Brian De Palma is a talented director, but he really needs to get himself some better writers. Mission to Mars is full of clever ideas, which are too rare in the movies, and spectacular, computer-generated special effects, which are not nearly rare enough, but much of the dialogue is cornball stuff that could have come…
The Skulls is a movie about a secret, all-male society at Yale which hardly even attempts to disguise the fact that it is based on Skull and Bones, an élite group whose membership is said to include both the George Bushes. So, too, “The Skulls” in the movie go around saying to each other “a…
Romeo Must Die, directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak, is a movie for martial arts enthusiasts featuring the grim and scary-looking Jet Li, allowed to play the good guy for once, as Han, a one-man enforcer of peace on rival gangs in Oakland, California. It is also a variant of the Romeo and Juliet story, as Han…
There is a certain kind of modern novel that is not really a novel at all but a series of ruminations on life, the universe and everything by a narrator who is a would-be philosopher and thinly disguised stand-in for the author. The master of this sort of ruminative fiction is Richard Ford, whose novels,…
Maybe Ali McGraw couldn’t have managed it, but one would have liked to see the beautiful and talented Leelee Sobieski given a chance to move an audience without having to die. Alas, it was not to be. Here On Earth, written by Michael Seitzman and directed by Mark Piznarski, is a remake of Love Story…
Roman Polanski always makes you want to watch what he is doing on the screen, but The Ninth Gate shows that he is hopeless when it comes to story-telling. This story is a mess, even if you allow for the fact that it is all about Satanism and witchcraft and conjuring up the devil and…
It’s sad to see a talented filmmaker like Steven Soderbergh descend to the quasi-propaganda and pure schlock of Erin Brockovich. Julia Roberts plays the eponymous Erin, a nasty, unpleasant foul-mouthed harridan meant to be both attractive and admirable to us because, I guess, she is Julia Roberts and doing feisty. Be feisty, Julia. And Julia…
Professional wrestling is truly postmodernism in sport, which makes it surprising to me that there have not been more documentaries like Beyond the Mat, directed by Barry Blaustein. This movie, though it is rather badly organized and tries to do too much, contains some marvelous, even unforgettable footage of what life is like behind the…
East is East by Damien O’Donnell, from a script by Ayub Khan-Din, is worth seeing because of its wry look at the culture clash between East and West in a working class area of Leeds, West Yorkshire, in the early 1970s, and for the terrific performance of Om Puri in the role of the Pakistani…
Whatever It Takes, directed by David Raynr and written by Mark Schwahn is yet another in the seemingly endless stream of movies which attempt to translate classic literature into American High School stories. This fad began in 1995 with what is still the best of its kind, Amy Heckerling’s adaptation of Emma, by Jane Austen,…
American Psycho is as a movie as it was as a book, not a serious work of art but merely something designed to be talked about in the media and thus to confer money and celebrity upon its now plural authors. This is important, because not all books or movies that are talked about in…
