The Cruise, directed by Bennett Miller, is really a one-man show featuring Timothy “Speed” Levitch, a tour guide with the Gray Line Tours in New York, who is a non-stop talker in a distinctively New York fashion, spouting a mixture of pseudo-profundity and nonsense in a vain attempt to show himself off as sage, prophet,…
What Dreams May Come, directed by Vincent Ward from a screenplay by Ron Bass and based on the novel by Richard Matheson, is the Orpheus myth translated into Californian — with visuals by Caspar David Friedrich. I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty close to being my idea of hell. Not that hell as…
Happiness, written and directed by Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Doll’s House), is a sort of twin of Neil Labute’s Your Friends and Neighbors. Both these young, independent filmmakers are reacting against Hollywood fakery and sentimentality by presenting us with horrifyingly funny looks at the sexual manners and mores of late-century America. What Jason Patric’s…
The documentary Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth, written and directed by Robert B. Weide.is, I think, an opportunity missed. Bruce, who died of a drug overdose in 1966, was a genuinely funny man who has a genuine claim to be considered a hero of free speech in America. Weide and those he interviews…
Holy Man, written by Tom Schulman and directed by Stephen Herek at first looks as if it is going to be a more successful exercise in Hollywood metaphysics than the dreadful What Dreams May Come. Set in the cutthroat corporate world of the Good Buy Home shopping network, run by the splendidly nasty John McBainbridge…
At the end of A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, as at the end of almost every Merchant-Ivory film I’ve ever seen, I said to myself: “What was the point of that?” I guess it’s a kind of trademark of theirs. In fact, the Soldier’s Daughter, based on a memoir by the daughter of the novelist…
When Shakespeare decided to put a trio of witches into Macbeth he knew that their very presence would suggest to his audience something fearful beyond imagining. They were a kind of algebraic symbol for the unknown quantity of evil which the play, in more realistic fashion, attempted to solve for. Nowadays, the presence of witches…
Antz directed by Eric Darnell and Tim Johnson begins with unmistakable Woody Allen—i.e. not some animated ant named “Z”—in analysis, feeling neurotic because, as the middle child of 5 million he didn’t get a lot of attention as a child. He tells the doctor that he is intimidated by the ant work-ethic: “Everything for the…
It cannot have escaped the notice of my readers that a favorite trope of liberals and other lefties — who more often call themselves “progressives” these days — is that all conservatism is just reflexive resistance to change, and that conservative political proposals are ipso facto designed with the more or less deliberate aim in…
Love is the Devil written and directed by John Maybury, stars Derek Jacobi as Francis Bacon, the pioneer of the skull-beneath-the-skin school of British art. Because he was forbidden by keepers of the Bacon artistic estate to show actual Bacon canvases on screen, Maybury, who is himself a painter, has had to confine himself to…
Waking Ned Devine, written and directed by Kirk Jones, is a delightfully funny and touching film that, I’m afraid, would not win the approval of Bill Bennett. It is about a crime — a fraud perpetrated on the Irish government by an entire Irish village which thus doubtless reveals its collective lack of character and…
The Celebration is a film directed and co-written by Thomas Vinterberg, a Danish director who has teamed up with Lars Von Trier, a fellow Dane, to issue a manifesto called Dogma 95. Everybody, including Mr Vinterberg himself, seems to agree that this is little more than a publicity stunt, and Vinterberg claims that in the…
