At its best, Olivier Assayas’s film, Irma Vep (an anagram of Vampire) is rather difficult for an American audience, unfamiliar with the classic French silent film Les Vampires by Louis Feuillade (1915), to understand, since so much of it depends on playing off that kind of innocence, but the appallingly poor English pronunciation of Jean…
Judging from one or two other reviews I have seen, critics seem to think that Con Air, directed by Simon West and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, is meant to be a witty send up of the macho action flick of which it is ostensibly an example. Maybe this is because Mr West has a background…
Speed 2: Cruise Control by Jan De Bont is even more mindless than the first Speed and is perhaps postmodern filmmaking at its most cynical and exploitative. That is to say, there is hardly any attempt to put together a coherent drama which would help us to make some sense of the relentless series of…
It’s nice to know, as I’m sure I’ve said before, that somewhere in the world life on celluloid is still an earnest business and not a sly, postmodern in-joke as it has so largely become in the pampered West. You might have to go to China, however, still not recovered from nearly 50 years of…
It is unfortunate for Stephen Frears’s The Van, based on the novel by Roddy Doyle, that it is coming out at a time when the economies not only of most of the countries where it will be seen but even that of perennially down-on- its-luck Ireland, where the film is set, are booming. The careful…
For just a moment, about half way through, Hollow Reed by Angela Pope looks as if it is going to face a difficult problem honestly. Talk about suspense! But just as, when it looks as if the hero of a movie like Con Air is done for, you know he can’t be, so here you…
Trial and Error by Jonathan Lynn, to a screenplay by Sara Bernstein and Gregory Bernstein, based on the former’s short story, has its funny moments, though the clichés come too thick and fast for the film to be quite satisfying in the end. In fact the basic situation the comedy presents us with is one…
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…
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…
Ulee’s Gold, written and directed by Victor Nunez is a film so slow-paced that even the exciting parts look as if they are on drugs. Perhaps this is because its star, the Ulee of the title (short for Ulysses) is the former pot- head Peter Fonda. It is not necessarily the highest of compliments to…
The Diary of a Seducer, by Dani le Dubroux, is a clever little movie based loosely on Kierkegaard’s Diary of a Seducer. The diary in this case exists in two forms. One is as a French translation of Kierkegaard which Grégoire (Melvil Poupaud), a young philosophy student who lives with his crazy grandmother, Diane, a…
A Chef in Love (or, to give it its French title, Le Mille et Un Recettes d’un Cuisinier Amoureux) by Nana Djordjadze is a Franco-Georgian film which takes the fast-track to success by foreign language films: include lots of food. Set in the Caucasus in 1920, it is the story of a French chef, Pascal…
