Music-making on the show-biz fringes: the hotel lounges of the Pacific Northwest. A sibling piano duo, a sort of fraternal Ferrante and Teicher, have been making a go of it for fifteen years. One of them (Beau Bridges) tries hard to keep up appearances; the other (real brother Jeff, with ...
By means of a radical face-lift seemingly in conscious homage to Georges Franju's Eyes without a Face (surgical lasers replacing scalpels), John Travolta and Nicolas Cage trade faces and places as an anti-terrorist federal agent and a mad bomber, respectively. And then, if you follow, vice versa. The actors look ...
Annette Bening loses her husband of 30 years (Ed Harris), only to then fall in love with a man who looks just like him (Ed Harris).
The collapse, all of a sudden, of a long-standing middle-class marriage comes about when both mates undergo a fling, by a wonderful coincidence, on the same long night. Storyline, locale, even character relationships, all tend to be eclipsed by the Cassavetes visual style, which is quite accurately described in the ...
Jean-Luc Godard was 33 when he starred in Agnes Varda’s short comedy The Fiancés of the MacDonald Bridge. That’s the same age as the photographer JR, the sole person ever to share a director’s credit with the New Wave pioneer, and also her co-star here. By Varda’s own admission, an ...
Ingmar Bergman's clinical account of a psychiatrist's nervous breakdown (the filmmaker's interest in psychiatry extends only as far as his affirmation of its inadequacy to spiritual crisis) is divided cleanly in halves. The first, the mundane half, contains some good stuff about the heroine's grandparents, particularly the fastidious set decoration ...
Italian women's film, from Turkish-born filmmaker Ferzan Ozpetek, filtered through the sensibility of a vaguely discontented wife, a drudging accountant in a Roman chicken factory and a moonlighting pastry chef too old (at thirty) to start anew as an apprentice baker, with a shiftless husband currently on the night shift, ...
Morbid remembrance of the blip-like rise and fall of Edie Sedgwick, tricked out with pseudodocumentary gimmicks by the sometime documentarist George Hickenlooper. Andy Warhol, well mimicked by Guy Pearce, is not hard to make into a compelling figure. But Sedgwick -- elevator heiress, socialite, art groupie, temporary "it" girl, drug ...
A respectable addition to Bukowskiana, if respectability can be a criterion for the life and work of the pickled writer, Charles Bukowski. A mangily bearded Matt Dillon, in the part of the author's semi-autobiographical stand-in, Henry Chinaski, gives a full-bodied performance, and a literally full-body one, his head tilted backwards ...
Or: I Was a Teenage Body Snatcher. Scriptwriter Kevin Williamson (Scream, Scream 2), a dehumanized cine-cannibal in his own right, seems to feel that self-conscious acknowledgment of his pilfered sources constitutes sufficient originality: here, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which in turn was "a blatant rip-off of The Puppet Masters." ...
A lot of knowledge went into the characterization of the movie-buff hero, beginning with his ritual of going through the coming week's TV Guide and circling the movies not to be missed (99 River Street, The Big Sleep, etc.), and continuing through his wardrobe, his bedroom decor, his job, his ...
Something very close to a sex comedy for grownups. John Turturro writes, directs, and stars in the carefully crafted, beautifully shot story of Fioravante, a strong, silent-type florist who agrees to do a favor for an old friend (Woody Allen) whose NYC bookstore has just gone out of business. It ...
What Carlos Saura did for the art of flamenco and tango in films called Flamenco and Tango, he now sets out to do for that soulful Portuguese folk song, dating back to the early 19th Century, the fado. A spacious and spare studio, translucent partitions, process screens, backdrops, mirrors, colored ...