Charming, but not magic
A menacing Queen of the Night and the lush designs of Maurice Sendak are this opera’s joys.
The End of Violence
Has a European ever made a good film about California? If so, this isn’t it. Wim Wenders, long an Ameriphile, has taken it upon himself to tell us all about what makes the Golden State tick at the end of the millennium. The press kit offers the helpful suggestion that since Wenders made his previous…
Kids in a candy shop
How high-tech Coldcut stays down.
Adventures in the skin trade
Boogie Nights is an adult film, but not in the sense of “adult entertainment,” the polite euphemism for the porn industry where its characters make their living. Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s freewheeling epic is a movie for adults: smart, funny, brave, devastating, ambiguous, sometimes all at the same time. This complex story’s fulcrum is ambitious…
Devil’s Advocate
So far in his career, poor Al Pacino has developed to actually transcend typecasting. Having matured in film and on the stage into a venerable but peppery persona, he has, for the most part, outpaced the legacy of Michael Corleone, the classic role he rode to prestige in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather series. Still, the…
Washington Square
Of Henry James’ troubled heiresses, Catherine Sloper in Washington Square (1880) is in some ways the most pitiable. James uses his carefully measured, beautiful language not so much to describe Catherine as to catalog her seemingly endless shortcomings. He appears to share the opinion of her father, Dr. Austin Sloper, an eminent surgeon whose beloved…
I Know What You Did Last Summer
Ever since Wes Craven threw in the towel on slasher films with his Wes Craven’s Nightmare, the genre has become an upfront burlesque. Subtle nudges and winks no longer will do. Take, for example, a scene early in I Know What You Did Last Summer. A quartet of high school seniors, futures bright, libidos outta…
