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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The Way of the Gun, a movie written and directed for critics by Christopher McQuarrie — who won an Oscar for the screenplay of that other critics’ movie, The Usual Suspects — begins and ends with a voiceover narration by one of the two stars, Ryan Phillippe, purporting to debunk the idea of a natural…
Aiming for the Like Water for Chocolate niche in the market, Woman on Top is advertised as a movie about sex and cooking — which at least must be said to beat sex and shopping. Insofar as it is actually about anything, however, it is more about magic. And not very interesting magic. The magic,…
Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, directed by Mark Jonathan Harris and narrated by Dame Judi Dench, manages the trick (as not all Holocaust documentaries do) of conveying strong emotion on the part of its subjects without ever seeming to exploit it or them. It tells the story of the 10,000 Jewish…
The comic insight at the heart of Jay Roach’s Meet the Parents lies in establishing the nexus between humorlessness, paranoia and sentimentality in Robert De Niro’s portrayal of every bachelor’s nightmare of the father of his intended. The late Adolf Hitler, I believe, had the same three qualities, though this is not a comparison in…
Maybe I’m getting too old to take a continual exposure to our morally radioactive popular culture. The experience of watching Whipped, written and directed by Peter M. Cohen, produced on me the same effect that the sight of Poor Tom o’Bedlam had on the Earl of Gloucester in King Lear: “I’th’ last night’s storm I…
Remember the Titans, directed by Boaz Yakin and written by Gregory Allen Howard, is another in the seemingly endless parade of Hollywood’s self-congratulatory retellings of the civil rights story of the 1960s. Combining it with a classic (not to say clichéic) football story about a high school team’s undefeated season makes the pill of sanctimoniousness…
