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…
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…
Kiss the Girls, directed by Gary Fleder to a screenplay by David Klass (based on the novel by James Patterson), begins with a voiceover narration, obviously by a scary sex-criminal, saying: “You want to know all about me. . .” Well, no, as a matter of fact I don’t. Why should he assume that I…
Kiss or Kill was written and directed by Bill Bennett — no, not that Bill Bennett but yet another example of the astonishing outpouring of Australian cinematic talent of the past few years. It takes as the basis of its dramatic scenario a theme that most Americans would have thought was not only thoroughly worn…
Mad City, directed by Costa-Gavras, has a good subject, but it can’t seem to stay focused on it. The director, known for such anti-American films as Z and Salvador, here ostensibly changes his subject to the media. Now I yield to no one in my dislike of the media, and especially of television newsmen, but…
Seven Years in Tibet from Tri-Star, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, stars the egregious Brad Pitt as Heinrich Harrer, an Austrian mountain climber in the Himalayas who is interned by the British in India as an enemy alien at the outbreak of the Second World War. He and his fellow Teuton climber, Peter Aufschnaiter (David Thewlis)…
The Ice Storm, directed by Ang Lee from a screenplay by James Schamus, based on a novel by Rick Moody, is a very moving film which, nevertheless, ultimately undermines its own emotional force by trying, after the manner of so many recent movies, to be as much an historical as a literary statement. For what,…
Nenette et Boni by Claire Denis is a rather enjoyable little meditation on the disjunction, in our late 20th century culture, between sex and context, between the act of coupling and its moral and biological consequences. Boni, short for Boniface (Colin Grégoire), a young man of about 19 or 20 who works as a pizza…
Gang Related, written and directed by Jim Kouf, is better than it sounds. Given that it is yet another crooked cop caper and that it features the late Tupac Shakur in over his head as one of the two bent patrolmen, it actually manages to be watchable through the sheer strength of Kouf’s writing and…
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…
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…
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…
