In the twisted game plan of Barry Levinson’s scintillating political satire Wag the Dog, presidential aides concoct an election-eve war with Albania in the hopes of torpedoing charges that their boss improperly touched a teenage girl. Hollywood and Washington work together to create that greatest of diversions: an international crisis…

I try not to use the word I. I try not to be too “self-referential” or self-consciously “literary.” But 1997 wasn’t exactly the kind of movie year that made me feel “cinematic.” As I looked over my writing for the past year, I was struck by how often I used…

In John Berendt’s beguiling travel-cum-true-crime book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the people of Savannah “flourished like hothouse plants tended by an indulgent gardener. The ordinary became extraordinary. Eccentrics thrived. Every nuance and quirk of personality achieved greater brilliance in that lush enclosure than would have been…

John Grisham’s The Rainmaker lulls you into the mindset you get while reading a bestseller at the beach. What a sad thing to say about a Francis Ford Coppola movie! Rather than heighten your awareness the way director Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) or The Conversation (1974) did, The Rainmaker makes…

Put brutally the marvelous The Wings of the Dove is the story of a romantic frame-up that backfires. Thankfully nothing is put brutally in this smart, lyrical movie. Director Iain Softley and screenwriter Hossein Amini cut to the thick of Henry James’ masterpiece about amorous extortion and moral purification. Helena…

Mad City, a descendant of Billy Wilder’s 1951 Ace in the Hole, may irritate orthodox movie buffs. In the coruscating Wilder classic, Kirk Douglas’ supremely cynical newspaper reporter turns the rescue of a cave-in victim into “the big carnival” (the film’s alternate title). The protagonist of Mad City, a TV…