Is there a movie star that the public is more wary of than Angelina Jolie? Tom Cruise has become the punchline to an overextended joke. But bring up Jolie in conversation and you’re apt to hear something like fear. Beneath the complaints about how weird she is, or the desperate claims she’s not that beautiful…
“God save us from the good intentions of well-meaning white liberals.” That was Morgan Freeman years ago at the press junket for “Driving Miss Daisy” explaining to some concerned Caucasian that, no, it wasn’t retrograde to depict an elderly black character in the American South of the ’50s and ’60s not acting like Huey Newton.…
In the mid-’70s, when women (among them Claudia Weill, Joan Micklin Silver, Joan Darling) were getting the chance to direct mainstream movies, Pauline Kael cautioned against expecting great things right away. Filmmakers needed a chance to learn and develop, she said, and there was always a chance they might not, or might simply become proficient…
I knew what she looked like by heart this time. That scrap of newspaper she was on should have been worn ragged by now, the number of times I’d pulled it out and looked at it when I was alone in the place. – Cornell Woolrich, “The Black Angel” It’s the fear as much as…
Let’s start with a few images: A psycho jive artist dancing around as he cuts a man’s ear off. A retired bullfighter slumped in front of a television set, masturbating furiously to slasher movies. Scenes like those, from Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” and Pedro Almodóvar’s “Matador,” pretty much secured the bad-boy reputations of their creators.…
Despite all the terrible publicity Mike Tyson has gotten over the years, I’ve never forgotten seeing him nearly two decades ago on “The Arsenio Hall Show,” walking out to surprise Muhammad Ali. When Hall asked who’d win if they got into the ring, Ali pointed to Tyson. Tyson, shaking his head said, “I know I’m…
It’s a measure of the smarts at work in “State of Play” that while none of the characters’ motives are clean, the movie never lapses into cynicism. This tense, cleanly made thriller, directed by Kevin Macdonald (“The Last King of Scotland”), plays off the faux scandals of the Clinton years (the Lewinsky affair) and the…
Even if the early buzz around Jody Hill’s “Observe and Report” weren’t grouping it with “The Cable Guy,” the comparison would be obvious. Like that film, “Observe and Report” is said to be a “dark” comedy. In this case that means that calculated outrageousness, brutalism presented for laughs and easy cynicism passes for daring. When…
To college students graduating into the nightmare of the current job market, the floating, companionable uncertainty of “Adventureland” must look very agreeable. Greg Mottola’s gentle comedy is set mostly in a Pittsburgh amusement park during the summer of 1987. The hero, James (Jesse Eisenberg), was expecting to spend the season traveling around Europe. But money…
