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…
. . .And, speaking of propaganda, there can be few more spectacular recent examples of the same than Ridley Scott’s G.I. Jane. Here is a film which has no single bit of characterization or plotting or dialogue which is not designed solely to persuade us that putting women into combat is right and reasonable and…
Mimic, written by Matthew Robbins and Guillermo Del Toro and directed by Del Toro (Cronos) is almost an old-fashioned creature feature — a cross between the slime-is-alive flick and the monsters-in-the- subway flick — but it is a surprisingly watchable and suspenseful example of the kind. Del Toro, who showed his cleverness and originality in…
Event Horizon written by Philip Eisner and directed by Paul Anderson, is set in 2047 and stars Laurence Fishburne as Miller, the captain of a rescue space ship called USAC Lewis and Clark which is going to see what happened to another ship, the Event Horizon, that got lost on a trip to the stars…
A Smile Like Yours, directed by Keith Samples (co-written by Samples and Kevin Meyer), starts off as a kind of throwback to those 1950s comedies in which a lovable ditz of a wife went around getting into trouble which her steady, long-suffering straight-man of a husband would then have to get her out of. George…
Air Force One by Wolfgang Petersen is a superior example of its kind, the disaster movie cum thriller featuring national security and political issues of a kind that Hollywood invariably gets wrong. This film is no exception. It posits a warlord ruler of Kazakhstan who threatens world peace by turning his desperately poor country into…
Picture Perfect, directed by Glenn Gordon Caron, is a nicely crafted picture calculated to warm whatever organ it is that serves advertising executives in the office of a heart. Jennifer Aniston stars as Kate, a young and ambitious specimen of that breed whose hopes of love seem to rise no higher than bedding, in a…
The End of Violence, directed by Wim Wenders and written by Nicholas Klein is a frequently enjoyable film in which, however, there is far too much going on, an excess of Germanic portentousness and a hackneyed narrative premiss involving a vast governmental conspiracy (ho-hum) against the people. On the symbolic level the film is about…
Shall We Dance? by Masayuki Suo is a Japanese film with all the charm and delicacy of the best French movies. It surprises and delights with the subtlety of its observation and the skill of its construction, and it moved me deeply at several points. Koji Yakusyo stars as Mr Sugiyama, a rumpled and tired-…
Conspiracy Theory, written by Brian Helgeland and directed by Richard Donner, attempts to do for lunatics what movies like The Shawshank Redemption tried to do for convicts—that is to sanitize them and make them lovable victims of government and society instead of dangerous social malcontents. Charming, blue-eyed Mel Gibson plays Jerry, a middle aged New…
Love Serenade, an Australian film by Shirley Barrett stars George Shevtsov as Ken Sherry, a recently divorced (for the third time) disc jockey from Brisbane who comes to work in the little Australian town of Sunray on the Murray River. Next door to him live two young sisters, Vicki Ann (Rebecca Frith) and Dimity (Miranda…
