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…
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 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…
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…
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…
Amazon, the IMAX film now being shown at the Museum of Natural History in New York, begins with scenes from an old black and white movie of pith-helmeted explorers fighting everything from vicious natives with poison-dart blowguns, to crocodiles to piranha. The picture is a tiny keyhole in the middle of the screen. Then up…
Don Diego (Anthony Hopkins), the aristocratic settler in Spanish California who dons The Mask of Zorro to fight against his aristocratic brethren and for the people as “Zorro,” the fox, is a man of apparently no politics, though he repeatedly risks his life, no internal conflicts, in spite of being “a traitor to your country…
Dr Doolittle, directed by Betty Thomas, stars Eddie Murphy as the eponymous doctor who can talk to the animals. For the nineties, all the whimsy of Hugh Lofting’s literary creation and the earlier film version starring Rex Harrison has given way to post-modern joking as celebrity voices are put into animal mouths and made to…
Mark Twain’s America written and directed by Stephen Low is the latest in IMAX 3-D and illustrates that basic critical principle, the law of the inverse relationship between the sophistication of a film’s technique and the quality of its content. The feeble idea on which this movie is based is that you can relate various…
Lethal Weapon 4 was, according to the credits, directed by Richard Donner, but it might as well have been directed by a computer. Here is the perfect summer blockbuster movie in which the formulae perfected in the first three installments in the series are employed once again, the explosions and the hair-breadth escapes are even…
There are several things to like in Armageddon, directed by Michael Bay. One is that the sympathetic main character, Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis), is a wildcat oil-driller who is introduced to us as he harasses a Greenpeace ship which has been sent to harass his offshore drilling platform by hitting golf balls at it. The…
Slamnation by Paul Devlin is a ridiculous if not often comical documentary about the growing fashion of the “poetry slam” — a kind of competitive sport involving mostly execrable poetry and the little clique of neurotics and borderline exhibitionists who write it for performance before vast arenas of enthusiasts. The film tells the story of…
