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…
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…
Boogie Nights has been hailed in advance as a contemporary classic and its director, Paul Thomas Anderson, as the new Tarantino. Well, maybe. But where I could see in Pulp Fiction and others of Mr Tarantino’s early works what all the fuss was about, even if I was a bit skeptical, in the case of…
The Matchmaker, directed by Mark Joffe, stars Janeane Garofalo as Marcy Tizard, campaign worker for Senator John McGlory (Jay O. Sanders) of Massachusetts. McGlory is running behind in his re-election battle on account of some unspecified outrages against family values, and his campaign manager, Nick (Dennis Leary), dreams up the brilliant scheme of sending Marcy…
Playing God, directed by Andy Wilson and written by Mark Haskell Smith is yet another example of the work of the Taranteenies, those hip young filmmakers who have dominated creative thinking in Hollywood for the past three or four years, in the wake of Quentin Tarantino’s success with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. You’d think…
Devil’s Advocate, directed by Taylor Hackford to a script by Jonathan Lemkin and Tony Gilroy, is like Playing God in being a Hollywood version of the Faust legend. It is a more theologically sophisticated one, if ultimately no more successful. Al Pacino plays the devil under the name of “John Milton”—perhaps because this film comes…
The Locusts, written and directed by John Patrick Kelley, is a tedious Freudian melodrama which, like so much else that comes out of Hollywood these days, bends every effort to convince us of the awful secrets buried beneath those smiling, happy-families exteriors of the 1950s. Such a belief in the real hideousness of apparent domestic…
Just imagine what you would get if the director of Trainspotting turned his hand to romantic comedy and, sure enough, that’s pretty much what you get with Danny Boyle’s A Life Less Ordinary. As with Trainspotting and their earlier hit, Shallow Grave, Boyle is joined by Andrew Macdonald (producer) and John Hodge (writer), but by…
Faust — as he appears in Playing God and Devil’s Advocate — appears to be all the rage in Hollywood at the moment. Coincidently, a Norwegian version of the Faust tale in Jan Troell’s Hamsun is knocking around out there somewhere at the moment. You may even get to see it if you live in…
Surprisingly, U-Turn by Oliver Stone is actually a rather enjoyable evening in the cinema, or it would be if it weren’t marred by the patented Stone phantasmagoric style. Dealing with a whimsical script like this one (by John Ridley, adapted from his book “Stray Dogs”) is something Stone should never allow himself to do, because…
Most Wanted, directed by David Glenn Hogan, is not without signs of talent, and it has one or two finely managed scenes. I especially liked the one where Keenen Ivory Wayans in the role of James Dunn, a stock innocent con on the lam (and boy is he innocent! he only got put in jail…
Going All the Way, directed by Mark Pellington, to a screenplay adapted by Dan Wakefield from his own novel is yet another among the plethora of recent cinematic evocations of the 1950s—and one which, I would have thought, might have elicited one or two protests from women because of the way that it treats them…
