Email Author Amy Taubin

2000 Stories by Amy Taubin

• Willem Dafoe Bares His Fangs

  published December 26, 2000

  The deliriously camp concept of E. Elias Merhige's Shadow of the Vampire is that Max Schreck, the star of F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu,... More >>

• Boys Will Be Boys (Sometimes Women)

  published December 19, 2000

  All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy's elegiac novel about the loss of the West and the end of youth, has been adapted with respect and... More >>

• Gus Van Sant’s Conventional Wisdom

  published December 12, 2000

  As generic as a Christmas tree, Finding Forrester would be pretty disposable if it were not decorated with taste and tenderness by Gus Van... More >>

• Fear of Flying

  published December 5, 2000

  Although hardly a connoisseur of Chinese martial arts movies, I count among my most delirious cinematic experiences a Berlin Film Festival... More >>

• Landscapes With Alienated Figures

  published November 28, 2000

  If Michael Snow's 1967 landmark avant-garde film Wavelength is like a Hitchcock movie with the narrative pared away so that only the... More >>

• Blasts from the Past

  published November 14, 2000

  Set in Paris during the countdown to Christmas Eve, Danièle Thompson's by turns hilarious and wounding La Bûche disproves the... More >>

• ‘Boys’ Keeps Swinging

  published November 14, 2000

  In these days of too many movies, it's rare for any of them to get a second chance at life. Wonder Boys, Curtis Hanson's bedraggled... More >>

• What Would the Community Think

  published November 7, 2000

  Kenneth Lonergan's You Can Count on Me, the winner of two of Sundance's biggest prizes, seems like a TV movie. A well-written,... More >>

• Swing the Body Electric

  published October 31, 2000

  In the current issue of Film Comment, Harmony Korine names Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore "the greatest movie about love."... More >>

• Eyes and Ears of the Beholder

  published October 24, 2000

  Tonie Marshall's Venus Beauty Institute is a showcase for Nathalie Baye, who rode to stardom on a bicycle in Godard's 1979 Every Man for... More >>

• Vincent Canby, 1924–2000

  published October 24, 2000

  As the first-string film critic for The New York Times from 1969 to 1993, Vincent Canby had a hand in making New York a moviegoing town to... More >>

• Peep Shows and Prison Showmanship

  published October 17, 2000

  "Two, four, six, eight. Don't go in to masturbate," chant the strippers who are picketing the entrance to San Francisco's Lusty Lady Theater. In... More >>

• First-Timers Get Under the Skin

  published October 10, 2000

  The first image in Ratcatcher, Lynne Ramsay's haunting evocation of a horrific Glasgow childhood, is of a preadolescent boy wrapping... More >>

• Spike Lee’s Own Scary Movie

  published October 3, 2000

  What better title than Bamboozled for a film in which the most electrifying dance numbers since the days of Vincente Minnelli occur within... More >>

• The Way of a Gun

  published October 3, 2000

  A wry, nearly deadpan suburban comedy, David Maquiling's Too Much Sleep is so good it made me wish I had kept that workhorse phrase... More >>

• Original Sins and Future Shock

  published September 26, 2000

  An autumn ritual, the New York Film Festival's "Views From the Avant-Garde" offers... More >>

• Sweet Release

  published September 19, 2000

  Wit Labor Day already a distant memory, Hollywood studio suits are trying to ignore their less than stellar summer box office grosses—down 5... More >>

• Kin Flick; Kindred Spirits

  published September 19, 2000

  By any standards, Alma is a nightmare of a mother. A pathological narcissist who experiences frequent psychotic episodes, she has problems with... More >>

• There Is Power in a Union

  published September 12, 2000

  Restrained, tough, and subtle enough to be as engrossing on the second viewing as it was on the first, Laurent Cantet's Human Resources is... More >>

• Endurance Training

  published August 29, 2000

  "We have TV down here," says one of the tunnel dwellers in Marc Singer's Dark Days. For five years, Singer documented the men and women who... More >>

• Boiling Points

  published August 22, 2000

  Just in time to put Lars Von Trier and his hype-happy Dogma spawn in perspective, Rob Nilsson's 1996 Chalk—an Oedipal drama so raw it... More >>

• Rules of Engagement

  published August 15, 2000

  In honor of their anniversaries and in conjunction with their DVD release, classic films are being restored and showcased in theaters for limited... More >>

• Crimes and Misdemeanors

  published August 8, 2000

  There's a moment in Gimme Shelter, David Maysles, Albert Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin's documentary of the Rolling Stones' 1969 American... More >>

• Primal Screen

  published August 1, 2000

  An anti-blockbuster about a guy who busts blocks legally for a living, Raging Bull makes pain the measure of manhood. Not only pain... More >>

• We’ve Got to Get Out of This Place

  published July 25, 2000

  Mooney Pottie puts sparkles on her science-class diagrams of fallopian tubes, which isn't the only reason that everyone in the small Nova Scotia... More >>