Defending Your Life

A haunting account of an act of terrorism from an age which, in retrospect, seems relatively free of it

Dante’s Peak by Roger Donaldson (written by Leslie Bohem) is a standard-formula disaster movie. The hero, Harry Dalton (Pierce Brosnan) is a ruggedly handsome vulcanologist who (we learn over the opening credits) has lost his fiancée, a colleague, to an erupting volcano. Now he harbors his secret sorrow and treads a lone path through the…

House of Sand (Casa de Areia), by the Brazilian director Andrucha Waddington from a screenplay by Elena Soárez, is a woman’s picture, set in a masculine — indeed, a heroic — landscape which dwarfs the men and animals making their painful way across it in the opening scenes. What we see are the wild and…

Sling Blade by Billy Bob Thornton deserves credit for the acting job of its director and writer, who also plays the principal role, that of Karl Childers, a mentally retarded man in his 30s released from a state institution — the state seems to be Arkansas — after serving twenty years for murdering his mother…

The House of Yes, directed by Mark Waters and adapted by him from the stage play by Wendy MacLeod is enough to make you feel sorry for the Kennedys. Its occasional flashes of wit and its more persistent intellectual superciliousness have no other point than redundantly to assert that somehow (the means can be left…

Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet is a good example of Shakespeare killed by terminal hipness. It is remarkably clever, and even has some good dramatic ideas. Having Juliet (Claire Danes) wake up just before Romeo (Leonardo DiCaprio) drinks the poison and simply cutting Friar Lawrence (Pete Postlethwaite) out of it is an interesting notion and…