The 1967 screen musical Doctor Dolittle, which starred Rex Harrison, was a commercial disaster for its studio, 20th Century Fox. The new nonmusical Fox version, starring Eddie Murphy, isn’t in the same overblown category as the original film — its disasters are more mundane. It’s a kiddie comedy that really…
It’s Christmas vacation, 1958. The movie my dad has chosen for a first-grade pal and me to see is the new Disney live-action adventure Tonka, starring Sal Mineo as a young Sioux named White Bull who traps and domesticates a clear-eyed, spirited wild horse named Tonka. Having seen The King…
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…
Rule number one: When crafting a thriller, make sure the audience can relate to, identify with, or empathize with at least one of the characters. Rule number two: The characters’ motivations must be clear. Fail in either area — or, worse, in both — and you end up with a…
Most people associate the disco era with hedonism, homosexuality, a sense of community, tacky fashions, and awful music. But in his new The Last Days of Disco, writer-director Whit Stillman imagines the era as merely a singles bar for romantics in search of soul mates, mostly heterosexual and hardly debauchees…
The Truman Show, starring Jim Carrey, is the Zeitgeist movie of the hour. How could it not be? It’s all about the omnipotence of television and how our lives seem scripted by some unseen force — a TV producer, perhaps? Zeitgeist movies, almost by definition, get written about not only…
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 “Size Does Matter” marketing campaign for Godzilla is far more ingenious than the actual movie. It’s also highly annoying and has spawned a spinoff: The ads for a new film called Plump Fiction inform us that “Width Matters, Too.” Perhaps the best thing about the much-ballyhooed arrival of Godzilla…
In director Barbara Kopple’s new documentary, Wild Man Blues, we follow Woody Allen around Europe as he takes part in a whirlwind concert tour with the New Orleans-style jazz band with which he plays. He kvetches from the get-go. “I would rather be bitten by a dog than fly to…
It’s the tail end of the 1996 California primary election campaign, and incumbent Democratic Sen. Jay Bulworth (Warren Beatty) is having a nervous breakdown. Sleepless for days and famished, he channel-surfs aimlessly in the darkness of his office. In a rare moment of lucidity, he has an inspiration: He arranges…
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,…
Hurricane Streets comes on like a tough cookie but ends up just plain stale. First-time writer-director Morgan J. Freeman (no relation to actor Morgan Freeman) plies the kind of beat-up, trash-can naturalism that went out with Sal Mineo films like 1957’s Dino. Set in New York City’s Lower East Side,…
The flimsiest hustle in movie promotion today is that independent films are starved for mainstream attention. The truth is that such films often have an open field when it comes to big-city media. Major studios are usually unable to deliver a finished print of a would-be blockbuster until two or…
In the production notes for Spike Lee’s new He Got Game, the filmmaker is quoted as saying, “I don’t think I’ve ever done a film that is just about one thing….” That’s true: Usually he’s able to cram in two or three things. In He Got Game, for example, there…
In writer-director James Toback’s quicksilver sex comedy Two Girls and a Guy, Robert Downey, Jr., plays Blake Allen, a struggling New York City actor who lives in a spacious loft in SoHo that he probably can’t afford. He’s a pampered prince who has worked out for himself a cozy romantic…
Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel Les Miserables, which he began in 1845, runs in most editions to around 1500 pages. The most recent film version — there have been five other adaptations for movies or TV — runs a bit under two-and-a-half hours. It’s an expert piece of pruning. But do…
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…
From its very first frame, Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy whooshes us inside the rollicking, deranged world of twelve-year-old Francie Brady (Eamonn Owens). Francie is a redheaded rascal who lives with his alcoholic “Da” (Stephen Rea) and screw-loose mother (Aisling O’Sullivan) in a small town in a part of northern…
If nothing else, The Big One, the current edition of Michael Moore’s continuing self-love fest, has a great subject: the desperation hidden inside a “thriving” U.S. economy. While politicians and financial wizards point to unemployment on the wane and profits on the rise, Moore notes that the largest employer in…
When you think about how some of the smartest, most surprising films about women have been made by men — and vice versa — you start to realize that directors should dare to speak for the other gender more often. Few filmmakers know the ritual bonds and betrayals of men…
Lovers of American movies used to joke that foreign films wouldn’t seem so good if you saw them without subtitles. John Sayles’ new movie Men With Guns plays better than his previous films because it does have subtitles. Bald dialogue always sounds better in Spanish or in Indian dialects. Set…
Probably every film director itches to make a Western, so let’s be thankful that, with The Newton Boys, Richard Linklater has scratched his itch. Now he can go back to making movies about subjects for which he has some genuine feeling. Linklater should not be begrudged his chance to “stretch.”…
