FEATURES
MOULIN ROUGE
By Kent Jones
If anyone can resurrect the musical and bring it into the present, it’s Romeo + Juliet director Baz Luhrmann. Set in Paris in 1899, his new film combines outrageously styled visuals, songs from every era of pop music history, and a classic story of impossible love between a struggling writer and a world nightclub siren. Putting the art back in artifice, the result is a magnificent confection to swoon for.
GUILTY PLEASURES
By John Turturro
This year’s Young Friends of Film Honoree makes a full confession
TIME AND TIDE
By David Chute
Influential Hong Kong director and prime mover Tsui Hark’s new film is more than just a dynamic, blink-of-an-eye thriller.
GHOST WORLD
By Mark Olsen
Crumb director Terry Zwigoff’s adaptation of a cult comic book about post-high school anomie.
EUREKA
By Tony Pipolo
Fusing road movie and psychodrama, this three-and-a-half hour interior epic announces the arrival of a major new Japanese talent
APOCALYPSE NOW
By Howard Hampton
Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam-as-bad-acid-trip epic still holds sway over the popular imagination. Now it’s bigger, longer, and recut, and they’re calling it Apocalypse Now Redux.
WALTER MURCH
By Michael Ondaatje
The legendary editor and sound designer of Apocalypse Now discusses how the new version came about.
RICHARD WIDMARK
By Kent Jones
Nominated for an Oscar for his debut performance as the giggling killer in Kiss of Death, he escaped typecasting and went on to become an icon of driven, intense postwar America masculinity in some of the key Westerns, noirs, and thrillers of the Fifties and Sixties. Here’s what he had to say about his career.
DVD
By Gregory Solman
Poised to replace the videocassette as the 21st-century format of choice, the Digital Versatile Disc represents a quantum leap in image and sound quality—right? Not necessarily. We tell you how to get the best results from your DVD player and take a closer look at the technical processes involved in converting celluloid images into zeroes and ones.
BOOTLEG VIDEO
By Edward E. Crouse
You’ll probably be able to buy a bootleg of Moulin Rouge the week it opens—but what will it look like? Our reporter road-tested some recent tapes and discovered a new form of termite art.
DEPARTMENTS
Editor’s letter
OPENING SHOTS
News, Chatterbox, Frame-Ups: Paul Bettany, Off the Shelf: If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor by Bruce Campbell
CRITICS CHOICE
8 critics review 25 new releases
JOURNAL
Cologne by Olaf Möller
FIRST LOOK
Nanni Moretti’s The Son’s Room by Deborah Young
DISCOVERY
Tears of the Black Tiger by Chuck Stephens
DISTRIBUTOR WANTED
Sara Sugarman’s Very Annie Mary by Nicole Armour
FESTIVALS
Berlin by Harlan Kennedy, Richard Peña; N.Y. Underground by Andrew Lewis Conn; South by Southwest by Mark Olsen; New Directors/New Films by Paul Arthur
REVIEW
Forever Mine by Greil Marcus, The Anniversary Party by Jessica Winter, Together by Nicole Armour, The Vertical Ray of the Sun by Chuck Stephens
VIDI VIDI VIDI
Catch-22 by Gavin Smith, Out of the Present by Nicole Armour, Incubus by Guy Maddin
FSLC SEEN
Who’s who at recent film society events
