Email Author Jessica Winter

1999 Stories by Jessica Winter

• Look Who’s Multiplying

  published December 21, 1999

  The robotics guys working on Chris Columbus's latest minivan—his usual rich-suburban, vaguely fascistic dramedy guaranteed by Satan's... More >>

• Animating Rhythms

  published December 7, 1999

  Like the improvisational jazz that often scores their films, the Hubley family's animated output has always married technical mastery with... More >>

• Lost Without a Map

  published November 30, 1999

  From a bizarrely overenunciated, hooked-on-phonics voice-over, through a diva fit at a child's funeral as if the church were Jennifer Lopez's... More >>

• Misery Loves Company

  published November 30, 1999

  In her debut collection, Women and Other Animals, Bonnie Jo Campbell takes a steel-eyed look at the human as car wreck. A giant,... More >>

• The Road Leads Home

  published November 23, 1999

  Just on the stiletto heels of Susan Sarandon comes another dramedy about a flighty, rudderless small-town mom hitting the road for California with... More >>

• Meryl Takes On the System and Wes Takes a Nap

  published November 2, 1999

  Would that the mind's powers of self-persuasion were stronger, and it were possible to convince oneself that Wes Craven's Music of the... More >>

• Our Bodies, Ourselves

  published October 26, 1999

  Much in Dreaming of Joseph Lees pivots on pathological jealousy, and the film casts a jaundiced eye indeed—interiors and exteriors... More >>

• The Vagina Monologue

  published October 19, 1999

  Surpassing Brandon Teena's sexual identity crisis is the one that reviewers of Boys Don't Cry have suffered in puzzling out the whole... More >>

• Lip Service

  published October 12, 1999

  Easily the best teen movie of the year, Show Me Love conjures with wry, empathetic precision the careening mood swings and casual emotional... More >>

• Corn Doggy Dogg

  published October 5, 1999

  Despite the ascendancy of hick-hop stars like Eminem and Kid Rock, despite the ongoing Hilfiger-underwritten experiment in selling black culture... More >>

• Sugared Town

  published September 28, 1999

  Where the hockey's good, the compass points north, and the ladies stay warm all night. Mystery, Alaska, is a tiny burg, little more than a post... More >>

• Now I Wanna Be Your Dog

  published September 21, 1999

  Even as light romantic comedies go, Dog Park takes one bland, maundering stroll. The film does have a thesis, though, and a sweet,... More >>

• Hey! They're Workin' Here!

  published September 14, 1999

  Playing the mild, schlumpy schoolteacher who falls for the beautiful, eponymous thief in B. Monkey, Jared Harris puts on the... More >>

• Across the Great Divide

  published September 7, 1999

  A few minutes into Deepa Mehta's Earth, when a little girl drops a plate and it shatters to the ground, the child asks her mother, "Can one... More >>

• Shtick Figures

  published August 24, 1999

  Let's give Hugh Grant some credit where credit is due: he's not waving his shtick around quite so much anymore. In his dumb, affable new comedy... More >>

• Call Off the Dogs

  published August 17, 1999

  Surely many hoped that Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels represented the last gasp of the Woo-via-Tarantino genre of ironic bloodbath capers,... More >>

• Girls & Boys Together

  published August 10, 1999

  Better Than Chocolate: as in "Your love is...," as in the Quik-secreting Sarah McLachlan ballad. The namesake film is an amiable, scatterbrained... More >>

• Uncomfortably Numb

  published August 3, 1999

  In Irvine Welsh's "The Granton Star Cause," one of three short stories from his collection The Acid House adapted for this film trilogy, a... More >>

• My Life So Far

  published July 20, 1999

  The life in question is that of 10-year-old Fraser, an inquisitive boy who lives in the Scottish highlands with his saintly mother (Mary... More >>

• Tuned In

  published July 20, 1999

  What shocks most about South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut isn't its well-documented gross indecencies but their context: the film's... More >>

• The Velocity of Gary

  published July 13, 1999

  Calculating Gary's said velocity might give occasion to a new definition of warp speed: lumbering and misshapen, apparently stitched... More >>

• The Dinner Game

  published July 6, 1999

  In the Annals of Idiocy— there with Dan Quayle, Charles Bovary, and Debbie Matenopoulos—surely a place is reserved for Pignon (Jacques... More >>

• When Love Comes

  published June 22, 1999

  The title of this New Zealand–bred film derives from its fictional singer's late-'70s disco smash, "When Love Comes Along," but Katie Keen... More >>

• The Broken Giant

  published June 22, 1999

  Twenty-seven-year-old Estep Nagy's debut film does no hand-holding of either the expositional or moral sort in telling the tangled, ugly story of... More >>

• Just a Little Harmless Sex

  published June 15, 1999

  Just in time for Hugh Grant's second coming, a film arrives whose pivotal incident entails a hooker, a front-seat blowjob, and a police bust.... More >>