Well, it’s a good subject and a great star. The Venus Beauty Institute is a French film written and directed by Tonie Marshall which explores the female fear of commitment. Everybody knows about the male fear of same, but the female version is much more interesting. Nor to her film’s credit does Ms Marshall’s feminist…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Like Waiting for Guffman, which Christopher Guest directed and starred in four years ago, his new movie, Best in Show is painfully funny. Truly funny and truly painful. And very much in the same way too—in the way, that is, that toe-curling embarrassment is painful if you are involved in it and funny if you…
Harold Ramis is a fine comic writer-director, and his Groundhog Day will go down in cinematic history as one of the great American classic films. But with his adaptation of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s Bedazzled of 1967 (directed by Stanley Donen), he has bitten off more than he can chew. Together with Larry Gelbart…
Requiem for a Dream, directed by Darren Aronofsky (Pi) from a script he wrote with Hubert Selby, Jr. (Last Exit to Brooklyn) and based on the latter’s novel, has a promising beginning. We see Harry Goldfarb (Jared Leto) stealing his own mother’s television set in order to pawn it for drug money. His mother, Sara…
Nearly three hours long and slow to get started, Yi Yi, (“A one and a two. . .”), a Taiwanese domestic epic by the writer-director Edward Yang, is nevertheless worth waiting out. By the end, it does what only the best movies do, which is to make us care so much about its characters that…
The iron rule in Hollywood is that if you’ve got a hit, you’ve got to have a sequel. But what happens when the hit depends, as last year’s Blair Witch Project did, on a necessarily temporary illusion of reality? Fool me once and I’ll give you a good review; fool me twice and I’m an…
Pay it Forward by Mimi Leder is meant to be another in what I take to be a new series of heart-tugging, inspirational tales like Music of the Heart or American Beauty (which also starred Kevin Spacey) that derive their oomph from the assumption that life in America is pretty grim and miserable but that…
