In addition to all the millions spent on the familiar publicity blitz and the subsequent stories and interviews in that coalition of the willing known as the media, in the movie business, context still counts. In the decade leading up to the year 2000, the apocalypse that never arrived (remember the disappointment of certain segments […]
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“I know I’m really lucky. I think I’m really happy.” So declares Natalie (Natalie Picoe, pictured) in the opening voiceover of Nosey Parker, John O’Brien’s sweet slice of life. But even the most novice moviegoer will know something is rotten in the State of Vermont (played here by itself, in all its shameless autumnal glory). […]
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Another look at classic movie bombs
How did Ishtar (1987), director Elaine May’s fourth and final feature, come to be the ultimate shorthand for cinematic failure? While it’s far from perfect, Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman eventually manage to wrangle some chemistry out of their time together on-screen, and the film is often quite funny. So what happened? The film […]
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The seasons of a lifetime
One of the most unusual motion pictures of the year, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring (the title is probably less unwieldy in the original, which renders each section with a single beautiful character), indicates that even in the midst of American cultural hegemony, a world cinema continues to exist and even thrive. The […]
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French director Claude Chabrol’s films usually contain two reliable elements. The first is the languid, privileged life of the bourgeoisie the French so enjoy documenting on film. Even the early Les Bonnes Femmes, which was not about the upper class but about shopgirls, portrayed the girls’ lives as stressless lollygagging marked only by shopping adventures […]
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Thirty years apart, 30 days of fast food
The must-see film of the moment is playing for one night at the Dryden this Friday. Walkabout (1971)is director and cinematographer Nicolas Roeg’s finest hour, a perfect jewel of a movie. A boy and his older sister are stranded in the Australian outback when their father, seemingly an emblem of staid society driven mindless by […]
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Hollywood gets inspired by the classics
With a coincidence that even Hollywood rarely permits itself, two of the most heavily promoted and generally extreme motion pictures of the year derive from two richly ambiguous incidents in the ancient past that permanently influence Western civilization. The political uprising in an obscure corner of the Middle East, culminating in the Crucifixion, and […]
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Special effects forge a horror compendium
The lavish new vampire movie, Van Helsing opens, appropriately, with a sequence that combines back story with an act of homage to the long, rich history of horror. Shot in black and white, with the classic Expressionist oblique angles, the opening duplicates the famous laboratory from the Frankenstein movies. Electricity crackles and sparks up […]
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Usually the dullest points during the Academy Awards telecasts occur when the presenters dole out Oscars for films the general public hasn’t seen and will probably never see: i.e., the shorts. That’s why this program, called the 2004 Oscar Shorts, is such a rare treat. The program contains three of the five 2003 nominees […]
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Bon Voyage brings spectacle to the screen for moviegoers who aren’t so much into gladiators and CGI and the like, and does it with old-fashioned panache. It posits the eve of World War II as a giddy, exciting time to be alive in France, as the leaders of Paris convene in Bordeaux to decide whether […]
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Short tales told on shoestrings
We all know April showers bring May flowers, but do you know what May flowers bring? No, not Pilgrims. In these parts, Shakespeare’s darling buds of May herald the unspooling of the Rochester International Film Festival, better known as Movies on a Shoestring. I always assumed the “shoestring” referred to the budgets of the […]
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In Envy, Jack Black and Ben Stiller play coworkers. Black invents something that makes dog waste disappear. Stiller fails to invest in the cockamamie scheme and loses out on the resultant windfall. Black builds a life of absurd, cartoon opulence across the street from his friend. Stiller becomes envious and reckless. Everything about this […]
