Felicia’s Journey ought to have all the ingredients of a terrific movie. The novel by William Trevor on which it is based is first rate, a haunting study of the banality of evil that sticks in the mind long after it is read. The director, Atom Egoyan, did a fine job with Russell Banks’s The…
The puzzling thing about Steven Soderbergh’s new film, The Limey, is the very thing he puts to the fore in it, namely the national origin of its central character. What has that got to do with the basic story of an ex-con who’s “not from around here” pursuing the man he believes to be his…
Music of the Heart is certainly heartwarming, though you may be inclined to object, as I do, to having your heart warmed by an emotional blast-furnace. The first non-horror flick by its director, Wes Craven, the film is, not surprisingly, altogether too fond of the cheap emotional effect and is constantly taking the easy routes…
The best line in Random Hearts, adapted from the novel by Warren Adler by Kurt Luedtke and directed by Sydney Pollack, comes when the frail-looking but impossibly beautiful novice congresswoman, Kay Chandler (Kristin Scott-Thomas) tries to get tough with the tough old cop, “Dutch” Van Den Broeck (Harrison Ford), from the District of Columbia Police…
Martin Scorsese’s new movie, Bringing Out the Dead is yet further evidence of its director’s fascination with the manic personality as well as his undoubted skill with the camera. Unfortunately, those of us who do not share this fascination are likely to find one manic personality looking rather too much like another, and the would-be…
The Story of Us by Rob Reiner attempts to do for marital difficulty what his earlier film, When Harry Met Sally does for marital concord. Once again he uses the quasi- documentary technique, which is all mixed up with flashbacks of the history of a particular relationship. But you can’t help noticing that there is…
Based on real people and real events which took place in 1994, The Straight Story, directed by David Lynch and written by John Roach and Mary Sweeney, is bad in the way that the old Disney movies were bad instead of being bad in the way that the new Disney movies are bad — which…
Happy, Texas, directed by Mark Illsley, is an intermittently funny tale of two escaped convicts who steal a recreational vehicle and find themselves forced to maintain their cover by impersonating a couple of gay organizers of little-girl beauty pageants. Jeremy Northam, an excellent British actor with a very good American accent, and Steve Zahn are…
Like Felicia’s Journey, Patricia Rozema’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is a film whose other virtues—in particular, the visual evocation of Regency England and the excellence of the performances of Frances O’Connor as the heroine, Fanny Price, Alessandro Nivola and Embeth Davidtz as the charming brother and sister, Henry and Mary Crawford, and Jonny…
Being John Malkovich, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze is a hilariously funny movie which also has some interesting things to say about art and artistry and love and sex and would probably even have interesting things to say about celebrity, too, if it were still possible to say anything interesting on…
A couple of months ago I picked Stigmata the front-runner in the Worst-Movie-of-the Year Stakes, but Kevin Smith’s disastrously awful Dogma has now blown by it in the stretch and is cantering towards the finish several lengths ahead of the field. Since his promising debut with Clerks (1994), Smith has been going steadily downhill in…
Body Shots, directed by Michael Cristofer and written by David McKenna, is really two movies in one, pulling in opposite directions—a fact which, whether it is intended as a kind of post-modern experiment or simply the result of incompetence, is fatal to its success. The first movie is a sort of latter-day comedy of manners,…
