The Wedding Planner begins with footage of a seven-year-old girl performing a wedding ceremony with her Barbies. It’s a fitting opening, because the movie that ensues could almost be the result of a screenwriter literally transcribing the play scenario enacted by a small child and her dolls. If you were…
The doomed are often a remarkably energetic and productive lot, especially when it comes to creating portraits of their personal horrors. Themes vary in intensity between slow self-destruction and grand devastation, but in vampirism the full spectrum of ghastliness may be covered, because the imbalance represents so much to so…
Something weird is definitely going on in the British pop scene. Years after tasteful Yanks allowed classic works such as Saturday Night Fever and Grease to dissolve into our vast iconic array, villainous limey programmers were still hyping them over there. Thus the dual plagues of disco and ’50s rock…
This is some damn fine coffee you got here in Twin Peaks. And some damn good cherry pie. But I have to tell you something, sheriff: Last night I had a dream in which a dancing midget talked backward, thus leading me to believe that our killer is a man…
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,…
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…
Maybe it wasn’t such a bad year for filmgoing after all, if only because it’s far harder to assemble a Top 10 list this year than it was last year. Or maybe the best of 1999 towered so far above the worst (and the middling, which includes the grossly overrated…
The year 2000 was by no means the best of times for moviegoers, but only a curmudgeon would fail to find, say, ten points of light in a darkened room. 1. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Once we marveled at the flying gymnastics of Bruce Lee. Now it’s Ang Lee who…
It’s where Walter Huston found paradise at the end of Treasure of Sierra Madre, where the murdering lovers Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw rode into the sunset at the end of The Getaway, and where Thelma and Louise were headed when they ended up at the Grand Canyon. There are…
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…
This cinematic bonbon has all the ingredients required to spin an audience into the throes of fuzzy warmheartedness — the hope, the compassion, the joie de vivre — blended with the skill of a consummate confectioner. Much like a box of sweets with a convenient guide inside the lid, Lasse…
The moods of Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me are so artfully mingled that it’s difficult to get a fix on this highly personal independent feature. Set in a quiet little town in upstate New York’s lovely Catskill Mountains, it is at once a drama about the unresolved traumas…
Assessing the merits of Quills, the lusty new feature by director Philip Kaufman (Henry and June), it’s tempting to seek correlative characters from popular movies in order to illustrate just how radical this business is not. In Kaufman’s film — affectionately built upon a screenplay by Doug Wright, who adapts…
What Women Want could be the first movie to win a Clio Award for Advertisement of the Year. No fewer than two dozen products receive prominent placement in the film, from Federal Express to Foster’s Lager to Cutty Sark to L’eggs pantyhose to US Airways. After a while you begin…
About halfway through the megabudget mountain climbing adventure Vertical Limit, even the most rugged, thrill-hungry fans of disaster movies may find themselves going numb. Not from the howling weather on the icy face of K2, in the Himalayas, where the action supposedly takes place. Not from oxygen deprivation. Not even…
Day 1: It was just part of the job, just another movie on another afternoon. This one promised to be no more special than any other, save the casting of Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe. Proof of Life was the movie during which they fell in love, or whatever it…
In 102 Dalmatians, a new brood of puppies is born, one of which, Oddball, doesn’t develop spots. The resulting feelings of inadequacy are such that the poor thing runs away from home and hides in a cave, gets bitten by a bat, and turns into a slavering mad dog. Cruella…
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…
Unbreakable is such a quiet film that, whenever a character speaks above a whisper, it sounds like the shattering of glass in a monastery. It’s also a terribly sad movie; almost no one cracks a smile or a joke, and everyone wears the look of someone who’s just spent the…
So many elements make up a boyhood, from joyful laughter and games, to purloined porno mags and pointless aggression, to the scary realization that something vital is slipping away, something that may never be reclaimed. Naturally nostalgic reflections on this magical time form the basis of countless films, with two…
Refreshingly, the biggest wonder about the new Arnold Schwarzenegger ride is not that human cloning has become a reality, nor that the America of the future (“sooner than you think,” as an opening caption ominously suggests) very closely resembles present-day Vancouver, Canada. It’s not even that technological advances appear to…
The soon-to-be-talked-about sensations in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem For a Dream include three or four flashing, near-subliminal montages that combine an eye’s iris and dilating pupil, an extreme closeup of heroin cooking in a teaspoon, and a sucking hypodermic needle; a surpassingly frightening sequence in which Ellen Burstyn, in the midst…
