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. […]
Movies
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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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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 […]
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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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Back from the future again
In its progress from a surprise hit made on a relatively modest budget back in the 1980s to its current status as yet another mammoth summer spectacular, The Terminator has undergone the familiar transformation from innovative and influential work with some genuine intellectual implications to yet another ho-hum blockbuster. It now seems to have ascended […]
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The business of murder and swashbucklery
François Ozon was once considered the enfant terrible of French cinema. Then he made the critically praised and very adult Under the Sand and followed it up with last year’s musical murder-mystery 8 Women. In his latest, Swimming Pool (opens Friday, July 18, at the Little), Ozon has finally found a way to effectively blend […]
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Birds of a feather
Appearing quietly amid the multiple explosions rattling the walls of the cineplexes, the new movie Winged Migration represents a phenomenon considerably more astonishing than Bruce Banner mutating into a raging green giant or Arnold Schwarzenegger remaining, well, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in all his granitic stolidity. The motion picture shows exactly what its title implies, the travels […]
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The strange, the kinky, and the Krispy
If the air outside is thick enough to cut with a knife, that means it’s time for the Rochester Jewish Film Festival. The festival opens this Sunday (July 13) and continues through the following Sunday (July 20), with all screenings taking place at either the Dryden Theatre or the Little Theatre. City has the inside […]
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An old-fashioned movie
The cinema exerts so powerful and personal an effect on the senses and the spirit that viewers often feel an intense emotional connection with particular movies, especially from their own pasts, far exceeding their reactions to other kinds of art and perhaps even to life itself. In part because of the sheer physical act of […]
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A ‘Whale’ of a film
It has won audience awards at film fests from Rotterdam to Sundance, but no trophy is more impressive than the one Whale Rider earned at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival. In the seven years I’ve been attending Toronto, the audience has only abused its power once, for 1997’s The Hanging Garden (it had the […]
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Big and green and mad as hell
Now and then a motion picture comes along that actually deserves all those superlatives that clog the daily prose of most reviewers, that sends them digging through their thesauruses for bouquets of compliments, that inspires them to deploy all the artillery in their sadly depleted arsenals of praise. The Hulk, alas and alack, is undoubtedly […]
