Heaven Can Wait

There is scarcely a cliché of the 1990s Hollywood thriller that is not to be found in Switchback, written and directed by Jeb Stuart. By now, the figure of the serial killer — so rare in nature, so common in the movies — has become such a familiar one that a filmmaker like Stuart will…

Payback is directed by Brian Helgeland, who was one of the writers involved in L.A. Confidential, and, like that film, this one is an exercise in ersatz film noir. It is not exactly a remake of John Boorman’s Point Blank of 1967, but both are based on the same novel, The Hunter, which was written…

It is only to be expected that Mel Gibson takes on and defeats the entire British army, virtually single-handedly, in The Patriot, but you would have thought that at least the film would have had something to say about what, from the point of view of the historian, the Revolutionary War was actually fought about….

24 7: Twenty Four Seven, directed by Shane Meadows, is a strange sort of 90s version of the old-fashioned boxing flick where the tough street kid fights his way out of poverty and hardship to success (even though it is often a problematical kind of success) by learning courage and self-discipline in the ring. The…

Grey Gardens by David and Albert Maysles is a re-release of the film they made in the 1970s about two women made interesting to the camera by the accident of celebrity, yet whose interest for us is owing simply to their strange and rather pathetic humanity. Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter of the same…

In Donnie Brasco, based, as it is at pains to remind you, on a true story, Mike Newell and his screenwriter, Paul Attanasio, set up a highly interesting conflict with a great deal of skill and then simply slither out of it at the end, leaving the issues they raise unresolved. The excuse for this…