Ward Serrill's video documentary chronicles the story of Bill Resler, Seattle tax man turned girls' basketball coach, and of his prize pupil, Darnellia Russell, a black transfer from her neighborhood Garfield High to white-bread Roosevelt High: "Darnellia Russell is my only chance at being famous." The story spans her entire …
Peter Davis's elaborate diagram and diagnosis of the American involvement in Vietnam — its history, its rationalizations, and its repercussions. In striving after comprehensiveness, Davis has put his fingers onto many points of interest (film clips from WWII Hollywood movies suggest the molded shape of American patriotism; the melodrama drummed …
A fairy tale for grownups? A grown-up fairy tale? Either way, don’t be fooled: the setting of writer-director Brett Haley’s father-daughter dramedy — a failing vinyl record store in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood, with frequent stops at a local bar that stays in busi-ness thanks to its reputed “authenticity” — …
Stephen King in a sentimental mood: the same coming-of-age cornfield as Stand by Me, with the same complement of goldie-oldies, but with a moderate supernatural element as well (a psychic upstairs boarder, hiding out from a shadowy army of "low men"). It's all pretty thin, though the dawning consciousness of …
The documentary on the making of Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now ought to please almost everyone. Those who admired the Coppola opus will be able to exclaim over the miracle that such a man could pull out such a movie from such a mire of disarray, diffusion, unwieldiness. Those who thought …
With its fond, indulgent, film-fan outlook, Howard Zieff's sweet-tempered spoof of early Hollywood seems actually more condescending than a Nathanael West-ian nightmare vision of the movie colony. The Jeff Bridges protagonist, an Iowa farm boy who decides to Go West to become a Zane Grey Western writer, is played as …
Disturbing opening scene, with a most uncharming display of machismo, male chauvinism, and downright drunken meanness from Burt Reynolds (who is he, after all, to make jokes about anyone's toupee?) — but all this is undercut by the "explanatory" scene to follow. A very nervous-making scene, later on, with the …
It’s snob vs. slob as a tenacious Sandra Bullock stars alongside Melissa “What the fuck’s your problem?” McCarthy to form an unlikely pair of detectives (Laurel & Sharty?) forced to partner on cracking a dope ring. Set up, punchline, setup, punchline: Ms. Bullock puts the gags on a tee for …
An ambitious, even overambitious, game of cops and robbers, fitted by rolling pin into the time-frame of Monday Night Football, a shade under three hours. Writer-director Michael Mann wants to have his opposing game players two opposite ways — as existential archetypes and as multi-dimensional humans — and the transitions …
A bit of a plodder. A young Englishwoman (Julie Christie) follows in the footsteps in India, two generations previously, of a family friend (Greta Scacchi), all the way to getting herself impregnated by a native. The larger amounts of time and interest are apportioned to the flashbacks to the colonial …
Hierarchical high-schoolers lampooned in a manner hardly more mature than that of the targets. This is certainly more than just another dead-teenager movie, although the plotline of serial murders (disguised as serial suicides) is, equally certainly, satire at its most sledgehammery. Occasional comparison comes to mind with the sadly unremembered …
Hierarchical high-schoolers lampooned in a manner hardly more mature than that of the targets. This is certainly more than just another dead-teenager movie, although the plotline of serial murders (disguised as serial suicides) is, equally certainly, satire at its most sledgehammery. Occasional comparison comes to mind with the sadly unremembered …
Community opposition to an urban renewal project in Sydney receives a setback when its spearhead, the editor of a radical newsrag, disappears without trace. Her closest associate tries to fill her shoes and at the same time to pick up her trail. The socio-political concerns never derail the movie from …
Directed by Tom Tykwer (Run, Lola, Run and The Princess and the Warrior) from an unrealized screenplay by the late Krzysztof Kieslowski (Red, White, and Blue), this is an apparently harmonious collaboration between a couple of fate-chance-coincidence guys. The extended credits sequence, during which a bomb planted in an office …
And not only heaven, but God, love, death, and hell -- as envisioned in archival film footage and man-on-the-street interviews. Actually, the men (and women) on the street have been taken off the street and put into Expressionistic sets, shadows, colored lights; and many of the film clips have been …