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…
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…
. . .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…
Wild America by William Dear is an engaging kiddie movie, supposedly based on the true story of a family of prominent naturalist-filmmakers, which will provide some wholesome thrills with its peeks at life and wildlife through the eyes of three boys growing up in Arkansas in the late 1960s. Unfortunately, Dear is not content to…
When the Cat’s Away (not a very adequate translation of the French Chacun Cherche Son Chat or “Everyone’s looking for his cat”), by Cédric Klapisch, is a charmingly old-fashioned kind of film, in spite of its depiction of very contemporary social realities. It offers a marvelously undimmed romanticism about Paris, and about the glamour of…
. . .And speaking of witless sequels, Batman and Robin directed by Joel Schumacher is a pathetic document—un-clever and un-funny. And being un-clever and un-funny are the two cardinal sins for any such obvious attempt at postmodern filmmaking as a Batman sequel. Given that we’ve got to watch this kind of garbage (since Hollywood hardly…
If you liked Forrest Gump you will probably like Contact, which is by the same director, Robert Zemeckis. I didn’t like Forrest Gump. In fact, I hated Forrest Gump, so it is not surprising that I also hate Contact, which is full of exactly the same kind of cheap uplift as that on offer in…
My Best Friend’s Wedding by P.J. Hogan (written by Ronald Bass) is not as awful as I expected it to be, given that it stars my least favorite actress, Julia Roberts, as Julianne, the gal who discovers she’s in love with a man she thought was her best friend when he announces he’s getting married…
Men in Black, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld from the comic book by Lowell Cunningham, is offered as a justification for weird sort of benign paranoia. The government, we are asked to believe, really knows all about the alien presence in our midst (that much is familiar) but they are keeping the knowledge of it from…
Le Mépris, or Contempt, based on a novel by Alberto Moravia, was directed by Jean-Luc Godard in 1963, but has just been re-released in a newly refurbished print. Michel Piccoli stars as Paul, a Communist playwright being wooed by a dumb American millionaire called Jerry Prokosch (Jack Palance) to re-write a script for a film…
Face/Off by John Woo offers what is perhaps the most preposterous plot ever for an action movie, and that is saying something. Most postmodern action thrillers—see, for instance, Speed 2 and Con Air—aspire to nothing higher than nudging you in the ribs from time to time to remind you that you are watching a movie….
