Desperately Seeking Susan movie review
A new-fashioned screwball comedy combining improbable elements, from ancient Egyptian artifacts to downtown New York chic, with classic conceits like mistaken identity and romantic conundrums.
female protagonist
Bandit Queen movie review
The true story of a modern-day female Robin Hood of India. A powerful and in spots devastating journey through one woman’s conquest of a culture that views women as little more than sexual commodities.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon movie review: arthouse action
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon will make you fall in love with film all over again. Instantly one of the greatest ever adventure movies, it’s also a touching, tender story of love forbidden and denied.
The Exorcist, Lost Souls, and Possessed movies review: sympathy for the devil
Do screenwriters bother with characterization or motive for Old Scratch? Rarely — the Prince of Darkness is supposed to just coast on his rep as the Ultimate Bad Dude, and yet those selfsame screenwriters must, by storytelling necessity, declaw him, prevent him from taking full advantage of the hellish forces at his command.
Nurse Betty movie review: the power of fantasy
Like a millennial Wizard of Oz, Nurse Betty is about the power of an all-consuming fantasy to help us cope with life’s disasters. Alternately startling and funny, melancholy and bizarre.
Twister movie review: storm troopers
One of my very favorite movies, a superb example of the genus Popcorn Flick, unforgettable as it puts onscreen imagery we’ve never seen before. This is as close as I get to turning my brain off at the movies.
Chicken Run movie review: rage against the machine
A witty Aardman-brand treat: Chicken Run is a sneaky, cheeky parody of prison and escape movies that nevertheless finds decidedly unsentimental pathos in the predicament of farmyard chickens.
Run Lola Run (Lola rennt) movie review: game over
Writer/director Tom Tykwer captures all of GenX’s best qualities — energy, resourcefulness, independence — and he does so in the shared visual vernacular of Xers: music videos, video games, and television.
Go (review)
So, Go’s three interconnected tales follow a diverse group of Los Angeles twentysomethings as their lives bang up against one another in a scenario that’s the 90s in a nutshell, from the Xer point of view: sex and danger that’s both exciting and terrifying (the clever script uses the word ‘go’ both in the imperative, let’s-get-out-of-here sense and also in the imperative, orgasmic sense, as a synonym for ‘come’). And is if to demonstrate typical Xer cynicism, it all happens while holly jolly Christmas passes by practically unnoticed in the background.
Miracle on 34th Street movie review: the spirit of Christmas
Miracle on 34th Street is, as all of us who love this classic film know, the story of how Macy’s department store in New York City not only found the real Santa Claus but hired him to, well, play Santa Claus.
