Tea With Mussolini is, like so many other works by its director and co- writer (with John Mortimer) Franco Zeffirelli, for movie-goers with rather more of a sweet-tooth than I generally find I have. Adapted from Zeffirelli’s autobiography, it tells the story of a small Italian boy called Luca (played as a child by Charlie…
Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl, directed by Joan Chen stars the beautiful young actress Lu Lu as the title character, a girl living with her happy family in Chengdu during the Chinese Cultural Revolution who is ordered, along with eight million other teenagers from the cities during the years 1966-76, to “go down” into…
Well, here goes. The following, I know, is an invitation to hate-mail, but I have to say that Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace, written and directed by George Lucas, demonstrates a remarkable paucity of imagination. The thought first came to me in the scene where Senator Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) explains to Queen Amidala…
David Mamet’s remake of The Winslow Boy — which was first adapted for the screen from Terence Rattigan’s play by Anthony Asquith in 1948 — gets my universally-coveted double stars not so much because it is a wonderful movie as because it is a wonderful event — a poke in the eye to the Zeitgeist…
The same trick which made Open Your Eyes a rather clever movie is also tried, in a somewhat cruder form, in The Thirteenth Floor, directed by Josef Rusnak. Unfortunately, in both cases the critic must refrain from revealing the trick, lest he spoil your enjoyment, though without revealing it the critic is almost completely unable…
Twice Upon a Yesterday, whose British title was The Man With Rain in His Shoes, was directed by Maria Ripoll as a pretty transparent imitation of Sliding Doors but without very much of that film’s wit or stylishness. I have nothing in principle against this kind of metaphysical fable and think of its great exemplar,…
The best moment in the new movie-version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Michael Hoffman, comes as Bottom (Kevin Kline) in the form of an ass is transported to the bower of Titania, the Fairy Queen (Michelle Pfeiffer), who has fallen in love with him (as the Shakespeareans among you will remember) because of…
I hope it will not sound too relativistic of me to say that each age has its own moral needs. In the late Victorian era people needed to hear—though not nearly so much as they might have needed to hear a few years earlier or later—that mercy and forgiveness and forbearance to sinners was holy…
Election was directed and co-written by Alexander Payne, the promising young director of Citizen Ruth. Once again, he shows that he has real talent in this often hilarious tale of life at George Washington Carver High in Omaha. Like that other recent success, Rushmore, the film looks at high school as something of a metaphor…
Well, here goes. The following, I know, is an invitation to hate-mail, but I have to say that Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace, written and directed by George Lucas, demonstrates a remarkable paucity of imagination. The thought first came to me in the scene where Senator Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) explains to Queen Amidala…
Twice Upon a Yesterday, whose British title was The Man With Rain in His Shoes, was directed by Maria Ripoll as a pretty transparent imitation of Sliding Doors but without very much of that film’s wit or stylishness. I have nothing in principle against this kind of metaphysical fable and think of its great exemplar,…
Like A Merry War, the adaptation of George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying that came out last year, Metroland, directed by Philip Saville and adapted by Adrian Hodge from the novel by Julian Barnes, in the end boils down to a pretty banal discovery of the obvious. For some reason, perhaps the historical accident of…
