Kenneth Branagh’s A Midwinter’s Tale is another sweet comic valentine to those batty but lovable show folk. So if you’re less than enthralled by the vanities and insecurities of actors, you may as well stop reading this and start shopping for another movie. Now that half the house has departed,…
French director Barbet Schroeder’s fifth American film, Before and After, strains to say something important about families–what binds them together, what tears them apart–in an age of moral ambiguity. In a more oblique way, this was also the subject of Martin Scorsese’s harrowing remake of the classic thriller Cape Fear,…
Have Messrs. Ivory and Merchant shown you into one too many drawing rooms? Just about had it with the Jane Austen craze? Up to here with Victorian-class warfare? How about the eternal feud between manners and desire? That’s okay. A lot of people feel the same way. But before you…
My favorite public official, the profoundly corrupt James J. Walker, is said to have spent all his waking hours between 1926 and 1932 lolling in a first-base box at Yankee Stadium, visiting his tailor, brokering crooked deals in speakeasies and throwing dice in a back room at the old Central…
Assorted Hollywood hotshots are still going downhill fast in Aspen and Telluride, but for the most part they regard Denver as fly-over country. So when the Mile High City shows up in a movie–even a movie as scummy as Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead–it’s a good bet…
China’s great filmmaker Zhang Yimou has never gotten along with his country’s ruthless government, and his stock recently dropped with his longtime leading lady, the ravishing Gong Li. But Zhang is absolutely dedicated to his art: Shanghai Triad is another astonishingly beautiful film in a line that includes Red Sorghum,…
To call John Woo a loose cannon is to understate the case. The former star director of the bloody, flamboyant, no-holds-barred Hong Kong cinema is a blazing wall of machine-gun fire and two halves of a severed freight train smashing together. Woo is helicopters bursting into balls of flame, fighter…
Historians tell us that King Richard III’s reputation as England’s most ruthless monarch is a bit inflated. In all likelihood, he wasn’t even the original Tricky Dick: A century earlier, after all, Richard II murdered one of his uncles and confiscated his cousin’s estates before getting himself imprisoned in Pontefract…
If John Grisham wanted to sue the makers of The Juror for impersonation of a legal thriller, he’d have a pretty good case. Some might see the star combo of Demi Moore and Alec Baldwin as a Dream Team, but the movie is strictly lightweight stuff, and unintentionally dense to…
Now comes 25-year-old Noah Baumbach to say his comic piece for the generation that disdains the label “X.” As a spokesman–at least for the affluent, white, college-grad segment of the group–his credentials are all in order: Recent degree from upscale Vassar (yes, they’ve had boys there for years), fashionably hip…
The shenanigans of Charles, Di and Fergie may intrigue the tabloid-TV crowd, but the present British royals are simply no match for their misbehaving forebears. You don’t even need to crack a history book to see the difference: Filmmakers have recently given us satisfying new interpretations of George III’s lunacy…
If there’s a less popular cause in the land of three-strikes-and-you’re-out justice than abolition of the death penalty, I don’t know what it is. Maybe a salary increase for Deion Sanders. Or amnesty for Saddam Hussein. The current occupant of the White House, cops sipping coffee down at the station…
God knows that American schools need inspirational teachers and that the funding cuts that threaten arts education everywhere are lamentable. But when Hollywood third-stringers get their hands on such material, the results are doomed to flunk the test. Mr. Holland’s Opus, in which Richard Dreyfuss portrays a budding composer who…
Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s The City of Lost Children is a kind of crypto-Freudian fairy tale about a sinister mad scientist in a foggy harbor town who kidnaps children so he can steal their dreams. He also has philosophical arguments with a disembodied brain living in a tank of…
Put Charles Bronson into a nice Chanel pantsuit, then apply the right shade of lipstick, and he’d seem an awful lot like the avenging angel Sally Field plays in Eye for an Eye. Gee, maybe that is good ol’ Charlie up there. In any event, director John Schlesinger has given…
Jennifer Jason Leigh, a girlish wisp with huge eyes, has emerged as one of the movies’ most accomplished actresses on the strength of her fearless essays in depravity, which all go bravely against type. Her career credits include low-down prostitutes in Last Exit to Brooklyn and Miami Blues, a coke-addicted…
The foundation on which Terry Gilliam has built the exotic and impressive fantasy 12 Monkeys may seem awfully familiar–at first. For one thing, this paranoiac vision is partly set, again, in a grimy, post-apocalyptic future ruled by Orwellian slavemasters. For a second, it strenuously demonizes science and technology: The cackling…
The abundance of golden light flooding James Foley’s Two Bits lets you know right away that you’re in trouble. Nostalgia trouble. That light, which never lets up, is the same color as sap, and there’s nothing quite so sappy as a memory movie in which an aging man looks way,…
Mel Brooks has clearly lost a step in recent years. But before writing him off as the literally 2,000-year-old man, have a look at Dracula: Dead and Loving It. It’s a satire that has some of the old Brooksian flash and fizz. The Guinness Book of Records tells us there…
The distinction in Oliver Parker’s new film version of Othello is that Shakespeare’s tragic hero is being played for the first time on the screen by a black actor. Despite seeming out of his depth for much of the proceedings, Laurence Fishburne brings raw, lusty power to the great role,…
The four disparate filmmakers who contributed episodes to Four Rooms apparently have one thing in common: a nasty streak that won’t quit. Set in a down-at-the-heels hotel on New Year’s Eve and loosely linked by the presence of a scummy bellhop named Ted (Tim Roth), all the vignettes are resolutely…
BEST TEN OF 1995 1. The Usual Suspects. Bryan Singer’s dark, twisting crime thriller restores the old glory of film noir, then presses on into uncharted territory with Kevin Spacey, Stephen Baldwin, Kevin Pollak, Gabriel Byrne and Chazz Palminteri in tow. Best advice: See it twice. And look out for…
