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…
With 1994’s Exotica, Atom Egoyan secured his reputation as Canada’s leading director; his new film, The Sweet Hereafter, based on a celebrated novel by Russell Banks, should solidify Egoyan’s hold on that title. Egoyan’s work, in general, is small-scale enough to seem arty and plain enough to be accessible. The…
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…
Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry is a film made by a free man — free certainly in a good way and perhaps also in a not-so-good way. Liberated, for whatever reason, from the need to play a nice guy, playing the bad man he does here frees Allen of the optimistic…
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…
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…
Now that the Japanese Tora-san series — with 50-odd entries in 30 years — has presumably drawn to a close following last year’s death of star Kiyoshi Atsumi, the James Bond films constitute the longest-running continuous series around. They’ve had their ups and downs, but something about the Bond formula…
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…
Wes Craven’s Scream, which opened almost exactly a year ago, was the surprise hit of an overcrowded Christmas season. The success was a triumph partly of counterprogramming: In the midst of a glut of classy Oscar contenders, Scream was the only teen horror film. It was also helped by the…
First The Heiress was unofficially remade as Washington Square, then Ace in the Hole as Mad City, and then The Day of the Jackal as The Jackal. Now we get The Absent-Minded Professor, all dressed up in new threads, as Flubber. In this frenzy of plundering the past, is nothing…
Documentarian Errol Morris is by far best known for his 1988 feature The Thin Blue Line, which is often described as the only film that ever got an innocent man off death row. But Morris got his start with very different sorts of material: His first two films — 1978’s…
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…
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…
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…
Over the past three years, Twentieth Century Fox has built an ambitious new animation studio in Phoenix, putting the promising Don Bluth and Gary Goldman in charge. The two were obvious choices. Since the animators defected from Disney Studios in 1979 to form Don Bluth Productions, they’ve turned out the…
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…
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…
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…
