As one of America’s greatest fans of Antipodean film-making, I am sorry not to be able to heap praise upon Oscar and Lucinda by Gillian Armstrong, but I’m afraid it is just too chaotic a film, morally and intellectually, to present us with a pleasing cinematic completeness. I suspect that this is a deficiency owing…
Hallaleujah, it’s a miracle! The Apostle is a (more or less) mainstream Hollywood film that neither patronizes nor trivializes nor demonizes religion. Written and directed by and starring Robert Duvall, the picture is a tour de force for Mr Duvall, who has given himself a wonderfully juicy part as the itinerant evangelist Sonny Dewey, a.k.a….
Deconstructing Harry by Woody Allen is like every other Woody Allen movie: a succession of more or less good jokes bound together by an essentially puerile fantasy. Or, in this case, a succession of interlocking fantasies. Harry Block (Mr Allen) is a novelist who is forever mining his chaotic private life for material for his…
The Postman by Kevin Costner was made about 25 years too late. This is the kind of thing that would have seemed “deep,” or possibly “heavy” to the drugged-out hippies of the Vietnam era, but is just laughable now. Even the audience of film critics I saw it with laughed out loud at several of…
The joke that gives As Good As It Gets its title is the best thing in the picture. Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson), a successful novelist, suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder which manifests itself in an insane punctiliousness about rituals, not stepping on cracks in the sidewalk, excessive hand-washing and the like. When his routine is disrupted…
Beaumarchais: The Scoundrel, directed by Edouard Molinaro from an unpublished play by Sacha Guitry has a Cyrano-like panache to it and is mostly quite enjoyable—though it is still worth remembering what Fabrice Luchini, in the title role, says to Manuel Blanc, the star-struck young Gudin who complains that the actors are pronouncing his words too…
Happy Together, directed by the Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai (Days of Being Wild, Chung-king Express), tells the story of two Chinese youths (Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai) living in Argentina. Fai (Mr Leung) and Ho Po Wing (Mr Cheung) are on-again, off-again lovers, the former sober and hard working, the latter a wild…
Jackie Brown confirms two things we have always really known about Quentin Tarantino at his best (at his worst he is just unspeakable). One is that he is the most compulsively watchable filmmaker now working in America. He knows how to keep an audience riveted to the screen, and he knows how to tell a…
Good Will Hunting by Gus Van Sant is, like Kicked in the Head, an illustration of what happens when you hand beardless boys $20 million dollars or so and say, “Go make a movie, kid.” Good Will is better than Kicked, but then anything this side of Flubber is better than Kicked. The boys in…
Tomorrow Never Dies, directed by Roger Spottiswoode is the latest in the seemingly endless chain of James Bond films. It is a disappointment. One of the few pleasures that conservatives could take in the Hollywood product of the late Cold War — that is watching an unashamed cold warrior fighting the commies for the good…
Flubber, directed by Les Mayfield, is a Disney remake of an original Disney movie of 1961 about a wonderful kind of “flying rubber” and called The Absent Minded Professor, directed by Robert Stevenson. It wasn’t a very good movie the first time around and it is, naturally enough, a much worse movie in the remake….
This month should be called easy morality month. No sooner do we get finished watching as Steven Spielberg proves to us with incredible but not untypical supererogation and at nearly two and a half hours length that slavery is iniquitous than we step into James Cameron’s Titanic and find that it takes nearly three and…
