Mike Figgis

After mastering the mixture of character drama and procedural hijinx on shows like "House" and "Bones," FOX has fallen into a bit of a rut. The fall saw the speedy failure of "K-Ville," a drama that wasted fantastic location work and a solid cast in a...

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...

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...

Now that the summer of sequels finally has ended, Hollywood has a message for adults: It's safe to get back in the theaters again. The fall always looks great from a Labor Day perspective as the studios and indie distributors prepare to unveil their...

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...

Brad Anderson's "Session 9" is an ingeniously scary movie. With the most effectively minimalist approach since "The Blair Witch Project," Anderson and his co-writer Stephen Gevedon took as their inspiration one of the most ominous buildings in America,...

1. LOVE STREAMS (John Cassavetes; 1984) 4 stars A Hollywood writer who cannot love confronts his sister, who loves too well. Writer-director-star Cassavetes' last major work, starring himself and wife Gena Rowlands, it's another blisteringly emotional,...

Friday October 27, 1995      "Leaving Las Vegas" is a film laden with virtues but difficult to embrace. Beautifully put together, sensitively acted by Nicolas Cage and Elisabeth Shue, directed by Mike Figgis with assurance and style and making...