Bait, written by a committee (Andrew Scheinman, Adam Scheinman and Tony Gilroy) and directed by Antoine Fuqua, almost rises to the level of a decent movie, but of course it cannot resist (as what contemporary Hollywood movie can resist?) the temptation to over-egg the pudding. The central character is an appealing ne’er-do-well and petty thief…
At a certain age, almost everyone is inclined to see his mother as a suffering saint and his father as a bully and a tyrant. It is a part of the process of growing up and corresponds with a youth’s period of greatest need to declare independence him- or herself from the paternal tie. It…
There is a certain wit to Valerie Breiman’s Love and Sex that makes it something more than a complete waste of an evening. As Dr. Johnson said of the Giant’s Causeway, it is worth seeing but not worth going to see. Could he have been looking forward to the age of videotape? The story makes…
Dr. T. and the Women is a typical Robert Altman film in being sprawling and incoherent and full of more or less purposeless and unresolved activity, but also typical in showing flashes of brilliance. Nor does it surprise that Altman is going in for a lot of sentimentalizing about women these days, since it gives…
Almost Famous begins in 1969 with a literary discussion about Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird between a precocious eleven year-old, William Miller (Michael Angarano), and his widowed mother, Elaine (Frances McDormand). A college professor in San Diego, Elaine has obviously invested a great deal of hope in her son, whom she intends to be…
BURR, HAMILTON AND JEFFERSON: A STUDY IN CHARACTER by Roger G. Kennedy Oxford U.P., 476 pp, $30 0 19 513055 3 REVIEWED BY JAMES BOWMAN Roger G. Kennedy’s book is subtitled “A Study in Character,” but it is also a study in historical reputation. Kennedy’s aim is to shock received opinion by rehabilitating Aaron…
At one point in Space Cowboys, William “Hawk” Hawkins (Tommy Lee Jones) says to Frank Corvin (Clint Eastwood): “Old Age just brings out more of the Frank in you, Frank” The same could be said of Eastwood himself. Like pretty much all of the films he has been unwise enough to try directing, this one…
So now I guess it’s official. After Analyze This, Mickey Blue Eyes, The Sopranos and other recent fictional treatments of the Mafia, along comes Michael Dinner’s The Crew to confirm that, so far from being the frightening organized crime syndicate we used to think it was, the mob is now to be considered as just…
The Opportunists by Myles Connell is a pleasant surprise. To some extent, it represents a throwback to the good old days in Hollywood when even the most hard-boiled gangster movies, or movies later taken to have glorified the criminal life, could be relied upon to portray a moral world characterized by inflexible certainty about what…
Bring It On, directed by Peyton Reed, offers the movie connoisseur plenty of shots of high school girls in their underwear and some terrific choreography of synchronized cheering routines which seem to have little if anything to do with cheerleading in the traditional sense but which are apparently true to life. If so, they are…
They don’t come much more charming than Shower, a Chinese film by Zhang Yang with a delicacy and a poignancy in its humor that is almost French. Its theme is a compelling one too, depicting in comic yet poignant form the clash between the new economy in post- Mao, post-Deng China and the old ways…
The Tao of Steve by Jenniphr Goodman is a likeable little slacker film set in (or near) Santa Fe, but a little too top-heavy with talk — in particular philosophical talk — as many indy first films by would-be intellectuals tend to be. We mustn’t be too hard on them. And the idea is a…
