The Thin Red Line, adapted from James Jones’s novel of Guadalcanal by the “legendary” Terrence Malick, director of Badlands and Days of Heaven, represents an “historic” return to movies for its director after a 20 year layoff. It is a mess — a classic case of what happens when you work on something for too…
Blast from the Past, directed by Hugh Wilson, is a charming, funny, well-crafted and even touching comedy that deserves the large audience I expect it will attract. This is the more remarkable as it is the fourth time (at least) that Brendan Fraser has made this same movie. First he was Encino Man, a prehistoric…
The 24 Hour Woman by Nancy Savoca stars Rosie Perez as Grace, the producer of a local daytime show TV show in New York called “The 24 Hour Woman.” The movie begins with Grace’s discovery that she is pregnant. Grace, her husband, Eddie (Diego Serrano), one of the on-air stars of the show and their…
20 Dates by Myles Berkowitz is a charming little pseudo-documentary about what happened when the author, an impecunious independent filmmaker, unexpectedly got $60,000 to produce a film “combining my two biggest failures, my personal life and my professional life.” His gimmick is to be his own star and to go out on 20 dates, recording…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
Affliction, based on a novel by Russell Banks, is written and directed by Paul Schrader, and, like so many other Hollywood products these days, it asks us to believe that traditional ideas of masculinity are psychically and socially destructive. Though it is well-written, well-acted and well-photographed, the movie really has nothing else to say to…
I tried very hard to like A Simple Plan, written by Scott B.Smith and directed by Sam (Evil Dead) Raimi, but I was only partly successful. The movie seems to have been heavily influenced by Fargo, right down to the vast and snowy prairie landscapes and the unexpectedly satisfying moralism of the ending, and, insofar…
