Mike Leigh comes back from his change of pace and change of scene in Topsy-Turvy, back to his normal pace and his old stomping ground, a working-class milieu in modern-day London, more exactly a utilitarian housing complex and three downtrodden families therein. He gives us (among other things) over a …
Gay romantic comedy, not to say lighthearted and jovial especially, about an imperfectly matched couple (one's all-time favorite movie is Gone with the Wind, the other has never seen it: he doesn't like black-and-white) who make repeated and painful attempts to fit together anyway. The original stage play by co-star …
Soap opera at near to its best, and certainly at Douglas Sirk's best. A middle-aged, middle-class widow falls in love with the much younger gardener. What will the children think? The neighbors? The moviegoers? R.W. Fassbinder drew heavily on this, along with bits of Imitation Of Life, for his Ali: …
A sort of 42nd Street with aspirations to Lincoln Center, following the blue-ribbon casserole recipe of Fellini's 8 1/2, of intermingled reality, fantasy, and memory. The changes wrought on the backstage-musical formula by these uptown ambitions are of dubious import: a dizzying, quicker-than-the-eye editing style, a blunt closeup of semen-wetted …
Inflated remake of the Robert Penn Warren Pulitzer-winner, with the pseudonymous "Willie Stark" as Louisiana governor Huey Long, and Oscar-winner Sean Penn as Oscar-winner Broderick Crawford. Penn, sporting a Trotskyite haircut as the backwater populist politician ("Ain't nobody ever helped a hick 'cept a hick hisself"), speaks in an accent …
The slobbiness inherent in the subject -- women's professional wrestling -- is not as overwhelming as might be feared. For all the undoubted appeals to T-&-A fanciers, and for all the distant Rocky parallels played up in the ads, this turns out to be a surprisingly downbeat comedy, with a …
The movie version of the Carl Bernstein-Bob Woodward book betokens the promotion of mild-mannered Clark Kent to the hero's role, protector of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. This post-Watergate permutation of the newspaper genre clings to plenty of starry-eyed ideas (Gordon Willis's lighting, for instance, sets up an overstated …
From the Cormac McCarthy novel, a post-WWII cowboy movie, not quite a purebred Western, a little like The Hi-Lo Country. A little (including in that scope the scrumptious Penelope Cruz), but not a lot. And it is, whatever its constitution, more than director Billy Bob Thornton can chew. The opening …
A small-town Carolina Casanova (Paul Schneider, an unstunning facial composite of Cruise and Costner) takes a shine to one of his buddies' all-grown-up but virginal sister (Zooey Deschanel, with her druggy, draggy, warped-record delivery, turning every line into an exercise in eccentricity, an adventure in affectation): "She makes me decent." …
High-school coach and athlete both hope to use the Big Game as their ticket out of a small Pennsylvania steel town. The drama spun around this situation is modestly, even humbly, understated. (That the teen hero is a hard-nosed cornerback, not quarterback, and the coach is up for a job …
Independent filmmaker Jon Jost -- a one-man team of director, writer, photographer, editor, and pseudonymous musical scorer -- here enters, or approaches, the commercial mainstream (an American Playhouse production) without abandoning his art-movie gimmicks, devices, "strategies": a flat, frontal composition of the back of a spectator's head eclipsing a painting …
Cameron Crowe's most "personal" film to date, a nostalgia trip into the rock-and-roll scene of the early Seventies. The names have been changed, to cover up, perhaps, for revisions or lapses of memory, and for ingrained tendencies to sanitize and whitewash. The fifteen-year-old free-lance rock journalist -- Crowe's stand-in -- …
The posthumous swan song of comedian Chris Farley gives no cause for mourning. It is neither good enough nor bad enough for that. Without any question, it constitutes a serious comedown for Christopher Guest, the director of Waiting for Guffman, though perhaps we should remind ourselves that the "mockumentary" on …
Dirty politics in a student-body election, climaxing in a shame faced public confession stolen directly from Preston Sturges's Hail the Conquering Hero. A routine distortion of high school life, with overaged, overskilled actors and with hardly a parent, a teacher, or a textbook in sight; at least halfway serious in …
Hawaii, 1959. Mainlanders from the east, Japanese from the west, mixing democratically with the natives and teaching each other the arts of kendo, surfing, and making out, with plenty of enlightenment to share with any viewer under the age of eight. Chris Makepeace, Yuji Okumoto, Don Michael Paul, Tia Carrere; …