There’s something curiously inanimate about Alan Rudolph’s Afterglow, but it’s certainly not the luminous and thoroughly engaging Julie Christie. Here’s a film that means to meditate on the pitfalls of marriage in the Nineties using slyness and dark wit, but it comes off as bloodless as a blueprint. Only the…
The driven, drawling Texas preacher Robert Duvall portrays in The Apostle is the latest in his long line of true believers, good and evil. Often taken for granted, this extraordinary actor has, on TV and in movies, played Nazi mass murderer Adolph Eichmann, Communist mass murderer Joseph Stalin, savior of…
In the paranoid cosmology of Gregory Hoblit’s Fallen, satanic evil is transmitted from person to person by casual touching, like typhoid or some rampant strain of the flu. Almost no one is immune in this deadly game of tag. Not fry cooks on their cigarette breaks, not award-winning teachers walking…
The superb British actor Alan Rickman, star of Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Sense and Sensibility, makes his directorial debut with The Winter Guest, a meditation on life, death and human relations that is as elusive as it is fascinating. It’s the kind of film that turns over in the mind,…
Does Robert De Niro presume to play free safety for the Jets? Can Denzel Washington slam dunk over Dikembe Mutombo? Well, no. But if Dennis Rodman gets a notion to do King Lear, better break out the swords. Because ever since Sonja Henie and her skates signed with Darryl F…
Martin Scorsese’s Kundun is a deeply ceremonial experience: It’s like watching a serene pageant of colors, rituals and costumes. The film is about the Dalai Lama–recognized as the fourteenth reincarnation of the Buddha of Compassion and the spiritual and political leader of Tibet–from his childhood in 1937 through the Chinese…
After watching Hard Rain, all but the most intrepid humans and whatever ducks are in the audience will probably feel like changing into dry clothes and curling up in front of the fire with a cup of hot bouillon. This has got to be the wettest movie in memory–wetter than…
Optimists confident that Prime Minister Tony Blair and Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams would simply sit down to tea last month at 10 Downing Street and toss eight centuries of strife into history’s dustbin have another think coming. Last week, Irish nationalists inside notorious Maze Prison gunned down Billy Wright,…
It’s the New Woody Allen Movie. In capital letters. And even when the old clarinetist is playing slightly out of tune, as he is in Deconstructing Harry, it doesn’t make so much difference. Faithful as the Earth circling the sun, Allen’s comedies of anxiety keep on coming, one per year…
While not a movie year to go down in infamy, 1997 was still mostly full of hype and holler. If the annual yield is judged by how many great films came out, 1997 was a loser. If you factor in the number of films that brought fresh talents and fresh…
Kevin Costner’s last outing as director/star, Dances With Wolves, nabbed Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay, but his post-apocalyptic followup, The Postman, is too standard-issue to impress even the resolutely middlebrow minds of Academy voters. Nor is it likely to please audiences. Call it what you will–Waterworld…
When was the last time the audience applauded a trailer and the movie lived up to it? Independence Day enticed millions with its preview shot of the White House blown to smithereens, but that film was a dumb, elephantine sci-fi pastiche. The trailer for Wag the Dog, a far more…
When first we see Melvin Udall, middle-aged misanthrope, he’s stuffing his neighbor’s pesky little dog into the garbage chute of their Manhattan apartment building. That’s perfection. Melvin, we soon learn, is nasty by reflex–a selfish, acid-tongued homophobe who has no use for Jews, blacks, children, women or anybody else who…
Imagine Macaulay Culkin as a three-inch rodent with no personality, and you’ve pretty much nailed the thing. Mouse Hunt, the third movie to be released by DreamWorks Pictures, is Home Alone boiled down to grim, humorless destruction, with a nameless mouse as the tormentor. Seen another way, it’s Tom and…
1. L.A. Confidential. Directed Curtis Hanson revives Fifties noir in high style. Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe and Kim Bassinger wallow in the mire and betrayals. 2. Mrs. Brown. Was Queen Victoria hot for her manservant? Dame Judi Dench convinces in a model of film literacy. 3. Boogie Nights. Rootless Seventies…
The new Gus Van Sant film Good Will Hunting is like an adolescent’s fantasy of being tougher and smarter and more misunderstood than anybody else. It’s also touchy-feely with a vengeance. Is this the same director who made Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy? Those films had a fresh way of…
For a high-school dropout with a bad temper, Quentin Tarantino has done pretty well for himself. Let’s see. In five years he’s grown into an ultra-hip icon with the fanatical following of a rock star and an entire school of imitators. He’s simultaneously brought Hollywood moguls to their knees and…
Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter is about grief and the search for grace and the frail relationships between parents and children. It’s a profound and beautiful work, and if we had any doubts about the skill of this gifted filmmaker in the wake of Speaking Parts or Exotica, they vanish…
When the Titanic, the grandest ocean liner of her day, struck an iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912, and sank to the bottom of the dead-calm, starlit North Atlantic, she launched a rich tangle of legends and lessons that endure to this day. You’ll find very few of…
It’s a tough act to follow, sweeping the Oscars with a hallowed epic about a redeemed Nazi who saves doomed Jews from the ovens. But Steven Spielberg, all grown up now and moving steadily forward, doesn’t disappoint. With Amistad, Hollywood’s master of narrative boldly plumbs some other heavyweight issues–the enduring…
Now that the Japanese Tora-san series–with fifty-some entries in thirty years–has presumably drawn to a close following the death of star Kiyoshi Atsumi last year, the James Bond films constitute the longest-running continuous series around. They’ve had their ups and downs, but something about the Bond formula has proved enduring…
It’s been forty years since the New Wave came crashing down on the placid shore of traditional French filmmaking, but to the faithful, it was only yesterday. Students of the art cinematic and devotees of all things francais are heralding the rerelease of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 milestone Contempt as a…
