A Bug’s Life, directed by John Lasseter “with co-direction by Andrew Stanton” and the usual array of celebrity voices including Kevin Spacey as the bad guy and Phyllis Diller as the ant-queen, is that by-now familiar Hollywood phenomenon, a movie about movies. The fact prompts the reflection that the American entertainment industry is so big…
Star Trek: Insurrection, directed by Jonathan Frakes, is another black- box movie — which is to say a movie that elevates the deus ex machina into a guiding principle. I know that I risk offending a lot of Trekkies who are used to this kind of thing, but I find it merely boring. Every time…
As Enchanted April showed a few years ago, Italy is the promised land for the cold, sexually-repressed, work- obsessed Englishman or, more likely, Englishwoman. At least it is for the English who imagine themselves as having been kitted out by their climate or their religion or their national character with such a load of what…
The first question to be asked about the shot-by-shot remake of Psycho, directed from Alfred Hitchcock’s original shooting script by Gus Van Sant, is why? What is the point? Couldn’t they just have got Ted Turner to “colorize” the great man’s greatest masterpiece? Why bother to hire a whole new cast and crew to go…
You’ve got to be thinking: isn’t one inspirational, sensitive, meaningful, caring, profound movie starring Robin Williams enough for one year? At least, could we keep it down to twice a year? At present we’re getting them at a clip of one every other month and it does seem a tear too much. It was only…
Hurlyburly directed by Anthony Drazan and written (from his stageplay) by David Rabe has an all-star cast, but it cannot escape from the poverty of its script, in which nothing very much happens (people come and go) and all the characters talk exactly alike—that is in a kind of souped-up psychobabble with an occasionally Pinterian…
The introductory disclaimer to the Dreamworks animated blockbuster, The Prince of Egypt (directed by Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner and Simon Wells) notifies us that the film has taken some “historical license” but that it has been “true to the essence, values and integrity” of the Exodus story. In literal terms this is true, but in…
Like the new Psycho, You’ve Got Mail makes the fundamental mistake of remaking a truly great movie instead of some second-rater that there would be some hope of improving upon. In this case, it’s true, the re-make is not a shot-by-shot imitation, but it was a bad idea to pick a movie with so much…
The most important question to be asked about Stepmom, directed by Chris Columbus, is why on earth Ed Harris was cast as the male lead, Lawyer Luke, who was married to the gorgeous Susan Sarandon and is now about to marry the gorgeous Julia Roberts. It makes no sense. There is no chemistry at all…
Shakespeare in Love, which was directed by John Madden from a screenplay co-written by Tom Stoppard, has all the signs of the high Stoppardian style, including lots of puns and Elizabethan English transplanted to unexpected situations, where it takes on new and usually humorous meanings. And not only Elizabethan words either. At one point we…
Little Voice written and directed by Mark Herman from a stage-play by Jim Cartwright is a wonderful movie with an absolutely knockout performance by the eponymous Little Voice or LV (Jane Horrocks) up until its climax. After that, it simply doesn’t know what to do with the situation it has created and peters out in…
Here is the basic idea of Arlington Road, written by Ehren Kruger and directed by Mark Pellington. A history professor called Michael Faraday (Jeff Bridges), who teaches a course on terrorism, gradually realizes that his new neighbors in the pleasant suburb where he lives are terrorists. If that premiss strains your credulity just a little,…
