Gladiator, directed by Ridley Scott, is the Saving Private Ryan of the second century. Its opening battle sequence is as electrifying in its way as that of Spielberg’s film, which may have influenced this one, particularly as Gladiator comes from Spielberg’s DreamWorks. It is also a handy demonstration of the foundation of Roman hegemony under…
The Girl on the Bridge (La Fille sur le Pont), written by Serge Frydman and directed by Patrice Leconte, I take to be a sort of parable or allegory of married love. In order to accentuate its rather spooky and tangential relation to reality, it is shot in black and white and makes use of…
In the New York Times‘s review of East-West, a Franco-Russian production directed by Régis Wargnier, A.O. Scott noted that, on its release in France last year, the film had been criticized for “its supposed anti-Communism” but that, it seemed to him, “its politics are fairly restrained.” How typical of the New York Times to assume…
The Girl on the Bridge (La Fille sur le Pont), written by Serge Frydman and directed by Patrice Leconte, I take to be a sort of parable or allegory of married love. In order to accentuate its rather spooky and tangential relation to reality, it is shot in black and white and makes use of…
Small Time Crooks has, like all Woody Allen’s films some excellent jokes. The best of them, however, are stupid-jokes (very popular in Hollywood lately) which, it always seems to me, is the comedic equivalent of dynamiting fish. It used to be drunks, now it’s idiots. Woody Allen himself plays Ray Winkler, a petty thief whose…
Bossa Nova, an adaptation of a story by Sérgio Sant’Anna (“A Senhorita Simpson”) by the Brazilian director Bruno Barreto, seems to have been conceived as a vehicle for the latter’s wife, the former Mrs. Steven Spielberg, Amy Irving. She plays Mary Anne, an American widow living in Rio and teaching English to upwardly mobile Cariocas,…
M:I-2, directed by John Woo and written by Robert Towne, is like the original Mission Impossible (1996) in being a postmodern-style romance of technology. The earlier film, which was directed by Brian de Palma, did for the deus ex machina what Shakespeare did for the Aristotelian unities, which is to say that it blew the…
In the New York Times‘s review of East-West, a Franco-Russian production directed by Régis Wargnier, A.O. Scott noted that, on its release in France last year, the film had been criticized for “its supposed anti-Communism” but that, it seemed to him, “its politics are fairly restrained.” How typical of the New York Times to assume…
Shanghai Noon, directed by Tom Dey from a script by Miles Millar and Alfred Gough, is a spoof- Western in the manner of Blazing Saddles but with two main differences from Mel Brooks’s classic. One is that it is 26 years further away from the sort of conventions of the genre that Blazing Saddles was…
Passion of Mind is the first film in English of Alain Berliner, the director of the charmingly disturbing or, disturbingly charming, Belgian film Ma Vie en Rose. Perhaps it was decided that for his American debut he needed to find his audience with the help of a star of the stature of Demi Moore. Similar…
I wouldn’t want it to be thought that I was piling on. Anyone who might otherwise have been tempted to see Battlefield Earth will need no discouragement from me to make him think better of the idea. I don’t know if I would go quite so far as the critic who called it “the worst…
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…
