Editor’s note: Thanks to a holiday scheduling snafu, we here present another review of Solaris. Yes, this does mean the film is extra good. Some students of science fiction prefer to call the genre speculative fiction, an appropriate term for works that can encourage responses of a greater complexity than the entertainment and escapism […]
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Animation for adults
A must-see for Japanimaniacs, those interested in Japanese folklore, or anyone weary of the boring stories that typically accompany American animation, Miyazaki’s Spirited Away is a refreshing new take on Alice in Wonderland. The film, which destroyed box office records in Japan, knocking Titanic out of the top spot (which, in turn, had bested the […]
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Bond’s returns, saves civilization again(yawn)
The appearance of Die Another Day demonstrates once again that after some 20 films, a handful of 007 impersonators, dozens of beautiful women, plots and situations that pretty much repeat themselves over and over, and a batch of recognizable conventions, the James Bond movies constitute a genre all their own. They influence the innumerable action-adventure […]
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A planet to make you think, another to make you drink
I think we might be asking too much of our movie-going audience. After a summer full of arthouse films disguised as blockbusters, Hollywood thought they could sneak Punch-Drunk Love in the back door without anyone noticing that Adam Sandler didn’t do any of his crazy voices or sing “The Chanukah Song” in it. I recently […]
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Chamber Potter mixture as before
Wisely perceiving (and abhorring) a vacuum between Halloween and Thanksgiving, the producers of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets apparently decided to anticipate the holidays and kick off the season a trifle early. Since their movie will assuredly harvest many millions of dollars and will probably still be playing somewhere at Easter, the maneuver […]
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As subtle as a club to the head
The Emperor’s Club was originally going to be called The Palace Thief, after the Ethan Canin short story upon which it’s based. But the film’s producers must have reasoned, “Heck, we’ve already ripped off Dead Poet’s Society; we may as well pinch its name, too.” (Rumor has it that another suggested title was Mr. Hundert’s […]
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De Palma’s Femme Fatale just a ittle tease
Brian De Palma’s new film, Femme Fatale, begins in darkness, with the muffled but gradually recognizable voices of Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck speaking on the sound track. As light filters by degrees into the frame, the audience sees a television screen showing the climactic scene between the two lovers in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity. […]
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Guns kill people, but so do women
[Cue Chandler Bing voice.] Could Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine (opening Friday, November 15, at the Little) be released at a more appropriate time? [End Chandler Bing voice.] We’re still finding victims of the Beltway Snipers, who were apparently picking people off from a distance with the impunity of Mark McKinney’s Head Crusher from The […]
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I Spy with very little mind
The new action comedy I Spy provides some important services and teaches some valuable lessons to the student of contemporary cinema, especially the well-known Hollywood variety. To begin with, the movie’s marketers copied Winston Churchill’s World War II strategy of carpet bombing, opening the picture in what seems like every multiplex in the country, with […]
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Frida gets her freak on
Julie Taymor, the Tony Award-winning director of the stage adaptation of The Lion King, made an auspicious feature-film debut a few years ago with Titus, a visually arresting take on Shakespeare’s tragedy that was the greatest Peter Greenaway film never actually made by Greenaway. When I heard she was helming the big-screen adaptation of Mexican […]
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The truth about Marky
If nothing else, Jonathan Demme’s new movie, The Truth About Charlie, demonstrates a familiar and sometimes entertaining combination of the courageous and the foolhardy — topped off, unfortunately, with the worst sort of Hollywoodthink. Both the courage and the foolishness derive from the fact that the picture is a remake of Stanley Donen’s 1963 comedy […]
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How to get on Santa’s “naughty” list
Paul Schrader’s Auto Focus (opening Friday, November 1, at the Little), a look at the life of Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane, is another by-the-numbers, end-of-the-year biopic that would probably be fairly uninteresting if it weren’t for the deviant subject matter. Apparently Crane, unbeknownst to his millions of fans, was a sick little monkey who […]
