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…
Visualize a pretty young woman and a handsome young man heading for the bedroom. She has just suggested that she wants to show him what she really wants, so naturally he begins unzipping his trousers en route to the bed. Oblivious to his loud boxers, she sits and begins swooning…
There’s a majesty to Michael Winterbottom’s new film, a majesty and a terrible, icy chill. There’s also a fair bit of invention, as the director of the wrenching Jude — based on Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure — has shifted the locus of that author’s fierce, beloved English west country…
“Keep a diary, and one day it’ll keep you,” said Mae West, and while the sentiment rings true, it does little to explain the mystery of why Helen Fielding’s sliver of literary history managed to keep anyone. Fluffy, shrill, and approximately as deep as Cosmo magazine, the book somehow hit…
A viewer doesn’t watch Amores Perros (Love’s a Bitch) so much as absorb it — like a body blow. “I wanted to make a movie that smelled of filth,” Alejandro González Iñárritu has said about his feature directorial debut. He has succeeded beyond perhaps even his wildest dreams. One of…
You may not know the name Anthony Anderson yet, but you will. Having had significant roles in four major films last year (Big Momma’s House; Me, Myself & Irene; Romeo Must Die; and Urban Legends: Final Cut), he’s trying to top himself this year with appearances in five. Already he’s…
Hello, what’s this? Why, could it be another cautionary tale from Hollywood about recreational drugs being — alert the media! — not particularly good for people? (If only they could try the same with guns. Messrs. Heston and Silver: You awake yet?) Indeed Blow director Ted Demme (Beautiful Girls, Monument…
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…
The heroine of Andrucha Waddington’s Me You Them is a force of nature who holds men in her thrall and deftly reshapes them to suit life. Without knowing it they fall prey to her charms, her spirit, her very scent. But she’s no Cleopatra dripping with jewels, no Lucrezia Borgia…
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…
It’s a scenario with which we’re all familiar by now: young single guys in search of hot babes, firing one-liners at each other, making pop-cultural references ad nauseam, and ultimately finding out that women are somewhat less shallow than they’ve been led to believe. At least it’s a scenario you…
We can run, we can hide, we can even try switching theaters, but there’s just no escaping that pesky Gene Hackman. He starred in The Conversation, he is ubiquitous, and revere him we must — virtually every single time we go to the movies. (Robyn Hitchcock even has a song…
To keep it simple, Enemy at the Gates plays like a mix of the PlayStation game Medal of Honor, a World War II Nazi shoot-’em-up viewed through a sniper’s scope, and a Harlequin Romance novel. It’s history lesson as video game, video game as soap opera, soap opera as highbrow…
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…
It’s almost impossible to know what to make of Monkeybone after one viewing; there’s so much going on in this dreamland of stop-motion and computer-generated animation and celebrity cameos that you have trouble keeping up with it. Indeed like a half-remembered dream, the movie’s often so overwhelming that even its…
Lance Barton, thin as paper and frail as fine china, is such a horrific standup that, during an amateur-night performance at the Apollo Theater, he is booed with so much force — the audience whips up its own whirlwind — he’s literally knocked off the stage. Lance’s manager insists he’s…
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…
The 20th Century is replete with examples of unconscionable crimes carried out in the name of some quasi-political, military, or religious cause — acts of such misguided judgment and mindless brutality that they seem to cross an invisible threshold of decency, morality, and understanding. The My Lai massacre of 1968,…
Outside avant-garde or experimental showcases, short dramatic films used to be little more than a means to an end — a risky route to an uncertain mainstream future. Getting one made was usually easy enough, as those things go. The hard part was getting it shown — especially if you…
