Queen, The

Of The Edge, written by David Mamet and directed by Lee Tamahori, it must be said that we should be grateful for what it does not do. It does not make the billionaire, Charles Morris (Anthony Hopkins) into a predictable rich-man villain, or even into a soulless, unpleasant character who stands aside as the real…

Firelight, written and directed by William Nicholson (Shadowlands, Nell), is a contemporary chick-flick, one of those costume drama romances that attempts to marry traditional girlish fantasies to a mild strain of feminism so as to make its mainly female consumers feel comfortable, even virtuous, about watching what would otherwise be embarrassingly retrograde material. A poor…

Hurlyburly directed by Anthony Drazan and written (from his stageplay) by David Rabe has an all-star cast, but it cannot escape from the poverty of its script, in which nothing very much happens (people come and go) and all the characters talk exactly alike—that is in a kind of souped-up psychobabble with an occasionally Pinterian…

The Tao of Steve by Jenniphr Goodman is a likeable little slacker film set in (or near) Santa Fe, but a little too top-heavy with talk — in particular philosophical talk — as many indy first films by would-be intellectuals tend to be. We mustn’t be too hard on them. And the idea is a…

John Herzfeld’s 15 Minutes makes the typical mistake of movies that attempt to satirize the celebrity-obsessed media culture of which, inevitably, they themselves are a part. In fact, so reliably do movies like Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers or Costa Gavras’s Mad City get it wrong that the suspicious-minded might be tempted to think that…

3000 Miles To Graceland, a heist movie whose connection to Elvis is extremely tenuous, does persuade us of one thing: that Kevin Costner is much better as a villain than he is as the sensitive, silent, wounded hero he has been playing for most of his career. The trouble is that the villain is as…