One True Thing, directed by the excellent Carl Franklin (Devil in the Blue Dress and that Arkansas movie with Billy Bob Thornton) and based on the novel by Anna Quindlen, suffers from trying to do too much. It is really three separate stories that are like plants grown too close together, all fighting for the…
Permanent Midnight, written and directed by David Veloz and based on the autobiographical book by Jerry Stahl is chiefly notable for the performance of Ben Stiller as Jerry Stahl, the TV writer who became a heroin addict and then, in recovery, managed to carve out a nice little career for himself as an ex-addict. Stiller…
Ronin is directed by John Frankenheimer and is named after the masterless warriors in feudal Japan who, having lost face through failing to protect their lord, are condemned to wander the earth as outcasts and bandits and not even allowed to call themselves samurai anymore. At one point in the film the official explainer who…
Rounders directed by John Dahl is wish-fulfilment fantasy of a different sort from that of Let’s Talk About Sex. This is the fantasy of cool, and it is paradoxical that the hottest new stars seem to compete to out-cool each other. Needless to say, this loving cultivation of image has little or nothing to do…
Clay Pigeons, directed by David Dobkin and written by Matt Healy purports to take place in Montana, though in fact it takes place in Movieland, or that province of it which has been colonized by Quentin Tarantino and all the Taranteenies. You know you are in this part of the world when everyone you meet…
The Eel, directed by Shohei Imamura, is like so many Japanese films a visual feast which works less well as a naturalistic drama than as a sort of moral parable, shot through with significant symbolism in mostly beautiful pictures. The story is of a midlevel Japanese “salaryman” called Yamashita (Koji Yakusho, who made such an…
Regeneration directed by Gillies Mackinnon from a screenplay by Allan Scott and based on the novel by Pat Barker is another retelling of the great left wing myth to come out of the Great War: that it was all the generals’ fault. “Half the seed of Europe,” to use Wilfred Owen’s angry poetic formulation, were…
It is not a particularly original or even, necessarily, interesting observation that marriage, like other symbiotic relationships, is often a matter of complementary pathologies. Or what would be pathologies if they were found in an individual. Benoit Jacquot (A Single Girl, The Disenchanted) has given us a portrait of such a marriage—and not much hope…
The Best Man, written and directed (in Italian) by Pupi Avati begins by solemnly informing us that “Once upon a time, women would marry not knowing what love was. . .” And lest you think, in a moment of nervousness, that you might not know what it is either, the film hastens to explain that…
Your Friends and Neighbors by Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men) is must-see cinema, though you will come away from it depressed and angry. In the midst of our frivolous, postmodern era, LaBute has, at least in this film, a true modernist edge to him. Like Beckett or Pinter he presents us with a…
The Slums of Beverly Hills, written and directed by Tamara Jenkins is another meditation on family, this time the highly dysfunctional, motherless Abramowitz family in Southern California in 1976. The patriarch, Murray Abramowitz (Alan Arkin) is a sometime car salesman but mainly unemployed drifter who moves his family around from one cheap apartment or motel…
You know when, in the course of watching The Avengers by Jeremiah Chechnik, you see Uma Thurman grappling with herself, while dressed in a rubber cat-suit, on top of a hot air balloon which is itself on the top of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, which is seen against the snowy backdrop of an apparently…
