Playing by Heart directed by Willard Carroll Movies that weave together three, four, five or more separate stories: We now see a sprinkling of these oddities every year. They’re generally independent productions, and usually melodramas, a form that allows for enough tonal variation that the films are seldom mistaken for each other. Altman’s Short Cuts is perhaps the best-known of the last
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In Dreams directed by Neil Jordan Neil Jordan knows what the screen is for. That’s unusual for an artist who began in literature, but right for one who used words to evoke feelings and images. His new movie In Dreams overflows with sights that suggest an artist has opened up his subconscious for public display. This is not a gift to
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Barrabas by Louis Feuillade We have a theory that crime enhances beauty,” explains Mary Vivian Pearce, decked out like a dime-store Alice Faye, in John Waters’ Female Trouble. ”The worse the crime gets, the more ravishing one becomes.” Artistic head of Gaumont studios in the silent 1910s, Feuillade created fast-paced crime serials that throb with dreamlike decadence. In a paroxysm
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A Man Escaped directed by Robert Bresson What’s your favorite film?” It’s the most banal question a critic–or any cinephile–encounters, and therefore the most essential. It invariably springs from trivial circumstances. Cocktail party chatter, waiting in line for something or other: strangers trying to connect, through a slightly forced, artificial conviviality. The subject turns, warmingly, to movies, but when you ask
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Children of Heaven directed by Majid Majidi Children of Heaven wrings more suspense from its modest story and characters than any recent foreign film I can recall. During the final sequence, I had knots in my stomach, partly because the movie was coming together in thrillingly unexpected ways, thanks to the filmmaker’s old-style craftsmanship–a rare thing in this era of MTV cinema–but
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Hurlyburly directed by Anthony Drazan Don’t miss Sean Penn’s extraordinary performance in Hurlyburly. I know for a fact that very few critics saw Hurlyburly at the time most of the awards groups voted (mea culpa) so no critics’ trophies point in the direction of Penn’s honesty and daring. But though Nick Nolte is prizeworthy (in Affliction or anything else), Penn’s
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The Swindle directed by Claude Chabrol   Mississippi Mermaid directed by François Truffaut Chabrol continues the New Wave interest in forcing movies to reveal the nature of human behavior by manipulating dramatic and social conventions. Typically combining once familiar genres–the heist comedy and the romantic adventure–Chabrol causes viewers to reconsider their responses. His ease at showing the hidden psychology of Victor (Michel Serrault)
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Dr. Akagi directed by Shohei Imamura The first time we see Dr. Akagi (Akira Emoto), he’s running. Not jogging, really running. Lungs heaving, arms pumping, shoes going slap-slap-slap on the ground as he rushes madly through the streets of his seaside hamlet. Like a man desperately hoping to prevent a murder a mile away–or a man hounded by unseen
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Private Confessions directed by Liv Ullmann Early in Private Confessions, the latest film written by Ingmar Bergman, Anna Bergman (Pernilla August), a young wife, goes to an elderly clergyman named Jacob (Max von Sydow) to confess that she’s been violating her marriage vows by having an affair with a theology student. “Confession,” though, is a slightly tricky proposition here, since Martin Luther
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The Faculty directed by Robert Rodriguez Hop in the Way Back Machine with me, dear Sherman, and we will revisit 1992. That was a year when hard-luck indie filmmaker stories still seemed fresh, and Robert Rodriguez trumped everybody. The struggling Austin auteur became an international sensation with El Mariachi, an amusing Tex-Mex Western spoof shot for $7000 or thereabouts, designed
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