The Object of My Affection, directed by Nicholas Hytner from a screenplay by Wendy Wasserstein, strives briefly to rise above the level of moral imbecility we have come to expect from most Hollywood comedies these days, but alas does not succeed. The idea is that Nina Borowski (Jennifer Aniston), a young social worker in New…
My Giant directed by Michael Lehmann is yet another depressingly heart-warming tale from Billy Crystal, who is second in the heart-warming league only to his friend and co-star in the relentlessly heartwarming Father’s Day, Robin Williams. Someone once said that all comedy is cruel, but Billy Crystal is living proof that this is not true….
Healing by Killing by Nitzam Aviram, an Israeli director, is a documentary which pretty persuasively establishes the case that it was the Nazi practice of euthanasia for victims of handicap, mental retardation and so forth which led to the holocaust. “Without the psychiatric death industry,” as one of Aviram’s interviewees puts it, “Auschwitz and Treblinka…
City of Angels by Brad Silberling is a remake of Wim Wenders’s The Wings of Desire which takes many of Wenders’s best ideas and puts them in the service of a standard issue, Hollywood chick flick—a Wallis Simpson fantasy about some big shot guy who gives up everything for a gal. And what a lot…
When J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World had its premiere in Dublin in 1907 there were riots in the streets because the play was thought to be a vicious slander on the Irish people. Synge had seemed to suggest that it was characteristic of the Irish blarney, at least among the rural folk that…
Suicide Kings directed by Peter O’Fallon attempts without very much success to present a kidnap caper in the manner of the brothers Coen, featuring a lot of crazy plot twists, wise-cracking and otherwise fantastical dialogue and lots of comic criminal incompetence. Christopher Walken plays what has long since become his typecast part, a sinister criminal…
Shooting Fish by Stefan Schwartz stars Dan Futterman and Stuart Townsend as Dylan and Jez (short for Jeremiah), an American and an Englishman who team up to run various scams in the interests, they say, of some orphans, namely themselves. If this strikes you as a jolly jape, you may be as much stuck in…
Chinese Box by Wayne Wang stars Jeremy Irons as John, a journalist living in Hong Kong in the months leading up to the handover of the colony by the British to the Chinese. He learns that he’s got leukemia and has approximately as long to live as the British presence in the territory will last….
The Spanish Prisoner, written and directed by David Mamet, gives expression to a refined kind of paranoia born of what we might call sophistication-anxiety. This results in the common assumption among contemporary writers, artists and (especially) filmmakers — see, for example, the recent movies Wild Things and L.A. Confidential — that everything must be different…
Lost in Space, directed by Stephen Hopkins, is just too silly for words. In yet another cinematic updating of a long-forgotten TV series, William Hurt plays Professor John Robinson, a scientist who has been chosen to emigrate with his family to the planet Alpha Prime, which is ten years in a fast spaceship away, but…
Grey Gardens by David and Albert Maysles is a re-release of the film they made in the 1970s about two women made interesting to the camera by the accident of celebrity, yet whose interest for us is owing simply to their strange and rather pathetic humanity. Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter of the same…
