Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, directed by Jim Jarmusch, is quirky, witty, fun, intelligent, without ever quite being a great movie. It lacks the urgency of great films, films that create their own forms by the power of what they have to say. Jarmusch is really as interested in his little post-modernist bag…
One must naturally applaud the highly moral purpose of a movie like Boiler Room, written and directed by Ben Younger. Out of appreciation for it, one can almost ignore the rap music and the suffocating hipness and, with them, the suspicion that like its model, Wall Street, the film really glorifies what it ostensibly disapproves…
Judy Berlin by Eric Mendelsohn is chiefly worth seeing for the performance of Edie Falco (Carmela Soprano on the HBO’s series about New Jersey gangsters) in the title role, and for its affectionate portrait of suburban Long Island, though nothing much happens in it. Also notable is the performance of the late Madeline Kahn in…
Movies about novelists can be even more deadly boring and narcissistic than novels about novelists. Wonder Boys, directed by Curtis Hanson from an adaptation by Steve Kloves of Michael Chabon’s novel, is a case in point. Not only is the movie far too taken up with writers and writerliness, it is a movie made according…
Not of this World by Giuseppe Piccioni is, like Erick Zonca’s The Dreamlife of Angels, a life-changing movie, a movie that I would have thought it impossible to watch unmoved, impossible to forget once seen, but for the fact that the New York Times‘s critic called it a “loamy soap opera” and “a melodrama of…
Michael Sragow, writing in salon.com, says that Søren Kragh-Jacobsen’s lovely little film, Mifune, “outlines the emptiness of upward mobility in an age of unapologetic capitalism.” It is one of those observations that tell you far more about the critic than they do about the film, which is not at all about “capitalism,” unapologetic or otherwise,…
Not One Less, directed by Zhang Yimou (Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern etc) is a propaganda film, a sad come-down for a very talented guy, I think—though its portrait of life among some of the poorest villages of China today is brilliantly rendered and memorably affecting. Here, too, is truth, and this is not…
What Planet Are You From? is a charming progressive fable about the female domestication of wild masculinity that will appeal on different levels to those, like its director Mike Nichols, who wish that it might be so and to those who fear that it is so. For everybody else, there is the pleasure of the…
Beautiful People, written and directed by Jasmin Dizdar, is what we might call a Rodney King movie—a relatively harmless, feel-good concoction of a familiar kind which asks, rhetorically, “Why can’t we all just get along?” Of course, neither Jasmin Dizdar nor Rodney King is interested in any answer there may be to their question. Instead,…
The Beach by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting) is obviously le dernier cri in hip, but it is a mess of a movie—sort of Lord of the Flies meets Blue Lagoon. In short, it doesn’t know where it’s going. On the one hand it very much likes the idea of the hippie colony on an almost inaccessible…
Eye of the Beholder, written and directed by Stephan Elliott from a novel by Marc Behm is routine post-modern noir—which is to say that it has no interest in the kind of tight plotting or carefully built up motivation that characterized traditional film noir. Presumably the media sophisticates who patronize movies these days don’t care…
It is fascinating how, although Hollywood has implicitly believed in every crackpot conspiracy theory for decades and has been willing to attribute to the democratically elected government of the United States any and all perfidies, it retains a sentimental attachment to the idea of the presidency. The image of the good king dies hard in…
