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Matt Zoller Seitz

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The Men Who Were The Thing Look Back on a Modern Horror Classic

By Simon Abrams and Matt Zoller Seitz
Oct 17, 2016

The Thing died a noisy death when it debuted in 1982. In fact, this masterful paranoiac thriller about a vicious shape-shifting alien infiltrating a group of scientists stationed in Antarctica bombed so hard that director John Carpenter was fired from his follow-up gig working on Firestarter. (Roller Boogie director Mark...
The Wet Look

Waterworld is a whirlpool of dazzling action, and muddled ideas

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Aug 3, 1995

Given what we've heard about the film's chaotic production history, the opening image of Waterworld has a certain juvenile charm: the world-famous logo of Universal Pictures, which bankrolled the movie -- a pristine blue planet floating in a serene sea of stars -- mutates so that the land is swallowed...
Unkind Cuts

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Aug 3, 1995

It's been a long time since I've despised a film character the way I despised Chad Palomino (James Le Gros), a rich, handsome, spoiled young Method actor who's had a string of early successes and has let every one of them go to his head. He's just been cast as...
Fashion Plate

Clueless is an improbably entertaining time-waster

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Aug 3, 1995

About 30 minutes into Clueless, a disposable new teen comedy starring MTV-spawned glamour girl Alicia Silverstone as a spoiled Beverly Hills princess, I started to picture myself as the protagonist of a post-apocalyptic science fiction movie. I'm playing a hard-bitten journalistic loner, a cross between Mad Max and Andrew Sarris...
A Boy and His Cetacean

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Jul 27, 1995

Discussing 1993's year in movies, veteran Hollywood scriptwriter William Goldman -- who wrote the screenplays for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President's Men and Marathon Man, and authored the classic how-to book Adventures in the Screen Trade -- singled out Free Willy as a story he wished...
Train to Disaster

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Jul 20, 1995

Just when it seemed safe to go to the summer cinema, Steven Seagal is back, this time in Under Siege 2: Dark Territory, a megabudget sequel that's literally on rails from beginning to end. Narratively speaking, though, it never pulls out of the station. Unlike in the Die Hard and...
Quiet Spell

The Indian in the Cupboard is as matter-of-fact and mysterious as its title

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Jul 20, 1995

The Indian in the Cupboard is an oasis of calm amid the glitzy din of summer. It rarely shouts when it can whisper. Like the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and the stories of the Arabian Nights, it is strange and complicated and contradictory. Working from a children's novel...
Moonstruck

Both corny and inspiring, Apollo 13 is about more than a space mission

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Jul 6, 1995

His ship might be damaged beyond repair, and his longtime ambition to walk on the moon might be dashed forever, but Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks), commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, still can't help dreaming. As he and his fellow crewmates float in a damaged tin can miles above...
Lost Knight

Hollywood (and Gere, and Connery) turn Arthurian legend into Arthurian mush

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Jul 6, 1995

First Knight, a new effort from Ghost director Jerry Zucker, purports to tell the tale of King Arthur's ill-fated marriage to Lady Guinevere -- a young English noblewoman who fell madly in love with the aging king's most trusted knight, the young, virile, reckless Lancelot. But because this is an...
Female Trouble

Two offbeat films chronicle three offbeat young women's struggles

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Jun 29, 1995

The absence of good movie roles for women has been bemoaned in the press so many times over the past few years that film critics might as well store a prototype version of such an article in their hard drives and assign it a function key. Clearly, the solution doesn't...
Batman, At Last

Sexy and soulful, Schumacher's epic proves the third time's the charm

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Jun 22, 1995

I was disappointed in the first two Batman movies. Despite moments of dark wit and visual brilliance, they didn't move me emotionally, and I didn't think much of them as entertainment, either. The problem was their director, Tim Burton. He's an artist, not a showman; a visionary, not a storyteller...
Flings, First and Final

Two new romances approach doomed passion, as seen at different ages and stages

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Jun 1, 1995

If you need proof that what we enjoy in art has nothing to do with what we'll accept in life, then consider love stories. When you look back at most of the really powerful movie romances both past (City Lights, Gone with the Wind, Casablanca) and present (Love Story, Annie...
Not Worth Remembering

Billy Crystal says Forget Paris; good idea

By Matt Zoller Seitz
May 25, 1995

Some movies are so bad that they make you look back over your recent moviegoing life with the merciless eye of an FBI agent assembling a dossier, desperately trying to figure out whether the people responsible for the picture that ruined your evening showed signs of obnoxious incompetence early on...
Love for Sale

By Matt Zoller Seitz
May 25, 1995

When 16-year-old mail-order bride Riyo (Youki Kudoh) gets off the boat that has borne her from her old home in Japan to her new one on a sugar cane plantation in Hawaii, she is shocked by the sight of her spouse-to-be. She expected that the man who paid for her...
Mad Mel's Epic Adventure

Mel Gibson puts himself on the line for Braveheart

By Matt Zoller Seitz
May 25, 1995

In the 16 years since he made his screen debut, Mel Gibson has seen plenty of action. Part of what makes him so charismatic is his ability to take a licking and keep on ticking: enemies can beat him, shoot him, torture and humiliate him, but he always comes back...
Cat Man Dues

Panther is a sincere, but self-defeating, exercise

By Matt Zoller Seitz
May 11, 1995

For nearly three decades, some of Hollywood's most powerful African-American players have labored unsuccessfully to bring the story of the Black Panther Party to the big screen. The father/son filmmaking duo of Melvin and Mario Van Peebles have managed to make the dream come true, and "dreamlike" is certainly the...
America, America

By Matt Zoller Seitz
May 11, 1995

The Perez Family and My Family (Mi Familia) don't glance off of you the way most movies do. Full of hardship, deprivation, bitterness and death -- yet maintaining an ultimate optimism -- they stick with you, even haunt you. The two films share a basic narrative of outsiders trying to...
Bad Seeds

By Matt Zoller Seitz
May 4, 1995

In the past two decades, filmmaker John Carpenter has directed 17 movies, and has established himself as a towering figure in modern horror -- a celluloid counterpart of novelist Stephen King, setting spooky stories in present day, recognizable settings, from suburbia (Christine) to the inner city (Prince of Darkness, Assault...
Getting Hooked, Brilliantly

With The Basketball Diaries, Leonardo DiCaprio becomes a star

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Apr 27, 1995

As Jim Carroll, the teenage prep-school junkie hero of The Basketball Diaries, Leonardo DiCaprio gives a performance so brilliant it's scary. DiCaprio's only 20, and has only three major screen credits behind him, yet he has the expressiveness and assurance of someone who's been starring in films for decades. He...
Good and Rotten

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Apr 20, 1995

One of the most welcome surprises of WorldFest is the premiere of Joe's Rotten World, a terrific comedy from Los Angeles-based writer/director Richard LaBrie, which comes on like A Confederacy of Dunces as directed by Albert Brooks and scripted by Tom Robbins. The premise is too complicated and bizarre to...
Generations

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Apr 20, 1995

Gregory Nava's My Family (Mi Familia), a multigenerational epic about a Chicano family in east Los Angeles, is one of the most satisfying dramas I've ever seen. The narrative follows the changing fortunes of the Sanchez family from the early part of the century through the late 1970s. It begins...
Not So True Confessions

The didactic Priest is an overheated but honorable melodrama

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Apr 13, 1995

Your hooey detector will probably start beeping about ten minutes into British filmmaker Antonia Bird's controversial melodrama Priest when Father Greg (Linus Roache), a young man of the cloth newly transferred to a blue-collar Liverpool parish, rises to address his congregation. These days, he complains from the pulpit, we are...

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