The hardiest of all the cinema perennials, as its history through the 20th century demonstrates, the horror film thrives in just about any climate or conditions. From its beginnings in the days of the silents through the present time, it has survived even the shocking, very real horrors of a turbulent history: world wars, genocide, […]
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All mobbed up all over
Despite the reiterated assertions from policemen, prosecutors, and the media that the Mafia no longer exercises enormous power, or even exists in any recognizable incarnation, the gangster movie, bless its tough little heart, maintains its devotion to the Mob. That organization provides the model for the history, the myth, the ethos of the form, suggesting […]
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Bondage, sex, and monsters
Whenever a prestigious juried film festival invents a special prize, everyone should take notice. Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine was the first documentary allowed to play at Cannes in over four decades, and it was so impressive, the jury created an award for it to win. In other cases, special award recipients have much darker […]
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‘Red Dragon’ awakes
The appearance of the new film adaptation of Thomas Harris’ novel, Red Dragon, suggests some odd and complicated ideas about literature, cinema, and maybe ourselves. For one thing, as that rara avis — a prequel which is also a remake (in this case, of a 1986 movie entitled Manhunter, much of which it duplicates) […]
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It ain’t easy being a spoiled teenager
The suits over at the WB network must be staggering around their offices in shock. Roger Avary’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ The Rules of Attraction takes two of the net’s biggest stars — James Van Der Beek and Jessica Biel — and uses them in family-friendly scenes involving coke-snorting, masturbation, an orgy, and hot […]
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Dumb and Dumber for the art-house crowd
Dumb and Dumber for the art-house crowd Imagine Of Mice and Men if George and Lenny were both boobs, The Odd Couple if Felix and Oscar were Norwegian, or Dumb and Dumber without the scatological humor, and you’ll most likely conjure up Elling, one of the overlooked nominees for Best Foreign Language Film in the […]
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Another degree of Kevin Bacon
As so often happens in the American cinema, the new movie Trapped, no doubt purely accidentally, strikes a chord that chimes with current events and contemporary media hysteria. In a time when so-called journalists, especially on the 24-hour news channels, positively drool, in their usual manner, over sensational reports of the disappearance, abduction, sexual assault, […]
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Mostly formulaic, but still a tasty treat
Yeah, we’ve seen it before: single, self-centered, career-minded woman acquires, through generally wacky means, somebody else’s sassy kid. Adult and child initially butt heads, but eventually help each other grow emotionally. When this premise is done with no thought, you get something like Bogus with Whoopi Goldberg and Haley Joel Osment. When it’s done right, […]
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The empire strikes first, again
Although it originates in a novel published a hundred years ago and has been translated to the cinema several times, most memorably in Zoltan Korda’s brilliant 1939 adaptation, the new version of The Four Feathers seems surprisingly — and, no doubt, accidentally — apposite at this moment in the 21st century. A motion picture in […]
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More dispatches from Toronto
Let us pick up where we left off last week at the 27th Toronto International Film Festival, which came to a close September 14. As with last week’s round-up, release dates, where available, appear in parentheses. Day Five (Fractured Family Tales) A Leave It To Beaver feel these films had not. Moonlight Mile (November 4) […]
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Not your mother’s Mork
The small, unusual new movie One Hour Photo provides its star, Robin Williams, who’s awfully busy these days, with yet another opportunity to play against type, personality, and history. At virtually the same time that his one-man Broadway show, which consists of his patented brand of wildly improvisational stand-up comedy, plays on HBO; and very […]
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A Greek tragedy of a cop flick
As the new Robert De Niro film demonstrates, even so ostensibly simple and relatively ancient a form (at least for the cinema) as the cop flick, even in the blockbuster blossom time, possesses the potential to be more than mysteries, manhunts, and shootouts. Based on a true story, City by the Sea examines not only […]
