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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
“Unclog any tubes today?” asks waspish wife Phyllis (Julie Christie) of her husband, Lucky Mann (Nick Nolte), a philandering plumber and handyman in Alan Rudolph’s Afterglow. “Pipes. The word is pipes,” he insists, though we have just been watching him wielding his tool in such a suggestive way (“Turn me on” he says to a…
Ma Vie en Rose or My Life in Pink by Alain Berliner manages to be a charming film, rather in the manner of the upbeat and jokey postmodernism of Berliner’s fellow Belgian, Jaco Van Dormael. Enjoyable as it is in many ways, however, one can never quite lose the sense of being got at by—that…
Ma Vie en Rose by Alain Berliner manages to be a charming film, rather in the manner of the upbeat and jokey postmodernism of Berliner’s fellow Belgian, Jaco Van Dormael. Enjoyable as it is in many ways, however, one can never quite lose the sense of being got at by—that rare thing—a perfectly amiable propagandist…
Swept from the Sea by Beeban Kidron is a ludicrously overblown adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s short story, “Amy Foster.” Now the first and absolutely essential thing for you to know about Conrad’s Amy is that she was — how shall we say? — of the canine kind with regard to feminine pulchritude. Also stupid. Conrad…
Welcome to Sarajevo, directed by Michael Winterbottom and written by Frank Cottrell Boyce, is based on the true story told in the book Natasha’s Story by the British television journalist Michael Nicholson. The movie fictionalizes it, calling the journalist Henderson (Stephen Dillane) and the little Bosnian girl he rescues from the carnage of 1992-3 and…
