When Neil Burger’s debut as feature-film writer and director, Interview with the Assassin, was being shopped around last fall, it had many intrigued but few interested enough to buy it for distribution. The theory goes that some distributors, among them Miramax, thought its subject matter felt a bit off post-September…
The advantage to making a Christmas movie is that, no matter how mediocre your final product is, it’s all but guaranteed to show up on at least one TV station, at least once a year, in perpetuity; even such woeful losers as the Nicolas Cage-Dana Carvey comedy Trapped in Paradise,…
Rarely does a theme unify a film festival; such gatherings, for the most part, are glued together only by movies few have seen and movies few will ever see, the unwanted or misunderstood offspring of would-be artists and could-be visionaries, kooky veterans who long ago ditched the mainstream for the…
So, you wish to know if Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is as good as the first Harry Potter movie. Is it as charming, visually gratifying, faithful to filthy-rich author J.K. Rowling’s inescapable books? Well, that’d be yep times four, as it’s definitely an enchanting spectacular for Potter…
Writer-director Todd Haynes’ loving re-creation of a 1950s-style Hollywood melodrama (think Douglas Sirk) is a puzzling affair. Watching Far from Heaven is like taking a trip back in time–not to the real world of 1957 but, rather, to the reel 50s, as personified by such classic “women’s films” as All…
If the title is a Jeopardy question, then the answer might be “How does Steven Seagal come across these days?” or maybe “How will you feel after an 88-minute rip-off of The Rock with action confined to slo-mo gun firing and random glass-shattering?” Seagal, who’s slowly morphing into an untalented…
A tough Paris cop (Jean Reno) flies to Tokyo for the funeral of his great lost love, only to find out that she has left him in charge of the rebellious teen-age daughter (Ryoko Hirosue) whose existence she had kept a secret from him. When the girl turns out to…
It is the essential sexiness of holy archetypes that stirs up a ruckus in Carlos Carrera’s competent if unremarkable tragedy, adapted by screenwriter Vicente Lenero from the 1875 book by Portuguese author Jose Maria Eça de Queiroz. We first meet our young, present-day hero (and anti-hero) Padre Amaro (Mexican superstar…
So enchanting it takes your breath away, Jean Cocteau’s 1946 live-action version of the famous fairy tale remains one of the most magical films ever made. Boasting a new print, struck from the restored French negative, and an improved, albeit not perfect, soundtrack, this glorious black-and-white film–in French with English…
A good deal of rogering goes on in Cloud Nine, Caryl Churchill’s dark farce about sexual identity that’s now getting a first-class production by Echo Theatre at the Bath House Cultural Center. Rogering is British slang for you-know-what. Boffing. Having it off. All that nahsty nudge-wink, nudge-wink bedroom nonsense. In…
Four signs the show you’re watching is among The Greatest Series in the History of Television: It’s an ensemble comedy that often resembles a drama and airs without a laugh track; the series’ creator gives interviews in which he/she congratulates the network for having the guts to air the edgy…
“When I was a child, I spake as a child… but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” So the New Testament says, and like many passages in what Homer J. Simpson aptly describes as “a preachy book,” that passage sidesteps an important question, namely: Why? Why…
Three years on, the besieged phenomenon–the scourge, Antichrist or the Vanilla Ice of the ’90s, pick ’em–has been rendered beloved; when they, slick bizzers in suits and on cell phones, speak of “Eminem” and “gross” in the same sentence, they’re talking only receipts, merchandise, profit. The man, just touching 30,…
The repellent Casanova portrayed by Campbell Scott in Roger Dodger has an instinct for looking up skirts and down blouses, but no capacity for looking in the mirror. Part salesman, part caveman, Madison Avenue copywriter Roger Swanson is, deep in his cynical heart, as loathsome to himself as he is…
The question “All right?” is asked of every character, on many occasions, throughout Mike Leigh’s latest film, All or Nothing. In working-class London, it seems, it’s the preferred substitute for “Hello” or “What’s up?” Whether or not it elicits a response is almost irrelevant; the question itself is a formality…
Director Chris Eyre, whose engaging 1997 road movie, Smoke Signals, helped energize a modest new wave of Native American filmmaking, is bound to open even more eyes with his bold second feature, Skins. Filmed on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and Nebraska, it’s a vivid look at two…
A lousy daddy, that King Lear. A real crumb bum. Through five long acts of Shakespeare’s finest play, Lear nastily foments family squabbles, property disputes, madness, war, murder and suicide. He destroys his entire family and leaves his kingdom in ruins. Only at the end of his ego-driven life does…
The best thing about turning 80, insists the maestro who has been making music for movies for half of the medium’s lifetime, is that you no longer have to lie about anything to anyone. It’s too late for lies; the clock will no longer forgive deception. So you may feel…
One day you’ll just have to have your own parade, you white-bread, plain ole “Amuricans” of multi-British Isles and possibly Dutch ancestry. Seriously. Those of you with limited and/or ill-defined ethnic heritage (and nothing to prove) will simply get all dressed up one day and march your lily-pale, boring asses…
At the corner of Eighth and G streets in the nation’s capital lies the Old Patent Office Building, which houses one of the country’s better-kept cultural secrets: The Smithsonian American Art Museum. The Smithsonian, a vast government bureaucracy consisting of 17 separate museums, has always been known more as a…
‘Tis the season The Simpsons jumps the shark, literally; that’s how the first episode–second, actually, if you count last Sunday’s belated Halloween show, and you should not, ever–begins, with Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie donning water skis and tempting the great white teeth below. But, of course, the series…
With Frida–the story of profoundly passionate and uncompromising Mexican-Jewish painter Frida Kahlo–it’s evident that a few folks in marketing know how to work the demographics (it’ll be extremely PC, possibly mandatory, to gush in adoration of it), but that’s the first and last cynical comment of this review. Frida is…
