris is by far best known for his 1988 feature The Thin Blue Line, which is often described as the only film that ever got an innocent man off death row. But Morris got his start with very different sorts of material: His first two films — 1978’s…