Folk Explosion
Loving send-up of aging hippies is a real gas.
[ read more... ]
[ read more... ]
Author Archive
Adrien Brody for President: Humility and passion from the hometown longshot.
Okay, so the man’s not a politician. But based on his appearance at the 75th annual Academy Awards, where he picked up a best actor statuette for his elegant, minimalist performance as a persecuted Jewish musician in the WWII drama The Pianist, he’s definitely a grace-under-pressure kind of guy. Because most people expected the award
[ read more... ]
[ read more... ]
Dependable King: A horror movie worth defending.
Stephen King, Tom Clancy and John Grisham are like security blankets to the major studios—something they can cuddle up to when they’ve had a run of bad luck and aren’t quite sure what the future will bring. Directors treat these best-selling authors in pretty much the same way—as a near-foolproof method of getting on the
[ read more... ]
[ read more... ]
Third World Wars: Two films about Africa that can’t stand the heat.
These days, you rarely hear Africa described as the Dark Continent unless the speaker is trying to seem worldly, sarcastic and disapproving. But movies are doing a pretty good job of keeping the old stereotype alive. Two new African-themed dramas are showing on local screens—the big-budget Bruce Willis military epic Tears of the Sun and
[ read more... ]
[ read more... ]
Sticky Web: A mental patient recalls his childhood-or does he?-in the latest Cronenberg film.
I wouldn’t recommend the new David Cronenberg movie, Spider, to very many people, even though I really liked it. It’s too fragile and odd to connect with a large number of people. Based on the 1990 novel by Patrick McGrath, the film is named for its title character, a mental patient (Ralph Fiennes) trying to
[ read more... ]
[ read more... ]
Rising Again: A four-hour lullaby about how (and what) the Confederacy lost.
If you thought the white South got a raw deal during the Civil War, Gods and Generals is your movie. Ron F. Maxwell’s mammoth, technically competent but artistically uninteresting war picture may be the most sympathetic to the Confederacy’s idealized view of itself. Maxwell’s screenplay suggests that the war was largely about Yankee greed to
[ read more... ]
[ read more... ]
Stone Reader
"All good books have one thing in common: they are truer than if they had really happened." So said Ernest Hemingway, one of the many great writers whose words of wisdom are quoted in Stone Reader, an autobiographical documentary about a filmmaker’s search for an obscure literary hero. Hemingway’s words presumably helped inspire writer-director-producer Mark
[ read more... ]
[ read more... ]
The Recruit
The CIA thriller The Recruit is no classic—it twists itself into knots to convince you that it’s not going to give you the ending that it gives you. But it’s clever, adult and fun, and altogether better than you’ve heard. Watching its twisty-turny plot unfold, and hearing Al Pacino rattle off one wise yet cryptic
[ read more... ]
[ read more... ]
It Was a Very Good Year
Last year was a terrific year for movies—maybe as good or better than 1989, which was outstanding in nearly every way. In the parched late-winter months, as distributors dump their time-wasters, my thoughts keep returning to the great movies released last year, and to the not-so-great ones that nevertheless contained moments, scenes or images that
[ read more... ]
[ read more... ]
Amen.;In the Mirror of Maya Deren
The latest in a wave of Holocaust dramas, Costa-Gavras’ Amen., offers the director’s usual mix of propulsive narrative storytelling, moral outrage and a sense of rightness that seems, in the end, a bit too easily claimed. Based on the true story of Kurt Gerstein (Ulrich Tukur), an SS officer and scientist who tried to blow
[ read more... ]
[ read more... ]
