In the tradition of such hard-boiled crime films as Get Shorty and Pulp Fiction, FROGS FOR SNAKES is a sexy neo-noir thriller centering on a group of New York theatre actors who moonlight as illegal money collectors. Unlucky in love, Eva (Barbara Hershey) has the most acting ability, but she dreams of abandoning the twisted underworld and living a quieter life on the beaches of Long Island. Her ...
Some pundits called it a flawed, exploitative action film that glamorized drug dealing and the luxury of a lucrative criminal lifestyle, spawning a trend of films that attracted youth gangs and provoked violence in theaters. Others hailed it as a breakthrough movie that depicted drug dealers as ruthless, corrupt, and evil, leading dead-end lives that no rational youth would want to emulate. ...
"Queen of the Indies" Parker Posey (Dazed and Confused, Waiting for Guffman, The Daytrippers) shines in this lightweight comedy about a romance between a floundering downtown party girl and a falafel vendor set in Manhattan's trendy loft and club scene. Posey is utterly charming as Mary, the 23-year-old whose talents are pretty much limited to "partying, flirting, making stuff ...
A black writer (Harold Perrineau, the poet in the spinning wheelchair in the HBO series Oz) is asked by his white girlfriend to give a speech about race at the racially mixed high school where she teaches. In preparation, he talks to a black friend but does the majority of the brainstorming for the speech with a white friend. Meanwhile, two black women talk sexual politics in a café, a ...
Uma Thurman is painful to watch in Hysterical Blindness--and that's a compliment. Thurman completely gives herself over to her trashy character, a pathetically self-deluding good-time girl who hangs out in a tavern in Bayonne, New Jersey, circa 1987. She occupies the bar stool next to her best bud (a dead-on Juliette Lewis), willing herself to believe that an obviously indifferent pick-up ...