A portrait of a fictional town in the mid west that is home to a group of idiosyncratic and slightly neurotic characters. Dwayne Hoover is a wealthy car dealership owner that's on the brink of suicide and is losing touch with reality. Directed by Alan Rudolph.
Minor Martin Scorsese, but in view of recent performance, minor is an improvement. Major Scorsese (Kundun, Casino, The Age of Innocence) is pretentious Scorsese, puffed-up Scorsese, inflated Scorsese. This one, an anti-valentine to New York City in the pre-Giuliani years of the decade, is an unmistakable companion piece to his …
Director Jonathan Kaplan cut his teeth on exploitation films for Roger Corman (The Student Teachers, Night Call Nurses), so it might seem only natural that he would get around to the women-in-prison genre. But by now he's serious and sensitive, the director of The Accused and Immediate Family, so the …
Idealistic paramedic comes to L.A. and goes down the drug tubes, guided by a thrill-seeking ambulance river. A festival of disgust (upchucking in a tank of exotic ish, etc.), with plenty to go around to the filmmakers themselves (interrupting the grubby reality for a dissolve-happy, allad-accompanied love scene). With Jason …
Ry Cooder, the eclectic American guitarist, singer, composer, and musicologist, rounds up some old lions (and a lioness) of Cuban popular music, for a series of live concerts, recording sessions, on-camera interviews, and ultimately a debut at Carnegie Hall. (Their sightseeing sidetrips on that occasion are a delight.) Directed by …
Uninventive variation on Speed: an experimental chemical weapon (code name: Elvis) will detonate when it hits fifty degrees Fahrenheit, if two civilians with an ice-cream truck can't fend off a crack team of mercenary terrorists. The civilians -- Skeet Ulrich and Cuba Gooding, Jr. -- are personable, but that hardly …
Lasse Hallstrom's treatment of the John Irving Bildungsroman of the same name: a Second World War period piece centered around one Homer Wells (Tobey Maguire), an abused orphan -- "twice adopted, twice returned" -- and the chosen understudy to the kindly doctor and backdoor abortionist (Michael Caine) who runs the …
Iranian filmmaker Majid Majidi's entry into the world of a blind boy, a triumph of humility and empathy. The boy's openness to the world around him in contrast to his father's insulation from it is a constant theme: the soundtrack, in one instance, quiets down to just the distant birdcall …
Robert Altman tarries a while longer in the Deep South, idly tracing the stereotypical loopiness of the natives. If the movie lacks the pervasive weather of The Gingerbread Man, it is thickly atmospheric all the same, settling into the locale as into an overstuffed easy chair: Holly Springs, Mississippi, at …
Hong Kong-style action dropped like a bomb into a Sidney Lumet-style probe of NYPD politics. The result is widespread devastation. Mark Wahlberg, reunited with the director of Fear, James Foley, who has sometimes been somewhat serious, is the soft-spoken second-generation Irish cop assigned to the Chinatown beat for incendiary reasons …
Excursion into pinkish nostalgia, a swirl of forces, currents, ideas, and ideologies at play in New York in the 1930s, a two-ring circus (at the least) revolving around side-by-side cases of artistic censorship: the opening-night shutdown of a federally funded Left-wing Broadway musical and the effacement of Diego Rivera's Lenin-lionizing …
Fractured fairy tale (to borrow a phrase from Rocky and His Friends): Hansel and Gretel recast as a French Bonnie and Clyde (he's impotent) who lose their way in the woods after burying a body, and fall into the clutches of a hirsute homosexual hermit. (Because they're French, the young …
Dangerous Liaisons retailored to the bodies and needs of modern American teens: it's still weighted with quaint notions of purity and reputation, but played mainly for catty laughs. (Don't misunderstand. It's not about teenagers who consciously act out a video they've seen, much less an 18th-century novel they've read. They …
Sober little comedy about the determined efforts of exiled Tibetan monks in India to watch the '98 World Cup final between Brazil and France ("France is the only country that loyally supports Tibet"). The story behind the screen is at least as compelling: the first film of Khyentse Norbu, a …