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…
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…
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 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…
Hilary and Jackie, directed by Anand Tucker from a screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce and based on the memoir A Genius In the Family by Hilary and Piers du Pré is a guilty pleasure. It is a pleasure because it is marvelously written, acted and directed, but it is a guilty one because a lot…
The Hi Lo Country, based on a novel by Max Evans published in 1961, has a weird period flavor to it even though, as directed by Stephen Frears, it is also very much of the nineties. You can see in it elements of Hemingway’s austere sensualism and bedrock conviction that literary art mainly consists of…
Children of Heaven by the Iranian director, Majid Majidi is a little gem of a film of the sort which the Iranians seem to be good at, though it is a very little gem. When nine year old Ali Mandegar (Mir Farrokh Hashemian) takes the only pair of shoes belonging to his younger sister, Zahra (Bahare…
A Civil Action, directed by Steven Zaillian, is not, as I expected it to be, another of those God-awful Grisham things about noble, crusading trial lawyers getting the better of evil, corrupt insurance companies. In real life, it is usually the trial lawyers who are the bad guys and the insurance companies their victims, but…
My Name is Joe, written by Paul Laverty (in Glaswegian with English subtitles) and directed by Ken Loach, stars Peter Mullan as the title character, an unemployed laborer (a surprisingly unobtrusive reminder of Loach’s usual left wing themes) and recovering alcoholic who is introduced to us at an AA meeting. He is now ashamed that,…
Peeping Tom by Michael Powell first appeared in this country in 1960, and it is often compared with Psycho, the work of another British-born filmmaker from the same year. But where Psycho was widely regarded as its auteur’s masterpiece, Peeping Tom got such a critical slating that it all but ended Powell’s career prematurely. Nowadays…
Central Station, a Brazilian film directed by Walter Salles, stars the marvelous Fernanda Montenegro as Dora (real name, Isadora Teixera) a retired schoolteacher who makes her living by writing letters for illiterates who stream through the main train station in Rio de Janeiro. Many of the letters she simply throws away, knowing that the hopeless…
Rushmore, directed by Wes Anderson is a wonderfully strange movie whose strangeness is what makes it worth seeing. Its main character is Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), a precocious 15-year old student at a posh prep-school called Rushmore Academy. He is there on scholarship as his father, wonderfully played by Seymour Cassel is a barber who…
