Palmetto is a film noir set in a torpid seaside Florida town. It’s based on the 1961 James Hadley Chase novel Just Another Sucker, and when we first see Harry Barber (Woody Harrelson), he fits that description exactly. He looks dazed and confused — a sucker incarnate. Suckers are, of…
Critics and audiences outside France have been going on for so long about the decline of French cinema that it’s fun to see a French film — Irma Vep — that says much the same thing. The rap is, of course, somewhat unfair — most raps are — but there’s…
Martin Scorsese’s Kundun is a deeply ceremonial experience — like watching a serene pageant of colors, rituals, and costumes. It tracks the life of the Dalai Lama — recognized as the fourteenth reincarnation of the Buddha of Compassion and the spiritual and political leader of Tibet — from his childhood…
Swedish director Jan Troell’s Hamsun, starring Max von Sydow, is easily the greatest film I’ve seen in years. It takes you as far out as you can go — to the limits of feeling. As a movie about a great and grievous artist made by an artist of equal rank,…
Where would Irish filmmakers be these days without “the Troubles”? In just the past couple of years we’ve seen The Crying Game (1992), In the Name of the Father (1993), Michael Collins (1996), Some Mother’s Son (1996), and now The Boxer, the latest collaboration between director Jim Sheridan, screenwriter Terry…
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…
If Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown didn’t arrive weighted with post-Pulp Fiction (1994) expectations, it might be easier to see it for what it is: an overlong, occasionally funky caper movie directed with some feeling. It’s derived from Elmore Leonard’s 1992 bestseller Rum Punch, with the location shifted from Palm Beach…
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 (1987) and Drugstore Cowboy (1989)? Those films had a fresh…
If one is in a Biblical frame of mind, the sinking of the White Star Line’s R.M.S. Titanic about 400 miles off the southern coast of Newfoundland in 1912 could well be characterized as an act of divine one-upmanship. The 46,328-ton “ship of dreams” was struck down on its maiden…
Steven Spielberg’s Amistad is being given the Big Picture treatment — Schindler’s List big, not Jurassic Park big. Last week’s Newsweek featured the film on its cover, calling it “Spielberg’s controversial new movie,” even though it had not yet been released and the only “controversy” was a legal one about…
You can’t exactly call Alien Resurrection a pleasurable experience, but then again you wouldn’t say that about its predecessors either. Directed by the Frenchman Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who previously codirected with Marc Caro Delicatessen (1991) and The City of Lost Children (1995), this fourth installment in the Alien onslaught is once…
You’re part of a team of Russia-based international bad guys that wants to knock off someone at the very top of the U.S. government. Who you gonna call? The Jackal. As personified by Bruce Willis, this assassin di tutti assassins is a rather tight-lipped psychopath with an alarming collection of…
A glance at the cast list for the new Sidney Lumet hospital drama Critical Care might lead you to expect an embarrassment of riches. Instead, the results are often just plain embarrassing. How could a film starring James Spader, Helen Mirren, Albert Brooks, Kyra Sedgwick, Anne Bancroft, Jeffrey Wright, Wallace…
