Star Maps, written and directed by Miguel Arteta, tells the story of Carlos (Douglas Spain) who comes from his grandparents’ house in Mexico, much against his mother’s wishes, to live with the rest of his family in Los Angeles: his father, Pepe (Efraim Figueroa), his mother, Theresa (Martha Velez), his sister, Maria (Lysa Flores) and…
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….
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…
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…
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…
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…
. . .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…
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…
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…
Why are so many people so ready to use dubious methods to prove that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare — From The Washington Times of June 22, 1997
Till There Was You, by Scott Winant, is a leaden and slow-moving romantic comedy that tries very hard to be romantic, but has very little success at all in being comic. Jeanne Tripplehorn plays Gwendolyn Moss, a young woman who, as a little girl in the 1970s, was inspired by the romantic story of her…
