The idea of a ghost who comes back from the dead to haunt his murderer is probably as old as murder itself and is familiar to us from the famous scene in Macbeth where Banquo’s ghost appears at the feast. But the idea of a ghost who appears not as a decorous classical shade, a…
The title of the latest movie to come out of the Evil Empire is Disney’s “The Kid”, possibly because the filmmakers were afraid that people might confuse it with the Charlie Chaplin classic of 1921—though more likely because Disney’s appalling hubris just can’t bear not to have its loathsome name on everything it produces. The…
All by itself, X-men seems to have turned around Hollywood’s summer, earning $57.5 million in its opening weekend (more than any other July film, ever) and making a lacklustre box office into something not far short of boffo. As to an adult sensibility (but who has one of those anymore?) this techno-fantasy may look all…
The Perfect Storm, though exciting as spectacle is disappointing as drama. Its director, Wolfgang Petersen here favors rather the style of Air Force One, his best known film, than Das Boot, his second best-known. Perhaps it was only the relatively small budget of the latter film which forced him to pay the attention he does…
I tried very hard to like Loser, the latest from Amy Heckerling of Clueless fame. And, indeed, there is much to like about it. Its hero, Paul Tannek (Jason Biggs) is a poor but likeable guy from a poor but likeable rural family who goes to college in the big city (a thinly disguised New…
It used to be said of anything that sounded overwrought and over-writerly that it “smelled of the lamp” — because the author was supposed to have had to stay up late to think of all the labored and artificial expressions he uses. Trixie, directed and co-written (with John Binder) by Alan Rudolph doesn’t just smell…
It is only to be expected that Mel Gibson takes on and defeats the entire British army, virtually single-handedly, in The Patriot, but you would have thought that at least the film would have had something to say about what, from the point of view of the historian, the Revolutionary War was actually fought about….
Sunshine, directed and co-written by the Hungarian Istvan Szabo but with an entirely English-speaking cast, is a superbly well-crafted film that manages, unlike so many of its elephantine brethren these days, to keep our attention riveted throughout its three-hour length. For what it is, it could hardly be better, but what-it-is is family- saga soap…
There would hardly be any reason to notice Me, Myself and Irene, the latest in the series of gross-out comedies from Peter and Bobby Farrelly that includes Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary, if it did not provide yet another example of the way in which vulgar Freudianism has become the religion…
It is with some reluctance that I add my voice to the chorus of praise that has greeted Chicken Run, the latest from Nick Park’s and Peter Lord’s Aardman animation shop (now operating under the aegis of DreamWorks). It would have been more satisfying to think of this film as I had grown used to…
Jesus’ Son [sic] adapted from a stories by Denis Johnson and directed by Alison Maclean represents a revivification of a kind of pretentiousness that had its heyday in the 1960s and was associated with that era’s conceit that hippies, drug-users and drop-outs of all descriptions were a higher order of spiritual being—more like Jesus himself,…
Kenneth Branagh’s new film of Love’s Labour’s Lost has very little to do with the play of the same name by William Shakespeare. Branagh’s marketability (such as it is) has always been pretty closely tied to that of the 16th century playwright, but here he is shamelessly using the Shakespeare brand name simply in order…
