I really wanted to like Mouse Hunt, which was officially directed by Gore Verbinski but unfortunately bears the hallmarks of the directorial style of Steven Spielberg, out of whose “Dreamworks” studio it comes. Every now and then, it is true, the skills of the comic duo of Nathan Lane and Lee Evans as the brothers…
Arguing the World, a documentary directed by Joseph Dorman, is what a documentary should be. That is, it persuasively re-creates a historical milieu—in this case intellectual life in post-War New York—by telling a particular story. The story is that of City College in the 1930s and 1940s, known as “the Jewish Harvard,” where the sons…
Fallen Angels by Wong Kar-Wai may be the most perfect postmodern movie yet. Of course it comes from Hong Kong. Its characters are fragmented and monosyllabic, its stories multiple and incomprehensible, its dialogue minimalist, and its photography frenetic and out of focus; but boy is this hot new movie cool. Or hip if you prefer….
Firestorm is the kind of picture which it would be nice to be able to encourage with a sympathetic review. It is the story of heroic men—in this case the legendary “smoke jumpers” who parachute into forest fires to help put them out—fighting against both nature and bad guys and prevailing against both. Nor is…
All the way through The Winter Guest, which was directed and co-written by the fine British actor Alan Rickman, I was bothered by the fact that the action (I use the term loosely) was supposed to be taking place on “the coldest day in living memory” in East Fife, Scotland. Anyone who has ever been…
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…
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…
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…
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…
“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…
Every few years around Christmas time, Steven Spielberg feels the need to trot out his social conscience for public examination. Four years ago it was Schindler’s List, a film designed to show how bad the Holocaust was. This year it is Amistad—the story of a slave rebellion aboard a Spanish ship in 1839 which created…
Anastasia, made for Fox by the disaffected Disney animators Don Bluth and Gary Goldman was deeply depressing for me to watch—not because it is shoddy filmmaking but because there is so much obvious talent here employed in falsifying reality for no good reason. Of course it doesn’t do for one to be too much the…
