For all of the talk about its legendary car chase through the streets of San Francisco and it is justified Bullitt idles far tool long in the slow lane when it should be blowing by the minivans and the carpoolers. Even the presence of Steve McQueen, with his laid-back, self-assured cool, can’t save it. McQueen […]
Larry Clark who wrote and directed his first film, Kids, at the tender age of 52 and in the process, broke the mold about what we should expect from a movie about teenagers returns to familiar ground in Bully, a striking and harrowing follow-up. A slam dunk natural subject for Clark, Bully follows the based-on-reality
The best actor nominees for the 1998 Academy Awards will probably be Jim Carrey, Tom Hanks, Ian McKellan, Nick Nolte and a wild card. Edward Norton or Jeff Bridges should fill this wild card (for American History X and The Big Lebowski) but that won’t happen. Instead, take a look at John Travolta in A
A Civil Action (1998) Read More »
In the vein of Unforgiven comes this moody western about another small town in the middle of nowhere, struggling with its place in a world quickly passing it by. Central to the story is Daniel Dillon (Peter Mullan), mayor of the town of Kingdom Come, Nevada, located on the spot of the gold claim he
A clinically austere art house film, Claire Dolan is Lodge Kerrigan’s follow-up to the rigorous Clean, Shaven. He opens with cool, carefully composed images of impassive skyscrapers, a hollow wind whistling through, before moving to the reticent, emotionally disconnected title character. Claire Dolan (Katrin Cartlidge, Naked) is a high priced prostitute, so down on her
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Faster than you can say, “Toys in the attic,” it becomes painfully aware that Peter Winter (Peter Greene Zed from Pulp Fiction), the main character of Lodge H. Kerrigan’s new film, is not quite right. Clean, Shaven is a brief but extremely powerful look at a page from the life of a schizophrenic who is
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Jack Ryan returns for a third outing in Clear and Present Danger, reuniting Harrison Ford’s Ryan with director Phillip Noyce, who also directed Ford as Ryan in Patriot Games. Too bad that with plenty of raw material (notably Willem Dafoe as an American mercenary working in Columbia), Danger comes up awfully short. For starters, what
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It is virtually impossible to separate Cleopatra the movie from Cleopatra the spectacle and that’s because they are truly and rarely intertwined. A legend of Hollywood, the 1963 production of Cleopatra has so much curiosity surrounding it I hardly know where to start. It was budgeted at $2 million and eventually cost (up to) $44
years ago, independent filmmaker Kevin Smith got his start with this little film that has since become one of indie cinema’s greatest inspirations. Made for the paltry sum of $28,000, Clerks is an incredible success that deserves its hype. Clerks is a spectacular joyride. Filmed in 16mm black and white, the film packs in non-stop
Kubrick was a beatnik poet. His work was plagued with metaphors, and the disease of hidden meaning was always turned to his advantage. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, he had almost a precognisance about the worry of the future that the millennium has exhibited so well for us. In The Shining, he taught us that,
A Clockwork Orange (1971) Read More »
