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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
There are two transcendent moments in the Autumn Tale, the fourth and perhaps best of Eric Rohmer’s magisterial “Tales of the Four Seasons.” The first is when we suddenly realize that the simple story of two women, married Isabelle (Marie Rivière) and her divorced friend Magali (Béatrice Romand), whom she is trying to fix up…
Besieged, like so many other films by its director, Bernardo Bertolucci, is dramatically simple and visually complex. More than any other director working today, Bertolucci is a story-teller in pictures, which makes for striking and memorable images that are forever bursting out of their contexts and becoming saucily incoherent, at least in any kind of…
I confess. When I was a callow youth—even, let it be said, a moony adolescent, I occasionally had fantasies like that which lies behind and beneath Notting Hill. I guess I always knew that neither Sophia Loren nor Elizabeth Taylor could ever be mine—not because they were superstars or married to other people but because…
There are two perfect, transcendent moments in the Tale of Autumn, or Conte d’Automne, which is the fourth and perhaps the best of Eric Rohmer’s magisterial series, “Tales of the Four Seasons.” The first of these is when we suddenly realize that the simple story of two women, married Isabelle (Marie Rivière) and her divorced…
Readers will divide in their reactions to the very funny Australian film, The Castle, directed by Rob Sitch, according as they are disposed to see its presentation of the Australian equivalent of trailer-trash as patronizing or not. As I have rather a high tolerance for ridicule—of others if not of myself—I am inclined to find…
