Elmore Leonard’s Touch is identified on the paperback as a mystery and carried in stores next to Leonard’s celebrated crime novels (like Get Shorty). But this wan little book is actually the problem child of Leonard’s oeuvre–the only crime it involves is lack of truth in advertising, and that’s on…
For generations, the heftier works of Leo Tolstoy have challenged undergraduate lifting power and speed-reading skills as much as they have confounded the world’s moviemakers. That dark tribute to nineteenth-century adultery, Anna Karenina, was filmed in America three times, beginning with Garbo in 1935 and ending with Jacqueline Bisset in…
Since Baby LeRoy first put the screws to W.C. Fields back in the 1930s, the intractable child who torments the cranky old man has rampaged through movie history like a wild force of nature. The most celebrated recent example, of course, saw little Macaulay Culkin befouling the burglary schemes of…
In Absolute Power, Clint Eastwood plays Luther Whitney, a master thief who burgles on little cat feet. He’s as stealthy as the Pink Panther pilferer, though not nearly as amusing. Luther, you see, is presented to us as an artist. We first see him at the National Gallery dutifully copying…
Robert E. Howard, the subject of Dan Ireland’s wonderful debut film The Whole Wide World, created the sword-and-sorcery genre with his Conan stories. Howard had a grand yet coarse-grained consciousness. His Conan stories, set in a fictitious primordial age full of demons and killers, boasted swift, cartoon-flavored action (“He moved…
Andre Techine’s Les Voleurs (Thieves) is stuffed with sex, blood and grand-theft auto, and at its heart lurks a homicide detective who’s deeply compromised himself in the investigation of a big case. But before anyone gets the wrong idea, please note that neither Clint Eastwood nor Arnold Schwarzenegger got within…
The spookiness that has seeped into first-time director Vondie Curtis Hall’s surreal action comedy Gridlock’d is the kind of dramatic bonus no moviemaker hopes for. It derives from the gang murder last September of the film’s 25-year-old co-star, Tupac Shakur, and it colors the entire length of this dark farce…
“In the constant struggle of man against nature,” the press notes inform us, “it is the most devastating adversary of all–a force… which suddenly explodes to wreak havoc and destruction on an unsuspecting population.” The notes are, of course, referring to a volcano. But…wait! Didn’t I read the same thing…
If the brutal miscarriage of British justice that drove In the Name of the Father didn’t send you running to the nearest Sinn Fein recruiter and the fiery romanticism of Michael Collins didn’t have you putting together a tidy shipment of machine guns for the Provisionals in Belfast, maybe Some…
At a twenty-year remove, Star Wars comes off less as the work of a wizard than as the weird obsessive outgrowth of an eccentric American primitive. George Lucas is a tycoon version of those self-taught craftsmen who fill backyards, storage rooms and cramped city apartments with paintings, gewgaws or wire-hanger…
Eight years after A Fish Called Wanda rang up $200 million at the box office and won an Oscar for its manic villain, Kevin Kline, the cast has reunited in hopes of putting another dark charge into movie comedy. Fierce Creatures is not a sequel but a major departure, and…
When an incredulous Jane Campion fan asked what I hated about Campion’s version of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, I immediately responded, “Everything.” Actually, I thought Barbara Hershey, as the subtle villainess, Madame Merle, made a good first impression: I laughed appreciatively when the heroine, Isabel Archer (Nicole…
In Mother, Albert Brooks plays John Henderson, a science-fiction novelist recently divorced from his second wife who decides he can’t risk another relationship until he comes to terms with his mother. So he does the logical thing: He moves in with her. He hauls out of her garage all his…
Just when you think Eddie Murphy has pulled off a glorious comeback, he slips up on the banana peel of ego. To wit: Not six months ago, Murphy burst back to the top with his energetic takes on seven different characters–fat, skinny and uniformly hilarious–in the sleeper of 1996, The…
Let’s give Kenneth Branagh credit, shall we, for the breadth of his good sense. At 35, this Irish prodigy is the foremost cinematic interpreter of Shakespeare in a time when everyone just short of Jackie Chan and Jim Carrey seems to be cooking up a new movie version of Macbeth…
When the British critic John Russell Taylor called the Hollywood musical “a city built to music,” he was thinking more of Fred Astaire’s work than of Woody Allen’s. But anyone who remembers how Allen swaddled that beautiful opening montage of Manhattan in “Rhapsody in Blue” knows that when it comes…
It may come as a surprise to some that leukemia, senility and bitterness between parent and child are the stuff of comedy. But therein lies the unlikely miracle of Marvin’s Room, a compelling drama about a shattered family trying to pick up the pieces that draws much of its strength…
Even the staunchest defenders of the First Amendment must reach pretty far down into their belief to come up with Larry Flynt as a poster boy. An unschooled Kentucky hillbilly with a big mouth and a gift for manipulation, he stuffed Hustler magazine, a phenomenon of the Seventies, full of…
In an ideal world, Ghosts of Mississippi would be about how the widow of Medgar Evers and the people of Mississippi finally got justice thirty years after the civil rights leader’s assassination. But Hollywood is not an ideal world–never has been–so Rob Reiner’s well-meaning, hand-wringing movie is really about the…
New Line’s release of Jackie Chan’s First Strike is salvo number three in Chan’s invasion of America. (Miramax’s version of the 1991 Operation Condor, the last film on which the star also took a director’s credit, is due out in May.) Like its predecessors, Rumble in the Bronx and Supercop,…
A famous movie composer once told me a joke: Two songwriters are sitting around, and one of them says to the other, “I just saw the most amazing thing. A man fell off the roof of a building, hit a ledge, fell to the street, got winged by a bus…
For people who grow up loving movies, returning to old favorites can be as jarring and illuminating as blowing the dust off a family photo album. Even if our judgments about the films are identical the second time around, our emotional reactions, if we’ve grown at all, change or deepen…
