Brief Encounter

Robert Duvall and his fetching companion, Luciana Pedraza, are fun to watch on the dance floor, but the movie he has built round those scenes is a pretty feeble one.

Playing God, directed by Andy Wilson and written by Mark Haskell Smith is yet another example of the work of the Taranteenies, those hip young filmmakers who have dominated creative thinking in Hollywood for the past three or four years, in the wake of Quentin Tarantino’s success with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. You’d think…

Despite its apocalyptic theme, Last Night by the young Canadian director, Don McKellar, is a shockingly modest—and thus, to my way of thinking anyway, likeable—little film. Set on the human race’s last day, before an unspecified cataclysm puts an end to all life on earth, the film attempts to make no profound political or spiritual…

Holy Smoke by Jane Campion is a movie whose most basic assumptions—arising out of a weirdly anachronistic, 1970s-vintage view of bourgeois life—makes it rather difficult to like. From the first glimpse she gives us of “Sans Souci, Sydney,” an overhead shot of acres of tiled-roof bungalows that bespeaks “suburbia,” we know that Miss Campion’s sympathies…

A charming fable of an environmentally friendly machine which proves to be the redeemer of mankind. Where have I heard something like this before?

Speed 2: Cruise Control by Jan De Bont is even more mindless than the first Speed and is perhaps postmodern filmmaking at its most cynical and exploitative. That is to say, there is hardly any attempt to put together a coherent drama which would help us to make some sense of the relentless series of…