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…
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…
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…
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…
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….
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…
Capitaine Conan by Bertrand Tavernier has endured the sort of distribution hell which is the fate of most foreign films, even the best, in this country—which is why I have only just got round to seeing it. But if you are lucky enough to be near where it is playing, do go and see it….
Mr Nice Guy, directed by Samo Hung, stars Jackie Chan as a TV cook who accidentally gets mixed up in gang activity in Melbourne, Australia. His now deceased father was supposed to have been a policeman and best friends with a man named Baggio (Barry Otto). Dad had made Baggio promise to ensure that Jackie…
Poor Deputy Marshal Sam Gerard! The only fugitives he ever gets to chase are Houdini-like in their ability to wriggle out of certain capture and who thus put him through a hell of frustration over and over (and over and over) again. . .and then they turn out to be innocent! Oops! Hope I didn’t…
The Real Blonde by Tom DiCillo shows as much promise as his first film, Living in Oblivion of 1995. Both are very funny, but both are rather inward looking — obsessed with movie making and acting — and both somehow fail to hold together very well. The Real Blonde, in fact, is like a collection…
And you thought they didn’t make them like this anymore! Twilight, directed and co-written by Robert Benton is what every fourth or fifth movie out of Hollywood these days tries and fails to be — that is, an old fashioned noir thriller. I hope that people will be able to tell that, compared to the…
Post Coitum Animal Triste, directed by Brigitte Roüen, stars Miss Roüen herself as Diane, a publisher married to the decent but boring lawyer, Philippe (Patrick Chesnais). She suddenly falls passionately in love with the much younger Emilio (Boris Terral) — a hydraulic engineer who goes about doing good, bringing water to the third world. What…
