Follow your bliss, middle-aged America! Quit your job, speak your mind, buy that muscle car you’ve always wanted. Start smoking pot again. Buff up and start an affair with a teenage girl. You may die for it, but you will die happy. Where have we heard this before? Periodically, the popular culture becomes receptive to…
Lucie Aubrac by Claude Berri (the great director of Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring), is another illustration of the use of cliché in great movie-making. Based on the true life events recorded in the memoir, Ils partiront dans l’ivresse by Lucie Aubrac herself, this film hits us over the head with its…
Mystery, Alaska, directed by Jay Roach, aspires to be the Rocky of hockey. A small-town hockey team from Alaska (surely they must mean Canada?) takes on the mighty New York Rangers on the neighborhood ice and, against all expectations, goes the distance with them. If you get a lump in your throat when Rocky staggers…
Double Jeopardy, directed by Bruce Beresford, is the latest example of what is coming to be one of Hollywood’s favorite new genres: the female paranoia movie. Like The Astronaut’s Wife of a few weeks ago, it deliberately sets out to exploit the sort of insecurity that has become endemic, in some ways the most destructive…
At one point in Best Laid Plans, written by Ted Griffin and directed by Mike Barker, two recent college graduates have an intellectual conversation as they to the Tropico Recycling plant, where Nick (Alessandro Nivola) works, apparently to dispose of the body of a woman Nick killed. This he had done on behalf of his…
The Astronaut’s Wife, by Rand Ravich, is like the Alien movies in being a kind of mythologization of modern female insecurities about sex and childbearing. Commander Spencer Armacost (Johnny Depp) is a mystery from the beginning. Apparently deeply attached to his wife, Jillian (Charlize Theron), to the point of uxoriousness, he is also very much…
So far, the strongest contender for worst movie of the year has got to be Stigmata, written by Tom Lazarus and Rick Ramage and directed by Rupert Wainwright. Not only does it make explicit — and almost unbelievably crass — Hollywood’s characteristically anti-religious bent, but its advocacy of an alternative spirituality is laughably clumsy, a…
Three Kings, written and directed by David O. Russell begins with a quasi- documentary moment. We see, off in the distance, a soldier with a weapon in his hand waving it aloft — we cannot tell whether it is as a gesture of surrender or threat — as Sgt Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg) in full…
Love Stinks is a nasty little film but, it might seem, something of a curiosity among recent Hollywood products in being entirely oriented toward the masculine point of view—or at least what people accustomed to the courtship rituals of late-20th century America will regard as such. For in truth, however revolting the male habit of…
Blue Streak, directed by Les Mayfield, reminded me a little of the extremely disturbing Austrian film, Funny Games, reviewed here last year, in that it leads us up the garden path of cinematic convention, then whirls around and cries: “Only kidding!” Nothing is what we thought it was. But where Michael Haneke, the sadist responsible…
For Love of the Game, starring Kevin Costner as Billy Chapel, an aging pitcher for the Detroit Tigers who hopes to end his career with a perfect game, turns out to be yet another Costnerian marathon of mawkishness and self indulgence. Oddly for a film that is ostensibly about a guy who has to learn…
When The Very Thought of You, directed by Nick Hamm from a screenplay by Peter Morgan, was released in Britain last year, it was called Martha, Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence. The American distributors must have thought that sounded somehow too suggestive, so they gave it one of those nondescript American titles, like Lost and…
