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…
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…
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…
Dancing at Lughnasa, written by Frank McGuinness from play by Brian Friel and directed by Pat O’Connor, stars Marvelous Meryl Streep doing a vowel-perfect Irish accent as Kate Mundy, a severe old maid and schoolmistress who is trying to hold together her little family in Ireland in the 1930s. The family consists of her four…
La Vita è Bella or Life is Beautiful was directed and co-written by Roberto Benigni, who stars as Guido Orefice, a Jewish waiter in Arezzo before the war. He woos and wins his wife, Dora (Nicoletta Braschi), whom he calls la principessa — the princess — in memorably comic and romantic style and manages to…
The thesis of Elizabeth, written by Michael Hirst and directed by Shekhar Kapur, is very simple— like the people that the thesis is ultimately about. These are the credulous peasants of the middle ages who are supposed to have worshiped the Virgin Mary. By the 16th century, the Catholic Church as headed by Sir John…
I expected Enemy of the State, directed by Tony Scott, to be one more document in the tedious succession of conspiracy-theory movies that has pretty much dominated Hollywood’s view of politics since the 1970s. It is that, certainly. Once again, a rogue official of the government controls a vast army of sinister intent and apparently…
Very Bad Things, written and directed by Peter Berg, aspires to be a black comedy but it forgets to be comic. The title is a true enough description of what is to be found inside, but as none of the bad things are also funny, the movie itself is merely. . .a bad thing. Jon…
James Cameron has a lot to answer for. By making the top grossing film of all time a three hour plus extravaganza he has convinced the money men that it’s OK to break the two hour barrier so long as you’ve got a picture that’s going to pull the teeny-boppers, with plenty of spending money…
Jerry Springer in ‘Ringmaster,’ directed by Neil Abramson and written by Jon Bernstein, stars Jerry Springer as the host of a daytime talk show very much like “The Jerry Springer Show”—only a disclaimer at the end informs us that this Jerry and that Jerry have nothing to do with one another. It is the downmarket…
Occasionally I go to see a film by a young independent director in the hopes of seeing some signs of life beyond the stuffed and mounted product of Hollywood—and hence in the hope of an escape from the moral smugness of the Hollywood ethos. But, judging by Crossing Fields, written and directed by a young…
La Vita è Bella or Life is Beautiful was directed and co-written by Roberto Benigni, who stars as Guido Orefice, a Jewish waiter in Arezzo before the war. He woos and wins his wife, Dora (Nicoletta Braschi), whom he calls la principessa — the princess — in memorably comic and romantic style and manages to…
