When Jean Cocteau began to direct Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la bête) in 1946, he was known primarily as a poet and a painter. After the film was released he instantly became one of the finest French directors of his era. As it stands today Beauty and the Beast is still one […]
It seems like eight years after Short Cuts, everyone decided to try to one up Robert Altman’s slow moving masterpiece. In the space of six months, we have seen the releases of three films that have been Short Cuts esque. First we had Magnolia. Then we had the beautifully photographed yet sluggish 1999 Madeleine. Now
I hate math. I’ve always hated math. It gives me a pounding headache. It would take a miracle to convince me of its value. But A Beautiful Mind has accomplished the impossible after watching the film, I have a new appreciation for math as an art, and for mathematicians as artists. Seldom do movies contain
With a cryptic title like Beautiful Girls, one starts to wonder to whom this film is being marketed. Is it the frat boy model-ogling crowd? Is it a self help flick for teenage girls? Is it soft porn? The answer, of course, is none of these: Beautiful Girls is a date movie, and quite a
We’re two movies into Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s Project Greenlight, and I’m ready to call the experiment a success. At what, I’m still not sure. The behind the scenes antics captured each week for the multi part HBO series provide an unprecedented insight into a movie’s arduous journey from script to screen. Week to
In 1965 Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo made this film tracing the efforts of the native population in Algeria, the 2nd largest nation in Africa, to rise up and liberate themselves after their French colonialist masters reneged on a promise to cut them loose. As much for its style as its even handedness, his film raised
Tim Burton’s first two Batman films were all about this nerd auteur playing with a gigantic train set, so even though the stories were threadbare and superficial, at least Burton brought a highly stylized pop Gothic look. Jack Nicholson hammed it up nicely as the Joker and Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman was an unforgettably sexy femme
The year was 1992 and the movie was Batman Returns. It marked the end of the Batman franchise as a series of good movies. It was, friends, the last great Batman. Gotham was dark and so was the script. Darkly comic, darkly romantic, and darkly dramatic. This tale told of Michael Keaton as Batman in
Batman’s reins have been turned over from director Tim Burton (now producing) to Joel Schumacher, from lead Michael Keaton to Val Kilmer, and from an old, baroque Gotham to a heavily stylized, kiddie pop city. A lot can be said for the idea that the setting of a picture thoroughly controls its tone. What we
Timing is everything for a movie’s success, and Basic Instinct had it in 1992, released years before the internet and the sophisticated world of satellite and cable television offered viewers a masturbatory buffet for nominal cost. Fourteen years ago, seeing Sharon Stone uncross her legs or frolic in the nude was a big deal on
