Full Metal Jacket (1987)

It was an interesting experience to go to see Kevin Spacey’s Albino Alligator with Jackie Chan’s First Strike fresh in my mind. The two films stand at opposite poles: the one delightfully fresh and uncomplicated and entirely based on its swift, non-stop movement and the other slow and lugubrious and full of portentous dialogue and…

Polish Wedding, written and directed by Theresa Connolly is a relentlessly life-affirming story about a Polish family in Hamtramck, Michigan, which undergoes in its own lovably ethnic way several family crises of a sort that sometimes happen to non-Poles too. The incongruously Irish-looking Gabriel Byrne plays Bolek, the paterfamilias, who is being cuckolded by Jadzia…

Yet another example of gore, black humor and special effects that only has contempt for the non-special but desirable effect of explaining what is going on

Music of the Heart is certainly heartwarming, though you may be inclined to object, as I do, to having your heart warmed by an emotional blast-furnace. The first non-horror flick by its director, Wes Craven, the film is, not surprisingly, altogether too fond of the cheap emotional effect and is constantly taking the easy routes…

Gladiator, directed by Ridley Scott, is the Saving Private Ryan of the second century. Its opening battle sequence is as electrifying in its way as that of Spielberg’s film, which may have influenced this one, particularly as Gladiator comes from Spielberg’s DreamWorks. It is also a handy demonstration of the foundation of Roman hegemony under…

Rachel Leigh Cook is not only beautiful but she must be the greatest actress of her generation. How else to explain the fact that she can submit to being told in the patented denasal tones of Sylvester Stallone that she is “a special girl” —and that if she forgets it she’s going to have “a…