Mike Figgis

2 1/2 stars (out of 4) After years of creating films that defied the big-studio cookie cutter, such as "Leaving Las Vegas" and "Timecode," maverick director Mike Figgis makes his most unpredictable move yet, shooting a conventional, predictable thriller....

With "Cold Creek Manor," gifted and idiosyncratic director Mike Figgis has sophisticated fun with the old-dark-house thriller genre and brings to it a subtly satirical edge. The result is a lightweight popcorn movie, hardly the scariest of the year but...

2 stars (out of 4) "Hotel" might be best described as the art-house version of "Cannonball Run." True, writer/director Mike Figgis keeps his action confined in one city (Venice) as Burt Reynolds, John Malkovich, Lucy Liu and others pop out of the...

Orson Welles once wrote of Hollywood, "a genuine individual is an outright nuisance in a factory." No one knew better than Welles did just how scorned genuine individualism can be in Hollywood — even in the most putatively independent of realms. But...

The White House being destroyed by an alien spaceship was the so-called "money shot" of "Independence Day," the image largely credited with launching the 1995 movie into the box-office stratosphere. Now that we've been exposed to day after day and camera...

Perhaps we expect too much from the first year of a movie millennium. Already, there are complaints -- as there are each year, no matter how the movies are finally judged -- about 2000. And yet I think 2000 was a 12-month span of films that will be...

Friday November 14, 1997      In creating "One Night Stand," writer-director Mike Figgis has, like the celebrated Dr. Frankenstein, come up with something of a monstrosity: a pompous, pretentious sex farce. If that sounds unnerving, you have no idea.   ...

Friday April 30, 1999      It's safe to say that almost every gay teen fantasizes having a romance with the campus hero, inevitably a handsome star athlete and student leader, unattainable to all but the most beautiful and popular girls and surely the...

Veteran series leads Julianna Margulies and Sara Rue have signed on to topline drama pilots at FOX. According to the industry trades, Margulies will star in "Canterbury's Law," a legal drama about a woman named Elizabeth Canterbury (hence the title, we...

"The Sopranos," hype-wise, is like "Harry Potter" for adults; no other series in the history of American television has unfolded quite like it, or caused quite the same paroxysms of expectation. I speak as somebody who found the DVD of four new episodes...