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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
I’m Not Rappaport, written and directed by Herb Gardner from his stage play, takes its title from the old vaudeville joke. Comic walks across the stage as it were down a street and encounters straight man with surprise: “Rappaport! What happened to you?” he says. “You used to be a short, fat man and now…
Portrait of a Lady by Jane Campion has a very strange beginning. A bunch of contemporary girls, photographed in black and white and grainy stills, as if they were the fading memories, talk about love and men and kissing and “relationships” and marriage over opening credits until one holds out her hand and we see…
Citizen Ruth by Alexander Payne is not so good a movie as it ought to be, given its materials and the good idea of its conception (you should pardon the term). Ruth Stoops (Laura Dern) is a feckless dopehead living on the margins of lower middle class Omaha. The film begins with a scene of…
Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet is a good example of Shakespeare killed by terminal hipness. It is remarkably clever, and even has some good dramatic ideas. Having Juliet (Claire Danes) wake up just before Romeo (Leonardo DiCaprio) drinks the poison and simply cutting Friar Lawrence (Pete Postlethwaite) out of it is an interesting notion and…
Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet is a good example of Shakespeare killed by terminal hipness. It is remarkably clever, and even has some good dramatic ideas. Having Juliet (Claire Danes) wake up just before Romeo (Leonardo DiCaprio) drinks the poison and simply cutting Friar Lawrence (Pete Postlethwaite) out of it is an interesting notion and…
Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump is one of those precious, self- conscious films that tries so hard to be heart-warming that it ultimately gives you heartburn. Candide, or perhaps Huckleberry Finn, meets Woody Allen’s Zelig in the title character, and it makes for a disconcerting mix. But this is not really a satire, as you might…
