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…
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…
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…
La Promesse by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne stars Jérémie Renier as Igor, a Belgian boy of about 16 working to help his father, Roger (Olivier Gourmet), who is a shady dealer in the import and export of illegal immigrants in Liège. He also works as an apprentice mechanic at a service station and seems genuinely…
Ponette by Jacques Doillon is a tribute to the precocious brilliance of the child actress, Victoire Thivisol, and presumably to Doillon himself for directing her and the other remarkable children — Matiaz Bureau, Delphine Schilz and Leopoldine Serre — who take up most of the screen time here. The film is worth seeing just for…
Operation Condor directed by and starring Jackie Chan, is one of his Hong Kong movies, made before he became a star in the U.S., and now released with dubbing for the American market which, together with the amateurish acting, makes it look like a cheap porno title. Let us be clear. This is trash. But…
George of the Jungle, directed by Sam Weisman and written by Dana Olsen and Audrey Wells is Disney’s concession to children who found Hercules too sophisticated. I would have guessed that anyone over the age of nine who so much as cracks a smile at all this strenuous but vain effort to be funny must…
Nothing to Lose, written and directed by Steve Oedekerk, stars Tim Robbins as Nick, an advertising executive in Los Angeles who is carjacked by “T” (Martin Lawrence) while in a state of shock over his apparent discovery of his wife, Ann (Kelly Preston), in bed with his boss, Phil (Michael McKean). Sittiing at an intersection…
Perhaps the most telling moment in Disney’s Hercules (directed by John Musker and Ron Clements) the latest in that company’s long succession of dreadful, vulgar and philistine cartoon movies, comes near the beginning with a musical recapitulation of Greek mythology (most of it garbled or deliberately altered to suit the use that Disney wants to…
Buddy by Caroline Thompson is the (more or less) true story of Gertrude Lintz (Rene Russo), a Brooklyn socialite of the 1920s and 30s and author of Animals Are My Hobby, who raised chimpanzees as if they were children with some interesting results and later tried the same trick with a gorilla (the eponymous Buddy,…
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
The Lost World: Jurassic Park by Steven Spielberg is virtually indistinguishable from the original of four years ago—and indeed from most other Spielbergian products, particularly in their emphasis on wise or clever or dexterous children rescuing their parents and in their environmental message. Indeed, the most curious thing about the whole film is that it…
