I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. In fact, every review of a Steven Spielberg film ought to stipulate this in its first paragraph: Spielberg is America’s most talented film-maker. Here’s an example of how talented he is. It’s a small one, but characteristic. At one point in his new film, A.I. Artificial…
There is a moment in What’s the Worst that Could Happen? where the movie almost seems to live up to the promise of its title. This comes when Max Fairbanks (Danny DeVito), a nasty and insufferable billionaire, attempts to justify to his wife, Lutetia (Nora Dunn) his behavior in getting involved in an increasingly destructive…
As an example of postmodern movie-making, the beginning of Swordfish, written by Skip Woods and directed by Dominic Sena, takes a lot of beating. John Travolta looking like the middle-aged dandy of which he has made rather a speciality since Pulp Fiction, is shown in tight close-up in the role of movie critic. “You know…
This is the abstract field.
The animated film Shrek, based on a story by William Steig and directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson, is a deconstruction of the fairy tale. It is so literally, in the sense that what drives the eponymous ogre out of his homey swamp and into his parody of a fairy tale quest is an…
The fairy-tale implications of title of The Princess and the Warrior (or, with German logic, Der Krieger und die Kaiserin), written and directed by Tom Tykwer, is both misleading and not. The film is set in the present day, in Wuppertal, Germany, and is told realistically — without even the fractured time scheme of Tykwer’s…
Those who remember fondly Francis Veber’s The Dinner Game from the summer before last may be a bit disappointed in Le Placard (The Closet)—which has a lot of the earlier film’s comic invention but also, to those of us who are accustomed to Hollywood-style propaganda, enough of an ideological edge to give it an unbalancing…
Dominique Deruddere’s Everybody’s Famous! (Iedereen Beroemd! in his native Flemish) is a rather charming little movie, though without enough of a sense of detachment from the dream of pop music fame which it otherwise makes fun of. Some will say it is condescending, but I don’t think it condescending enough, at least in this sense….
Baz Luhrmann, director of Strictly Ballroom and Romeo+ Juliet seems with each film to be trying to outdo the absurdity and outrageousness of the last. If so, he’s going to have a hard time topping Moulin Rouge, which seems to me to go about as far as you can go with self-parody. He is reported…
The fairy-tale implications of title of The Princess and the Warrior (or, with German logic, Der Krieger und die Kaiserin), written and directed by Tom Tykwer, is both misleading and not. The film is set in the present day, in Wuppertal, Germany, and is told realistically—without even the fractured time scheme of Tykwer’s earlier hit,…
The return of The Sopranos to HBO last month for its third season reminds us once again of what a great work of American art this collaborative venture, headed by David Chase, still is. Although it suffers from the twin disadvantages, either of which might seem certain on its own to be artistically lethal, of…
— An address to the Friends of The New Criterion, New York, April 18, 2001 Hilton, Roger, distinguished Friends of the New Criterion. I’m here this evening as, a kind of representative—as I am in the magazine itself—of the vulgarity of the popular and media culture that it is otherwise so successful at keeping out….
