There is a moment in The Wedding Singer, directed by Frank Coraci to a script by Tim Herlihy, that summed the picture up for me. After Robbie Hart (Adam Sandler) is stood up at his own wedding by the vixenish Linda (Angela Featherstone), he can’t bear to go near a wedding again, so he has…
Mrs Dalloway is directed by Marleen Gorris, the Dutch director of the unrelentingly feminist Antonia’s Line, from a screenplay by Eileen Atkins. The screenplay, so far as I can tell, is very faithful to Virginia Woolf’s novel, so fans of Mrs Woolf may enjoy it. The rest of us may take it as Ms Gorris…
Live Flesh by Pedro Almodovar begins with a scene, set on a lonely night in 1970, in which a baby is born on a bus on the way to the hospital. There is a comic bus driver and a comic older woman helping the baby be born. “If idiots like us didn’t give birth,” she…
Josh and Jonas Pate, co-directors of Deceiver, have all the vices of the Coen brothers—mainly pretentiousness and self-conscious artiness—without any of the virtues. Their film is not funny and not even particularly intelligent, although it tries very hard to be the latter. So much so, indeed, that the three main characters are introduced to us…
I Love You, Don’t Touch Me is a charming little film by Julie Davis that has intelligence, wit, humor, good acting, good writing, good music and almost all things going for it —apart from being facile and unconvincing in its main point. This is that, as the gorgeous heroine, Katie (Marla Schaffel)—who is of course…
The Replacement Killers, directed by Antoine Fuqua, stars Chow Yun-Fat as John Lee, a kind of Chinese version of the decent American everyman as noir hero of the 1940s — a world-weary Humphrey Bogart, say, who is capable of all criminality but for some reason draws the line at killing a kid, in this case…
Dark City by Alex Proyas is another example of the triumph of image over drama which has made postmodern movies what they are and, I believe, will someday be seen to have devastated the capacity of Hollywood to produce quality films. For drama, that is, there must be rules. Some things can happen and some…
Zero Effect is a wacky detective yarn written and directed by Jake Kasdan and starring Bill Pullman as Daryl Zero, an updated, Americanized version of Sherlock Holmes. Zero is a reclusive private detective who gives his cases names like “The Case of the Mismatched Shoelaces” and commands spectacularly high fees for his “highly intuitive” powers…
Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life by Michael Paxton turns out to be a product of the Rand industry instead of a critical and dispassionate look at the life of the late novelist and philosopher. For anyone of critical temperament, watching it is only slightly less creepy than sitting through something called L. Ron Hubbard:…
The Borrowers directed by Peter Hewitt and based on novels by Mary Norton is a curious looking picture and occasionally a funny one, but for the most part it leaves us with the impression of opportunities missed. As so often in big-money Hollywood pictures, a world of artistry is lost for the sake of some…
Nil By Mouth by Gary Oldman is a surprise. You would think that Hollywood’s favorite maniac villain — along with Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken — would have been infected with the Hollywood slicks, but here, in his first appearance as director, he is doing something altogether different — that is a sort of cinéma…
Four Days in September by the Brazilian director Bruno Barreto has about it the sepia tones of an old photograph. How strange people were in those far off days of 1969, and what strange things they did. Much credit is due to Barreto, himself a former leftist, for the skill and artistic restraint involved in…
