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…
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…
Starship Troopers directed by Paul Verhoeven and based on the book by Robert Heinlein is a custom-made vehicle for the expression of what I take to be the Hollywood worldview. In the fanciful future utopia it conjures up for us, the fearsome tide of poor, dirty, low class, and superstitious people, with skins both swarthy…
Fairy Tale by Charles Sturridge tells the story—sort of—of the fairy-photograph hoax perpetrated by a couple of young girls in Yorkshire in 1917-18. Now if you are going to do this on film, this way of doing it, with a bunch of ostensibly real fairies buzzing about on dragonfly wings, is probably the best way…
The Man Who Knew Too Little, directed by Jon Amiel, is for fans of the comedic style of Bill Murray who—as he does in such mediocre movies as Kingpin and What About Bob?—manages to wring what genuine comedy there is out comic situations so outlandish that they would bring a blush of shame to the…
Perhaps the emblematic scene of Iain Softley’s adaptation (written by Hossein Amini) of Henry James’s Wings of the Dove comes as Millie Theale (Alison Elliott) and Kate Croy (Helena Bonham Carter) meet Merton Densher (Linus Roache) in an exhibition of the erotic art of Egon Schiele (by coincidence, such an exhibition is being shown at…
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, directed by Clint Eastwood from John Berendt’s best seller stars John Cusack as John Kelso, a journalist sent to Savannah by Town and Country magazine to cover one of the highlights of the social season there, a Christmas party given by Mr Jim Williams (Kevin Spacey). But…
Bean—without the Mr. usually appended to his name in the series of delightful comedy shorts featuring the character created by Rowan Atkinson—has now been stretched out to feature length in a version directed by Mel Smith, Atkinson’s former colleague on the BBC’s hit satirical revue of the early ’80s, “Not the Nine O’Clock News.” He…
Gattaca, written and directed by Andrew Niccol is one of those hokey “futuristic” flicks which is really a form of pandering to a very present-day paranoia. It does not exactly require a huge leap of imagination to project a “not-too-distant future” in which gene-typing has become so swift and reliable that state security will have…
There is scarcely a cliché of the 1990s Hollywood thriller that is not to be found in Switchback, written and directed by Jeb Stuart. By now, the figure of the serial killer — so rare in nature, so common in the movies — has become such a familiar one that a filmmaker like Stuart will…
I was, as my long-time readers may remember, inclined to give Leaving Las Vegas the benefit of a very considerable doubt that it was not, as it seemed to be, about insane self-indulgence but, like Kiss or Kill, about the intersection of love and trust. One Night Stand, the latest from that film’s director, Mike…
The Jackal, directed by Michael Caton-Jones, is a formula blockbuster and a complete artistic void. The only interesting thing about it to me was the chance it afforded to spot the trends as to what ingredients go into the formula this year. For example, the macho man who has an on-screen homosexual kiss looks as…
