Night Falls on Manhattan is that rare thing, a film that is bursting with talent—written and directed by Sidney Lumet it features fine performances from Andy Garcia, Ian Holm and James Gandolfini and even such cinematic palookas as Richard Dreyfuss and Lena Olin are punching above their weight—which is, nevertheless, a complete failure. It is…
Where Twin Town is determinedly cutting edge, Brassed Off by Mark Herman is quaintly old-fashioned. It is so both in being a straightforward, Rocky type story of a Yorkshire village’s brass band making it to the finals of the national band competition and in being the crudest sort of left wing propaganda—the sort of propaganda…
Breakdown by Jonathan Mostow is a superior sort of thriller that is a step in the right direction after recent Hollywood examples of the genre—that is, in the direction of the things that ordinary, reasonable people really do fear. Which is to say not unbelievably big Amazonian snakes or volcanos erupting in downtown Los Angeles…
Rough Magic written and directed by Clare Peploe has got to be a contender for worst movie of the year. It’s a real stinker. The worst thing about it is its preposterous plot, full of what is obviously meant to look like bits of “magic realism” but coming across instead as a sort of cartoon…
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…
Father’s Day by Ivan Reitman is based on the preposterous premiss that an apparently happily-married woman, upset at her husband’s failure to pursue their runaway 17 year old boy who has left home to become a rock-band groupie, would tell not one but two old boyfriends that they might be the boy’s father—in the expectation…
If John Woo thinks, as the publicity material claims, that Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai is “the closest thing to a perfect movie that I have ever seen” I wonder why he does not make movies like it himself? In fact, Le Samourai, made in 1967 but only seen in this country before in the wake…
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…
Children of the Revolution, written and directed by Peter Duncan, represents the less attractive side of the Australian sensibility I have so often had occasion to praise here. For it is a too-natural development out of healthy skepticism to turn merely cynical, and that is what, I take it, we have here. There is, to…
Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery, directed by Jay Roach from a screenplay by Mike Myers, stars Myers as one of those swinging secret agents from the 1960s—though he is supposed to be British he resembles Matt Helm more than James Bond—frozen for 30 years and reanimated, along with his mod get-up, his bad teeth…
The Designated Mourner, written by Wallace Shawn and directed by David Hare, is chiefly remarkable for the fact that it shows Mike Nichols can act. Or at least overact. It’s hard to tell if it is Mr Shawn’s overheated writing, Mr Hare’s spare, intense directing or Mr Nichols’s own natural hamminess, but the overall effect…
Scream by Wes Craven seems already to have become a cult hit, presumably because Wes is as knowing about the fright-film genre as his jaded audience and likes to play with their expectations. At one memorable moment while a crowd of teenagers are gathered to watch yet another horror film they have all seen before,…
