Operation Condor
You may have noticed protesters picketing outside screenings of Operation Condor. If you have been unlucky enough to have sat through this seven-year-old Jackie Chan reissue, you’d not hesitate to join them. The Arab-American protesters have every reason to speak up about the worse-than-Disney-caricature buffoons and savages Operation Condor purports them to be. But it…
Royal Revival
In 1864 Queen Victoria was the most powerful woman in the world, ruling over a British Empire that would only expand during her 64-year (1837-1901) reign. But as Mrs. Brown opens, this very public figure is in the midst of debilitating grief. Three years after the death of her husband, Prince Albert, Victoria is above…
Nothing to Lose
While it may seem that Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon are determined to take the “buddy picture” genre to their graves (watery or otherwise), Tim Robbins and Martin Lawrence step into the ring with Nothing to Lose, to fight for their right to banter in the love/hate relationship squared circle. Better still, for the most…
Alone together
“I want to be alone,” Greta Garbo famously proclaimed and then got what she asked for, only to end up feeling betrayed in her opulent isolation: “But I never said I wanted to be left alone.” Americans are like that. We wanted to be alone, which is why we invented a New World in the…
Drag, strip, please
Doll Rods are on high-heeled quest for global domination
The Detroit Way
The masters raise a new generation of jazz musicians.
My Best Friend’s Wedding
Instead of updating the screwball comedy genre for the anything-goes 1990s, screenwriter Ronald Bass and director P.J. Hogan have merely added a few contemporary flourishes to a story that would not be out of place in the 1950s. Here women have two options: they are either tragically lonely, die-hard careerists or altar-bound support mechanisms whose…
A simple dance, gracefully executed
The defining moment of Shall We Dance? is a brief glance that carries the force of a thunderbolt. In the middle of a long train commute to his new home in the suburbs, fortysomething accountant Shohei Sugiyama (Koji Yakusho) looks up to see a wistful sight: a lovely young woman named Mai (Tamiyo Kusakari) staring…
