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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
The best thing about Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, written and directed by the Englishman, Guy Ritchie, is the plot. Long before Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction revolutionized the noir style of thriller and brought back the gangster movie in a new form, a tightly constructed, intricate plot was one of the…
The old stories are always the best. When I saw the trailer for She’s All That, directed by Robert Iscove, I thought: here was a kiddies’ movie that, unlike the dreadful but depressingly popular Varsity Blues, I might not find it quite unbearable to sit through. First, it was a retelling of the Pygmalion story,…
Still Crazy, directed by Brian Gibson from a script by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, also the writers of The Commitments, does about as good a job as it is possible to do with such predictable material as the reunion twenty years later of an aging 70s pop group. The recent Velvet Goldmine dealt…
In The Theory of Flight, Helena Bonham Carter may have contracted Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, better known to Americans as Lou Gehrig’s disease, but her real-life beau, Kenneth Branagh, seems to have contracted an even worse case of Robin Williams’s disease. Both KB and RW are young men who labor under the burden of more blessings…
Varsity Blues, directed by Brian (Good Burger) Robbins, is yet another in the seemingly endless procession of dumb Hollywood movies designed to attack the masculine virtues and what used to be thought of as the laudable American quality of the will to win. Like Affliction and The Thin Red Line in recent weeks, it seems to…
Here is the story of Message in a Bottle, directed by Luis Madoki. A desperately sad widower and boat-builder, the strikingly handsome Garret Blake (Kevin Costner), puts letters to his dead wife in bottles and throws the bottles into the sea. They are found by a beautiful young, unattached single mother called Theresa (Robin Wright…
