If ever there was a movie destined to be written about in an “elevated” realm beyond the movie pages, it’s Primary Colors. Thanks to Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones, the Hollywood-Washington nexus has lifted director Mike Nichols’ picture, based on the 1996 bestseller by Joe Klein, into a higher stratosphere…
In his 1993 book Sarajevo: A War Journal, the Bosnian journalist Zlatko Dizdarevic reported on an eleven-year-old who was waiting in line for water when snipers killed his mother and father: “After the shooting, this boy started to fetch and pour water over the bodies of his dead parents. He…
A movie starring Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon, Gene Hackman, James Garner, and Stockard Channing ought to be a whole lot better than Robert Benton’s Twilight. It’s one of those “autumnal” movies about a private detective who is too old for the game but still goes through the motions. Benton, in…
Dangerous Beauty presents a sixteenth-century Venice filled with statesmen who hop from bed to bed without fear of “bimbo eruptions.” That’s because the courtesans aren’t bimbos, and they aren’t hidden: Everyone from the admiralty to the bishopric patronizes them. Having developed their minds along with their erotic skills, they’re boon…
British actor Gary Oldman, who made his mark playing a punk in 1986’s Sid and Nancy and a playwright in 1987’s Prick Up Your Ears, wrote and directed Nil By Mouth, which has already drawn comparisons to the class-conscious dramas of Mike Leigh (1993’s Naked, 1996’s Secrets & Lies). The…
Jeff Bridges is so euphorically whacked as a social dropout in The Big Lebowski that you get a secondhand high just looking at him. Padding around Venice, California, in a T-shirt that barely covers his midriff bulge, he comes off like a beach bum who bowls instead of surfs. His…
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…
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,…
This period tale of two gamblers — Oscar, a failed minister, and Lucinda, a glassworks owner — is too wispy to be an objet d’art and too clumsy to be a toy. Its key symbol is a tiny glass teardrop known as the “Prince Rupert drop,” which can withstand a…
Palmetto is a film noir set in a torpid seaside Florida town. It’s based on the 1961 James Hadley Chase novel Just Another Sucker, and when we first see Harry Barber (Woody Harrelson), he fits that description exactly. He looks dazed and confused — a sucker incarnate. Suckers are, of…
In these paradox-ridden times, producers in search of cutting-edge fantasies look back — they visit their boyhood or girlhood rooms and ransack their old books and videos, or peruse their studio’s property list for works that scored well in other media. In the mid-’90s, the English company Working Title Films…
His eye trained on the manic collision of Catholicism and consumerism, Spanish director Pedro Almodovar has made some of the liveliest, most genre-bending films of the past two decades. The guru of a visual style that emphasizes bright primary colors and bold geometry, he’s in love with the glittering surfaces…
The fifteenth Miami Film Festival continues apace Thursday through Sunday with two works by Japanese director-actor Takeshi Kitano, a star-studded entry from venerable new-wave filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, and the most recent movie made by playwright David Mamet. Not forgetting a closing-night screening of Italy’s Il Ciclone, which has become that…
You will give yourself a migraine if you attempt to divine a theme running through the 26 films that make up the fifteenth Miami Film Festival. Don’t bother trying. A readily apparent theme does not exist — not that one needs to. International in everything but name, this year’s renewal…
One of the conceits to which every critic must be genetically predisposed is the idea that, at the end of the day, his or her opinion actually matters. That some unknown phantasm at a nonspecific coffee shop sits immersed in said critic’s latest ill-advised screed, imbibing every word as if…
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…
Critics and audiences outside France have been going on for so long about the decline of French cinema that it’s fun to see a French film — Irma Vep — that says much the same thing. The rap is, of course, somewhat unfair — most raps are — but there’s…
Swedish director Jan Troell’s Hamsun, starring Max von Sydow, is easily the greatest film I’ve seen in years. It takes you as far out as you can go — to the limits of feeling. As a movie about a great and grievous artist made by an artist of equal rank,…
Martin Scorsese’s Kundun is a deeply ceremonial experience — like watching a serene pageant of colors, rituals, and costumes. It tracks the life of the Dalai Lama — recognized as the fourteenth reincarnation of the Buddha of Compassion and the spiritual and political leader of Tibet — from his childhood…
In the twisted game plan of Barry Levinson’s scintillating political satire Wag the Dog, presidential aides concoct an election-eve war with Albania in the hopes of torpedoing charges that their boss improperly touched a teenage girl. Hollywood and Washington work together to create that greatest of diversions: an international crisis…
Where would Irish filmmakers be these days without “the Troubles”? In just the past couple of years we’ve seen The Crying Game (1992), In the Name of the Father (1993), Michael Collins (1996), Some Mother’s Son (1996), and now The Boxer, the latest collaboration between director Jim Sheridan, screenwriter Terry…
While not a movie year to go down in infamy, 1997 was still mostly full of hype and holler. If the annual yield is judged by how many great films came out, 1997 was a loser. If you factor in the number of films that brought fresh talents and fresh…
