Email Author Dennis Lim

1999 Stories by Dennis Lim

• Regret To Inform

  published June 22, 1999

  More than 20 years after her husband was killed in combat, Barbara Sonneborn decided to visit the site of his death in Vietnam. The... More >>

• A Life on Strings

  published June 8, 1999

  An omnibus film constructed around a single fetish object, The Red Violin spans three continents, four centuries, and five languages. On... More >>

• Truth Be Told

  published June 1, 1999

  There's a horrible timeliness to the two most striking works at this year's 'docfest': The Valley, which unblinkingly chronicles a gory... More >>

• Star Stricken

  published May 25, 1999

  The tagline for Notting Hill reads, "Can the most famous film star in the world fall for the man on the street?" A more honest version... More >>

• Videodrome

  published May 11, 1999

  Premised on the notion of "subvertising," the Faze festival (Cantor Film Center, May 12) sets out to celebrate the music video as an anarchic art... More >>

• The Castle

  published May 4, 1999

  The Kerrigans are simple folk who reside on the outskirts of Melbourne. How simple? They live right next to an airport runway—and they like... More >>

• The Go-Betweens

  published May 4, 1999

  This is us as a Seventies band," Robert Forster writes in the liner notes for the Go-Betweens' 78 'til 79 The Lost Album, a collection of... More >>

• Desperate Measures

  published May 4, 1999

  As botched-drug-deal tales go, Pusher digs surprisingly deep— its surface clichés give way to an existential despair that... More >>

• Pusher Man

  published May 4, 1999

  Nicolas Winding Refn's first film is the drug-world morality tale Pusher (see review). It's a... More >>

• Get Real

  published April 27, 1999

  Eager to both please and educate, Get Real goes about its business with an earnest tunnel vision that's almost endearing. But it's mired in... More >>

• Family Matters

  published April 27, 1999

  Lisanne Skyler's Getting To Know You was one of many movies that left Sundance this year without a distribution deal. An impressive first... More >>

• Opposing Farces

  published April 20, 1999

  Director Alexander Payne follows up Citizen Ruth, his sharp, almost Sturges-like abortion-wars satire, with Election, a less... More >>

• Grand Allusions

  published April 6, 1999

  Working off the transcendently paranoid, made-for-movies premise that reality might be the grandest illusion of all, The Matrix comes on... More >>

• Following Up

  published April 6, 1999

  A stylish, artful crime thriller, Christopher Nolan's Following is the sort of no-budget indie debut whose merits are in danger of being... More >>

• Tender Mercies

  published April 6, 1999

  It may not surface in a Nike ad anytime soon, but Blur's new single, "Tender," is the real bittersweet symphony. Floating in on a brittle... More >>

• If Looks Could Kill

  published March 23, 1999

  An explicitly gay serial-killer flick, Hard might be expected to counteract, or at least undermine, the dubious take on sexuality endemic... More >>

• Movie Mania

  published March 23, 1999

  From the encyclopedic Internet Movie Database to the smart niche reporting of Indiewire, the Net can be an endless resource (or distraction) for... More >>

• End Games

  published March 16, 1999

  A filmmaker who's plowed the same narrow, distinctive furrow all his career, Hal Hartley seems to have dug himself into a hole. While his last two... More >>

• The Wall / The First Night of My Life

  published March 9, 1999

  It's no surprise that every film in the "2000 Seen by . . . " series— eve-of-millennium stories commissioned by French television— uses... More >>

• The Filth Element

  published March 2, 1999

  The premise of Cruel Intentions— a retread of Les Liaisons Dangereuses with high-school kids— can be distilled to a single... More >>

• 8MM

  published March 2, 1999

  8MM pretends to be about evil— the enormity of evil, why it exists, how it contaminates, deep stuff like that. In case you don't pick... More >>

• Missing Links

  published February 23, 1999

  Ambitious but confused, Conceiving Ada is a noble attempt at retracing the life of Ada Lovelace— the daughter of Lord Byron and, more... More >>

• Skin Flicks

  published February 16, 1999

  Even in its less stellar incarnations (and this was, to be honest, one of them), the Rotterdam Film Festival can be counted on for a bracing... More >>

• Jawbreaker

  published February 16, 1999

  "Dark," as we know, is the indie flavor of the month; it's also, as done by crass, witless (and, almost invariably, young white male)... More >>

• Hands on a Hard Body

  published February 2, 1999

  Twenty-three hopefuls gather outside a Nissan dealership in Longview, Texas, place their hands on a shiny new pickup, and try to keep them there... More >>