Gekko No Sasayaki or “Moonlight Whispers” is a brilliant little Japanese film, written and directed by Akihiko Shiota, about young love which suddenly spins out of control and becomes sexual perversion. Not a very promising subject, you might think, and the quasi-clinical dimension of the film, though it has a serious point to make, is…
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but just in case you’ve been living in Borneo for the last 80 years you might not know that the class-ridden British army in World War One was staffed by senior officers who were idiots and junior officers who were amateurish, upper-class twits, while the ranks were…
Gekko No Sasayaki or “Moonlight Whispers” is a brilliant little Japanese film, written and directed by Akihiko Shiota, about young love which suddenly spins out of control and becomes sexual perversion. Not a very promising subject, you might think, and the quasi-clinical dimension of the film, though it has a serious point to make, is…
You know you’re in trouble with a movie that begins as the camera pans over the spines of a pile of highbrow books. Look at all those impressive authors’ names! Kierkegaard, Chekhov, Joyce, the Marquis de Sade. The selection is as telling (and is meant to be) as the books themselves about what it is…
Philip Kaufman’s Quills, based on a play by Doug Wright, who wrote the screenplay, is a perfect illustration of the fact, which I may have mentioned once or twice before in these reviews, that it is now impossible for Hollywood to make a movie about sex which is not at the same time propaganda for…
David Mamet’s State and Main is so slow moving, so sluggishly edited, that you’ve got to wonder if it is so through incompetence — though this might be OK for other kinds of films, it’s disastrous in a comedy — or if there is some subtle purpose to it: an attempt to assert, for example,…
There are just enough good things about Cast Away by Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump, Contact, What Lies Beneath) to make it worth seeing. These are as follows: (1) what is perhaps the most thrilling and frightening representation of a plane crash on film; (2) magnificent photography of the South Seas and the island where Tom…
Science fiction is the parent genre of all post-modernism. If, as Hemingway said, all subsequent American fiction arises out of Huckleberry Finn, all post-modern movies arise out of Plan Nine from Outer Space and other B-grade schlock sci-fi movies of the 1950s — movies which have been enjoyed ever since by the cognoscenti more for…
Who, I wonder, is the intended audience for movies like Thirteen Days? Of course we know who it is that makes them. Kevin Costner, in spite of a string of self-indulgent flops is still a big enough star to be allowed to indulge himself a bit further. And of course when two or three are…
The word “honor” turns up conspicuously in only one place, apart from the title, in Men of Honor, which was directed by George Tillman Jr. from a script by Scott Marshall Smith based on the true story of the U.S. Navy’s first black diver, Carl Brashear (Cuba Gooding Jr.). This comes as Brashear is facing…
Bounce, written and directed by Don Roos is a high concept movie. A playboy advertising executive called Buddy Amaral (Ben Affleck) gets lucky with a stunning blonde called Mimi (Natasha Henstridge) as they wait to catch the last flights out of snowbound O’Hare International in Chicago. In order to spend the night with Mimi, Buddy…
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon directed by the excellent Mr. Ang Lee is a sort of Charlie’s Angels for sophisticates. Good as Mr Lee is, one sometimes finds oneself observing of his films that they are very well done while asking oneself if, after all, they were unquestionably worth doing. So it is with this film,…
