Magnolia, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, is like David O. Russell’s Three Kings in being an impressive display of moviemaking talent without ever quite becoming an impressive movie. In both cases, I think, the problem is that the talented writer-directors are overreaching themselves and trying to do too much. In the case of…
Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown could be said to be a loving, autumnal tribute to the two great passions of its director’s life outside of the cinema, namely, jazz and psychotherapy. True, the movie contains no scenes involving therapy, nor even any reference to it, but its subtext is the fundamental therapeutic assumption of vulgar…
I didn’t bother going to see Fight Club when it came out in October because, having seen Seven and The Game, the earlier films by its director, David Fincher, I thought I knew what to expect: namely, bargain basement nihilism and pseudo-profundities got up into an “edgy” package with “edgy” music and featuring big stars…
In The Hurricane, Norman Jewison is going through the motions. His film takes an ostensibly true story which also conforms to a classic movie situation—a man condemned for a crime he did not commit—and allows our expectations to do all the work. Rubin “Hurricane” Carter (Denzel Washington) was a top middleweight contender in the mid-1960s…
Tumbleweeds, in spite of a superficial similarity to Anywhere But Here and a virtuoso performance by Janet McTeer in the principal role, is a much more propagandistic and (therefore) much less interesting film than the Susan Sarandon/Natalie Portman two-hander. It is true that Ms McTeer, who became an instant celebrity three years ago when she…
Galaxy Quest, directed by Dean Parisot and written by Robert Gordon and David Howard is a hilariously funny spoof of the “Star Trek” mania chronicled in Roger Nygard’s recent documentary, Trekkies. Nygard’s film is as sad as it is funny, since it shows us real people who choose to live in a fantasy world. But…
There is a scene in Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair in which the hero, a novelist called Maurice Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes), and his married lover, Sarah Miles (Julianne Moore), go to a movie based on one of one of Bendrix’s novels. As they sit in the smoke-filled fleapit, we…
As I watched Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, I kept asking myself why this movie was being made. The decrepitude of its subject matter is obvious from its very first scenes when we see the eponymous Mr Ripley (Matt Damon) accompanying a lieder singer at a private recital for…
In Ride With the Devil, the great Taiwanese director Ang Lee shows once again that he has a kind of genius for the old Hollywood trick of adapting second-rank fiction to the big screen. This is not meant to be a put-down. First rank fiction very rarely makes a first rank movie. What to my…
Like David Lynch in The Straight Story, Mike Leigh apparently thought it was time to surprise us with Topsy-Turvy. Instead of his usual dark and sardonic and implicitly political look at present- day Britain, he offers us an ostensibly sunny period-piece about, of all things, the collaboration of W.S. Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) and Sir Arthur…
There’s no question that Shine director Scott Hicks’s Snow Falling on Cedars is well-named. The weather — not only snow but fog and rain and looming clouds over the glorious landscapes of San Pedro Island in coastal Washington state — is undoubtedly the star of the show. Unfortunately, this is because the weather is mainly…
Cradle Will Rock is a huge disappointment—nothing but a vanity project for Tim Robbins, who wrote and directed it. It’s a great shame, not only because Robbins showed that he was capable of something much better in Dead Man Walking a few years ago, but also because it has an all-star cast (including Vanessa Redgrave,…
