Wild Man Blues by Barbara Kopple is a documentary about Woody Allen and a pickup band and their tour of Europe to play New Orleans jazz. The deal must have been for Barbara to come along and get lots of shots of Woody and Soon-Yi, suitable for tabloid TV, in exchange for making Woody look…
Wild Things, directed by John McNaughton and written by Stephen Peters, is superior quality 90s noir — which means, as I have said before, noir without any moral compass whatsoever. It’s too bad because this could have been a good film. It has clever plotting, good dialogue (without being overfull of wisecracks and strained attempts…
The Newton Boys directed by Richard Linklater is the sort of movie that Hollywood made routinely 25 or 30 years ago, a movie about criminals as existential heroes—decent fellows no worse than lots of respectable folks who, though equally ready to be corrupted, haven’t the guts to go out and say “stick ’em up” as…
Niagara Niagara directed by Bob Gosse, is what we might call a sick flick which reproduces in its title the “echolalia” or weird repetitions and irrational tics incident to sufferers of Tourette’s Syndrome. The sufferer in this case is a young woman called Marcy (Robin Tunney) from a wealthy but uncaring family who meets (while…
Two Girls and A Guy, directed by James Toback, stars Heather Graham and Natasha Gregson Wagner as Carla and Lou, two young women who meet at the entrance to an apartment building where both are waiting for someone. They do not know each other. Lou, a bubbly sort, strikes up a conversation and enthuses about…
Sliding Doors by Peter Howitt is what they used to call — perhaps they still do — a stylish comedy, but it also has that little metaphysical kick that the movies occasionally give us, that sense of the supernatural somehow brought down to earth, domesticated and made familiar to us that only celluloid can confer….
Grey Gardens by David and Albert Maysles is a re-release of the film they made in the 1970s about two women made interesting to the camera by the accident of celebrity, yet whose interest for us is owing simply to their strange and rather pathetic humanity. Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter of the same…
Lost in Space, directed by Stephen Hopkins, is just too silly for words. In yet another cinematic updating of a long-forgotten TV series, William Hurt plays Professor John Robinson, a scientist who has been chosen to emigrate with his family to the planet Alpha Prime, which is ten years in a fast spaceship away, but…
The Spanish Prisoner, written and directed by David Mamet, gives expression to a refined kind of paranoia born of what we might call sophistication-anxiety. This results in the common assumption among contemporary writers, artists and (especially) filmmakers — see, for example, the recent movies Wild Things and L.A. Confidential — that everything must be different…
Chinese Box by Wayne Wang stars Jeremy Irons as John, a journalist living in Hong Kong in the months leading up to the handover of the colony by the British to the Chinese. He learns that he’s got leukemia and has approximately as long to live as the British presence in the territory will last….
Shooting Fish by Stefan Schwartz stars Dan Futterman and Stuart Townsend as Dylan and Jez (short for Jeremiah), an American and an Englishman who team up to run various scams in the interests, they say, of some orphans, namely themselves. If this strikes you as a jolly jape, you may be as much stuck in…
