Bullitt (1968)

First westerns, then horror films, now gangster flicks: all the great Hollywood genres have been appropriated by the spoofters and turned from serious melodrama— in living memory, the movies have become the one place in the aesthetic world where the expression is not an oxymoron— into comedy and parody. Hard on the heels of this…

Gridlock’d is yet another attitude film, this one by Vondie Curtis Hall and starring the late Tupac Shakur and Tim Roth. They play a couple of junkie musicians in Detroit vaguely trying to “kick” (i.e. the habit) after Tupac’s girlfriend, played by Thandie Newton, overdoses one New Year’s Eve. They take the girl, Cookie, to…

The Eyes of Tammy Faye, a documentary by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, is worth seeing in the limited sense in which many inferior documentaries are worth seeing—that is, as a document of cultural or sociological interest. I confess to a further enjoyment of the campy set-up—including narration by RuPaul Charles and little Shari Lewis-style…

The movies can’t help themselves: they chase the chimera of the “real man” within the great man as great men themselves once chased military glory

A child’s-eye view, and therefore a rather amusing treatment, of social pathologies that are, in reality, not at all amusing

Philip Kaufman’s Quills, based on a play by Doug Wright, who wrote the screenplay, is a perfect illustration of the fact, which I may have mentioned once or twice before in these reviews, that it is now impossible for Hollywood to make a movie about sex which is not at the same time propaganda for…