U-571 by Jonathan Mostow, who directed and co-wrote it, might have been sub-titled “Indiana Jones Goes Underwater,” so many are the hair- breadth scapes i’th’imminent deadly breach. Once again, Hollywood has refused to learn the lesson that less can be more. For in real life — I mean if you were actually with the handful…
For a few moments near the beginning of Betty Thomas’s 28 Days (written by Susannah Grant) you might almost begin to think that the comic drunk, that staple of 1950s humor who has now almost completely disappeared from the cultural landscape, was making a comeback. Nowadays, of course, we tend to think that laughing at…
As in last year’s Run, Lola, Run, which was actually made later, the German director Tom Tykwer shows in Winter Sleepers his fascination with time and chance, with the momentous consequences of quite trivial causes — and his sense of style. But this film is less laden with cinematic trickery and self-conscious cleverness than Lola…
It pains me to have to criticize William Friedkin’s movie, Rules of Engagement, because it is that rare thing, a pro- military movie out of Hollywood. Moreover, its scenes of combat are well-made and gripping to watch — both those set in Vietnam in 1968, when a younger Terry Childers (Samuel L. Jackson) saved the…
Ready to Rumble, directed by Brian Robbins and written by Steven Brill, might have been called “Dumb and Dumber Go to the Mat.” Its ostensible look behind the scenes at professional wrestling could have followed the trail blazed by the excellent Beyond the Mat, reviewed here last month. Instead the movie settles for repeated attempts…
At the climax of Frequency, directed by Gregory Hoblit from a script by Toby Emmerich., we see both Frank Sullivan (Dennis Quaid) and his grown son, Johnny, a.k.a. the Chief (Jim Caviezel), fighting with the same man (Shawn Doyle), the sort of policeman-cum-serial killer of a sort that only seems to exist in the movies….
Michael Almereyda’s extremely hip film version of Hamlet could have given us a cogent reading of the play, if not necessarily exactly what it deserves. Some important critics, starting from the undoubted fact that Hamlet is a difficult and sometimes nasty character, a royal pain in the Elsinore, have gone on to conclude that the…
Did you know that gossip can be vicious and destructive—especially when false rumors are deliberately planted by idle and amoral youths just to see what happens? No? Then Gossip, directed by Davis Guggenheim and written by Gregory Poirier, is definitely the movie for you. Even if you did know these things but have a glossy-magazine…
Me Myself I, written and directed by Pip Karmel, is a sort of Australian version of Sliding Doors but with little of its prototype’s wit or cleverness. Everybody’s favorite bouncing Aussie lass, Rachel Griffiths (who, like Toni Collette, sprang to international stardom out of Muriel’s Wedding) plays a 30-something journalist in Sydney called Pam Drury….
Early on in Keeping the Faith, Father Brian Finn (Edward Norton) advises his worshiping flock, most of whom appear to be worshiping him, that “faith is different from religion,” and he makes it clear which of the two he prefers. Religion is old, stuffy, rule-bound, while faith is personal—“a feeling, a hunch,” he says. I’m…
Once upon a time, Hollywood’s stock-in-trade was the “wom-jeop” movie, designed to appeal to the chivalrous instincts of the boys and young men for whom it was intended by placing an attractive woman in jeopardy and then supplying a handsome young hero with whom the youths could identify themselves to rescue her. Its post-feminist equivalent…
You can tell that Return to Me, co-written and directed by Bonnie Hunt, who also stars in the best friend role, is a chick flick because the car accident in which the beautiful zoo-keeper, Elizabeth Rueland (Joely Richardson), perishes takes place off-screen while the subsequent prostration with grief of her surviving husband, Bob (David Duchovny),…
