Many students and fans of the horror film, I am sure, will welcome the new movie Freddy vs. Jason with expressions of gratitude and relief, and possibly even a few resounding cheers. Surely, after so many years of shock and fright, so many buckets of gore and gobbets of flesh, so many scores of dead […]
Movie Reviews
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Buffy who? Give us more JC!
The makers of Slamdance victors Harry Knuckles and the Treasure of the Aztec Mummy are back with a cautionary tale involving Jesus, lesbians, vampires, Mexican wrestling, Kung Fu, and God knows what else I missed because the smile on my face was so huge, I couldn’t see over my cheekbones. We’re talking about a film […]
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We need some real cowboys again
The release of Kevin Costner’s generally impressive new picture, Open Range, ironically emphasizes the delicate condition of that once robust genre, the Western. Innumerable students of the form at every level of learning offer a wide variety of reasons for its virtual disappearance over the last three decades — the war in Vietnam, a new […]
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Nowhere to go and all day to get there
It’s been a decade since the bafflingly popular Merchant-Ivory team has churned out anything I could even remotely recommend to friends and family. Since Remains of the Day, director and co-writer James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant, and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala have made a couple of really awful pictures (Jefferson in Paris and Surviving Picasso), […]
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Perfectly at home on the ‘Range’
Despite its decades of decline, the Western, that grand and glorious American form, will never entirely succumb to the vagaries of taste and time. Expressing, no matter how crudely and falsely at times, some notions of ourselves as a people, it simply means too much to our history and more important, to our mythology. Its […]
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Get itchy and dirty this weekend
Okay, first things first: Ichi is pronounced “ee-chee,” not “itchy,” otherwise this would probably be the long-awaited feature-film debut of a certain ultra-violent cat-and-mouse team from The Simpsons. But that’s not to say Ichi the Killer (screens Saturday, August 16, at the Dryden) isn’t brutal in its own right. Believe me, when director Takashi Miike […]
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The Ben and Jen show
It must have seemed like a good idea at the time, one of those isolated brainstorms that now and then sweep through narrow areas of Southern California, specifically, conference rooms in the region of Hollywood. Some inventive person probably suggested a movie constructed around two of the best known young stars in American film, who […]
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Chasing a one-armed bandit, and a box
The flying guillotine looks like an umbrella that extends into a red fondue pot on a chain. Its master is a blind octogenarian named Fung Sheng Wu Chi, and he has eyebrows twice that of even Andy Rooney. Fung’s enemy is a one-armed bandit who killed his two brightest protégés in 1971’s One Armed Boxer. […]
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The horse of the Great Depression
Based on a runaway bestseller, and a true story at that, Seabiscuit, if one believes the publicity and the press, will probably win a trifecta of Academy Award nominations.
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No aces up his sleeve
Owning Mahowny, the new Philip Seymour Hoffman vehicle, tells the true story of a Toronto banker who stole millions of dollars to support a gambling habit in the early ’80s.
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English of the English
In recent years, a number of small, modest, mostly comic works, many of them dealing with the lives of working-class people in dreary provincial towns, typify the current minor renaissance in British cinema. Within their narrative process and despite their humorous treatment, films like The Full Monty, Little Voice, Brassed Off, and even Trainspotting address […]
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Reversal of fortune
There isn’t a warning strong enough to prepare you for Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (screens Saturday, July 26, at the Dryden). But it’s not only because of the now-infamous graphic violence or brutal rape scene, which had people fleeing, presumably with their hands either up in the air or over their eyes, from its Cannes premiere […]
