Pushing Tin, directed by Mike Newell, is a reminder that our popular culture wants it both ways. On the one hand it thrives, as entertainment has always done, on the competition of macho men to see who is stronger, smarter, quicker or more dexterous. On the other hand it feels constrained to deplore such competition…
Goodbye Lover, directed by Roland Joffé, is yet another inadequate attempt by Hollywood to recapture the look and feel, if not the spirit, of 1940s vintage films noirs. But as I noted in my review of L.A. Confidential, of which this is surely a stable-mate, the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. It has…
Lovers of the Arctic Circle is a handsomely constructed fable of love and destiny, written and directed by Julio Medem. Those with a taste for magic realism or the sunny po-mo fables of Jaco Van Dormael (Toto the Hero, The Eighth Day) may well enjoy it, though to my taste its weird Spanish romanticism and…
The latest from David Cronenberg, eXistenZ, has a certain unexpected wit to it. Set in an unspecified future, it tells the story (or should we say seems to tell the story?) of the world’s greatest computer-game developer, called Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Her newest and greatest game, eXistenZ, involves putting the players into a…
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…
I think I shall have to develop a shorthand designation for pictures like A Walk on the Moon, directed by Tony Goldwyn. We may call them tales of the Spiritual Adulterer. These started coming out in the mid- to late-1960s and have continued in uninterrupted spate since then. Their purpose is to sell us on…
The Corruptor, directed by James Foley, is a routine shoot-’em-up that briefly aspires to something higher. Chinese supercop Nick Chen (Chow Yun Fat), drawn by the lure of money and easy sex into the underworld of Chinatown, New York, is receiving bribes and kickbacks from a Mr Big of the Chinese rackets, Henry Lee (Ric…
You can see why the novel The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacqueline Mitchard made such a hit as the first selection of the Oprah book club and why its film version, directed by Ulu Grosbard from a script by Stephen Schiff, will doubtless be the chick flick of the season. There’s a child…
Ravenous, written by Ted Griffin and directed by Antonia Bird, is one of the weirdest movies I’ve seen in a long time. I even found myself rather enjoying it for the amusingly original way it has of making its highly dubious point. This is, as I understand it, the presentation of an essentially feminist view…
How on earth did Ron Howard hope to succeed where Peter Weir failed? Hubris, I suppose. Ron Howard’s done a guest shot on “The Simpsons” (along with those other giants of the silver screen, Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger) and Peter Weir hasn’t. But for those of us not giddy with success, however, the idea…
Hélas! The good-humored detachment and optimism that François Truffaut brought to the French cinema seems to have died with him. Barring the rare exception, like last year’s Un Air de Famille by Cédric Klappisch, each new French film that manages to get itself released in this country seems to try to outdo the last in…
Near the end of The Mod Squad one of the three drop-dead hip teen cops, Pete Cochran (Giovanni Ribisi), says to another, Julie Barnes (Claire Danes): “Dirty cops, drops at the airport: I feel like one of us should say, ‘We’re getting too old for this s***’.” Julie replies: “At least it’s not going down…
