The Sweet Hereafter, written and directed by the Armenian- Canadian director of Exotica, Atom Egoyan, is a movingly updated version of the Pied Piper story only without the rats. This time the Pied Piper is not a businessman or a moralist but mere capricious fate which causes a school bus to run off the road…
The movies of the Alien series have always had as subtext the feminist view of abortion, but never more so than the latest, called Alien Resurrection, which comes to us from Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Jeunet was co-director of the very weird French films Delicatessen and City of Lost Children, and this looks a lot like both…
In spite of all the publicity, Red Corner is rather a roundabout apology for than a criticism of the Red Chinese regime. Richard Gere may be personally hostile to the Chinese gerontocracy, but the movie he wishes to showcase his opposition takes its politics in a depressingly familiar direction which leaves Jiang Zemin and his…
The Rainmaker is redundant proof that Francis Ford Coppola has lost it permanently. If you thought that things couldn’t get any worse for him after the egregious Jack, wait till you see this two-hour infomercial on behalf of the Trial Lawyers Association. Coppola seems to have used up whatever stores of subtlety and moral ambiguity…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
