The latest from David Cronenberg, eXistenZ, has a certain unexpected wit to it. Set in an unspecified future, it tells the story (or should we say seems to tell the story?) of the world’s greatest computer-game developer, called Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Her newest and greatest game, eXistenZ, involves putting the players into a…
Lovers of the Arctic Circle is a handsomely constructed fable of love and destiny, written and directed by Julio Medem. Those with a taste for magic realism or the sunny po-mo fables of Jaco Van Dormael (Toto the Hero, The Eighth Day) may well enjoy it, though to my taste its weird Spanish romanticism and…
Goodbye Lover, directed by Roland Joffé, is yet another inadequate attempt by Hollywood to recapture the look and feel, if not the spirit, of 1940s vintage films noirs. But as I noted in my review of L.A. Confidential, of which this is surely a stable-mate, the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. It has…
Pushing Tin, directed by Mike Newell, is a reminder that our popular culture wants it both ways. On the one hand it thrives, as entertainment has always done, on the competition of macho men to see who is stronger, smarter, quicker or more dexterous. On the other hand it feels constrained to deplore such competition…
You sure can tell that Among Giants was written by Simon Beaufoy (it was directed by Sam Miller), last heard from as the screenwriter of The Full Monty. Like Monty, this movie is set in (or near) Sheffield in Yorkshire and is an exercise in nostalgia and sentimentality of a peculiarly English—especially a northern English—type….
There is an essential bit of information about the plot of Open Your Eyes (in Spanish Abre Los Ojos), directed by Alejandro Amenábar, which is withheld until almost the end of the film and which, because I think it just about worth seeing, I will not reveal here. But it is worth knowing that it…
There is an essential bit of information about the plot of Open Your Eyes (in Spanish Abre Los Ojos), directed by Alejandro Amenábar, which is withheld until almost the end of the film and which, because I think it just about worth seeing, I will not reveal here. But it is worth knowing that it…
SLC Punk is another teen movie, but one with a serious purpose that is not lost sight of in the first five minutes. Obviously based on the personal experience of the writer-director James Merendino, it presents us with the inherently comic picture of a post-high school punk rocker, called Stevo (Matthew Lillard), and the not…
Idle Hands, directed by Rodman Flender (can there really be someone with such a name?), is another in the recent spate of teen movies. With what can only be considered predictable unsuccess, it tries to marry the old-fashioned, rather campy moralism of the old-time teen slasher movie with the hip, happenin’, po-mo wit of Scream….
The Dreamlife of Angels (in French La Vie Revée des Anges) by Érick Zonca is by far the best picture I have seen this year and one of the best I have ever seen. I can’t remember the last time I came staggering out of a movie, as I did out of this one, literally…
Robert Altman’s new picture, Cookie’s Fortune, is like all his films in having in it a lot of good things pushed to—and usually way beyond—their limit. Here the relentless folksiness of the sleepy Mississippi town, Holly Springs, is truly charming most of the time, but on occasion it becomes almost enough to give Andy Griffith…
The good news about Go, written by John August and directed by Douglas Liman (Swingers) is that it is the best of the scores of imitations of Quentin Tarantino that have appeared since Pulp Fiction set the standard for hip postmodernism at the movies in 1994. It is therefore the hippest movie you can see…
