Play It To the Bone, directed by Ron Shelton, is a Woody Harrelson movie in every sense of the term — that is it is full of macho posturing at the same time that it attempts to make a joke (a rather tired joke by now, you might think) about male stupidity. This is how…
Everything that is important in Girl, Interrupted, directed by James Mangold and based on the memoir by Suzanna Kaysen, can be condensed into one comment by the mental institution attendant, Valerie (Whoopi Goldberg) as she attempts to give the reluctant Suzanna (Winona Ryder) a bath. “This place is a f****** fascist torture chamber,” says the…
At the beginning of Anna and the King, directed by Andy Tennant and adapted by Steve Meerson from The English Governess at the Siamese Court by Anna Leonowens (1870), Mrs Leonowens (Jodie Foster), a widow, explains to her young son Louis (Tom Felton) why she has come to Siam as tutor to the son of…
Alan Parker’s film version of Angela’s Ashes points up what was wrong with the best-selling memoir by Frank McCourt on which it is based. I’ll be the first to admit that McCourt’s book was a good read, but what made it one was the wry humor and skillful writing, above all its sensitive ear for…
Anywhere But Here, Wayne Wang’s adaptation to the screen of a novel by Mona Simpson, is a total chick-flick but still worth seeing for the terrific performances of Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman as the mother and daughter whose troubled relationship it is all about. In fact, the greatness of these two performances rather exaggerates…
Flawless, written and directed by Joel Schumacher, is an odd-couple picture featuring Robert DeNiro as a retired policeman and security guard called Walt who suffers a stroke and turns for rehabilitative help to his neighbor, a “female impersonator” (as he prefers to call it) and cross-dresser called Rusty (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Rusty is to teach…
A film critic called upon to review a James Bond movie feels a bit like a restaurant critic who is asked to review McDonald’s. The World is Not Enough, directed by Michael Apted, is like most of its 18 predecessors pure McEntertainment. Anyone who has been to the other Bond films will know exactly what…
Somewhere near the end of The Insider, written by Eric Roth and directed by Michael Mann, we overhear a TV announcer talking about “a fraud perpetrated on the American people”—by which he means the tobacco companies’ concealment from public view of what they know of the harm caused by their product. But the real fraud…
Like its predecessor, Toy Story 2 is a triumph of technology — the relatively new technology of computer animation — if not of moviemaking. In fact, as a kind of technological marvel it is naturally impervious to criticism on any merely airy-fairy, aesthetic grounds. Like the Bond films with which it might otherwise be thought…
Anyone who is still familiar with Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” will find little to recognize in its Tim Burtonification as Sleepy Hollow. Burton has filled this bit of belletrist whimsy from the now almost-unimaginable past with his familiar, not to say trademark devices. All takes place amidst spooky landscapes in grey and black,…
Despite its apocalyptic theme, Last Night by the young Canadian director, Don McKellar, is a shockingly modest—and thus, to my way of thinking anyway, likeable—little film. Set on the human race’s last day, before an unspecified cataclysm puts an end to all life on earth, the film attempts to make no profound political or spiritual…
42 Up, the sixth in Michael Apted’s fascinating series of documentaries about a group of English schoolchildren first introduced to us at the age of seven in 1964, is the best yet. In a way this was predictable, since at 42 the sense of youthful expectation in which anything still seems possible has at last…
