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…
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…
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…
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…
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 Other Sister, directed by Garry Marshall, tells the story of Carla Tate (Juliette Lewis), a young woman of 22 or 23 who, because she is mentally retarded, has spent most of her life in a “special school” and is now coming home, as the picture begins, to live with her well-to-do family in San…
8mm, directed by Joel Schumacher stars Nicholas Cage as Tom Wells, a private investigator engaged by an elderly widow to find out the truth about an 8mm film she has found among her late husband’s effects. On the film there appears to be recorded the violent death of a young girl, murdered before our eyes…
The Harmonists, directed by Joseph Vilsmaier, is the “based-on-a-true story” story of The Comedian Harmonists, an immensely popular singing group in pre-war Germany that eventually had to break up, as three of its six members were Jewish. Like nearly every other film set in its time and place, this one is ultimately sucked into the…
Payback is directed by Brian Helgeland, who was one of the writers involved in L.A. Confidential, and, like that film, this one is an exercise in ersatz film noir. It is not exactly a remake of John Boorman’s Point Blank of 1967, but both are based on the same novel, The Hunter, which was written…
God Said, “Ha!” written, directed and performed by Julia Sweeney, formerly the androgynous “Pat” on “Saturday Night Live,” is a one-woman show consisting of the author’s personal account of a difficult year in her life when her younger brother was dying of lymphatic cancer, she herself was being treated for cervical cancer, she was out…
Analyze This, directed by Harold Ramis (Groundhog Day), stars Robert DeNiro as Paul Vitti, a notorious New York mobster who suddenly finds he’s having panic attacks. He thinks they’re heart attacks. When the doctor tells him that they are in fact psychosomatic, he is incredulous: “Do I look like a guy who panics?” The doctor…
The Winners, a documentary by Paul Cohen, tells the story of four former winners and one third place finisher in the Queen Elizabeth Competition for violinists and pianists in Belgium and what has happened to them since. It is an absorbing but disorganized film that doesn’t quite know what it wants to say, though it…
