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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
It would take too long to catalogue all the excellences of Agnieszka Holland’s adaptation of Henry James’s Washington Square, but chief among them must be the performances of the actors in the four principal roles. Albert Finney plays rich Dr. Sloper, Ben Chaplin plays the handsome bounder, Morris Townsend, who comes to court his plain…
Wide Awake, directed by M. Night Shyamalan, must have attracted its stars — Denis Leary, Dana Delaney and Rosie O’Donnell, all of whom are badly miscast — because it tells what purports to be a heartwarming story of a kid in Catholic school, presumably of Irish extraction, who has to come to terms with his…
She’s So Lovely was directed by Nick Cassavetes from a screenplay by his late father, John Cassavetes, and provides a showcase for the talents of Sean Penn and his real-life wife, Robin Wright Penn, in classic Cassavetes situations of groups of friends sitting around, getting drunk together, laughing and saying the sorts of things that…
Perhaps the most unforgettable moment in In and Out (written by Paul Rudnick and directed by Frank Oz) comes as Joan Cusack, having just been jilted at the altar by Kevin Kline, who has picked that moment to decide that he is gay ( “Was there any other time you could have told me this?”…
Intimate Relations written and directed by Philip Goodhew is a lovely black comedy, supposedly based on a true story, which shines with brilliant performances by Rupert Graves and Julie Walters. Mr Graves plays Harold Guppy, a bit of a ne’er-do-well who, after stints in the Royal Navy and the Merchant Navy, comes to Abergavenny on…
