Kama Sutra by Mira Nair (co-written by Ms Nair and Helena Kriel) stars Indira Varma as Maya and Sarita Choudhury as Tara, two childhood friends in 16th century India who become deadly rivals in love in adulthood. It is an Indian version of the English bodice ripper style of historical romance and altogether tedious in…
Liar Liar is another high-concept movie, this one directed by Tom Shadyac, who also directed Jim Carrey’s breakthrough film, Ace Ventura, Pet Detective. Here Carrey appears as Fletcher Reede, a shyster lawyer whose five year old son, Max (Justin Cooper) makes a birthday wish that, just for one day, his father cannot tell a lie….
The only thing Sharon Pollack’s Everything Relative has going for it is its political correctness. Billed as “a lesbian Big Chill” the film is amateurish, self-indulgent, stupid, sentimental, politically tendentious, ill written, ill-acted and ill-directed, but, by golly, it hews to the Party line without the slightest deviation. Pro-choice, pro-left, anti-Christian, anti-conservative: all its views…
Hard Eight is a brilliant little film by Paul Thomas Anderson, who also wrote the screenplay. It is a retelling (sort of) of Shakespeare’s Tempest set in the seedy but ever-atmospheric world of Nevada gambling dens. It begins with a castaway called John (John C. Reilly), washed up outside “Jack’s Coffee Shop” somewhere along a…
Absolute Power is a typical product of the Clint Eastwood line of knock-off existentialist heroes: a vehicle, that is, for yet another mythologization of the high-plains-drifter/man-with-no-name anti-hero whom neither old Clint nor his devoted audience ever seems to get tired of. I got tired of it myself a long time ago, so I should probably…
Sling Blade by Billy Bob Thornton deserves credit for the acting job of its director and writer, who also plays the principal role, that of Karl Childers, a mentally retarded man in his 30s released from a state institution — the state seems to be Arkansas — after serving twenty years for murdering his mother…
Hotel de Love by Craig Rosenberg is, like Cosi, a fresh and amusing Australian film that puts Hollywood schlock like Fools Rush In to shame. It tells the story of twin brothers, Rick (Aden Young, who also plays Nick in Cosi) and Stephen (Simon Bossell) who fall in love with the same girl, Melissa (Saffron…
Blood and Wine is another of those collaborations between Bob Rafelson (director) and Jack Nicholson (star) which promises to be on the cutting edge of hip—just as Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens and The Postman Always Rings Twice were in their day. Another way of putting it might be that the film…
Thieves by André Téchiné, is one of those films where the artistic means completely overpower the narrative ends. Here we have multiple narrators, shifts backward and forward in time, several brooding, complex, mysterious characters and a tangle of unexplained plot details trailing off into philosophical conversations full of gnomic utterance. And all for what? To…
The Beautician and the Beast, written by Todd Graff and directed by Ken Kwapis, is built entirely on the comedic talents of Fran Drescher, “The Nanny” in a moderately popular TV series of that name. Unfortunately, those foundations are not quite firm enough to support the house. Or castle, as it happens, since the “high…
Dante’s Peak by Roger Donaldson (written by Leslie Bohem) is a standard-formula disaster movie. The hero, Harry Dalton (Pierce Brosnan) is a ruggedly handsome vulcanologist who (we learn over the opening credits) has lost his fiancée, a colleague, to an erupting volcano. Now he harbors his secret sorrow and treads a lone path through the…
If you could legitimately take, as some reviewers seem illegitimately to have done, the final words of the Pakistani convenience store clerk, Nazir Chowdray (Ajay Naidu), in SubUrbia as the real direction in which the film is heading, it would not have been at all a bad picture — though written by Eric Bogosian (from…
