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…
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…
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…
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…
You have to start watching right at the beginning of La Cérémonie, Claude Chabrol’s latest addition to one of the oddest and most compelling bodies of cinematic work in the world. Why does the maid, Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire), answer the questions of her would-be employer, Catherine Lelièvre (Jacqueline Bisset) in that odd way? Why is…
We might call Metro by Tom Carter a palimpsest movie—one where you can read another text beneath the one on the surface. To some extent this is true of all Hollywood movies, which are made (as they nearly always have been made) with a cavalier disregard for the writer’s craft. At some point in the…
In Love and War is a New Line release of a Richard Attenborough film, based on Henry Villard’s book, Hemingway in Love and War. It is co-written by Villard’s son, Dimitri. Villard Sr. was in Italy with Hemingway and Agnes von Kurowsky, the (American) nurse on whom Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms is…
Fierce Creatures by Robert Young and Fred Schepisi brings together again the four principal actors of A Fish Called Wanda, though not in their characters from that film. This is quite a different story—about an Antipodean tycoon presumably based on Rupert Murdoch called Rod McCain (Kevin Kline) who takes over a small zoo in England…
Now we know who put the “Ham” in “Hamlet.” Who else but Kenneth Branagh, whose new, four hour movie of the play is his latest bid for the title of world’s greatest actor. And world’s greatest Shakespearean director and entrepreneur to boot. Readers with long memories will remember, perhaps, my strictures against Mel Gibson’s cinematic…
Jackie Chan’s First Strike, directed by Stanley Tong, is another example of the only kind of action film I seem to get any enjoyment out of anymore. Most of them are so artificial and unbelievable: special effects overwhelming the human element. But the remarkable Jackie Chan does action at the human level. This he gets…
In the Realm of the Senses is a Japanese film made twenty years ago by Nagisa Oshima. At the time it was considered shocking even by the relaxed standards of the day and it was seized by U.S. Customs Agents. What innocent times they seem! Nowadays we aren’t so much more depraved than people were…
