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"Joan Ellis: The
Pauline Kael of the Internet." --
Newsweek
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"Joan Ellis: The
Pauline Kael of the Internet." --
Newsweek
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Quotable reviewsTitles are alphabetized.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
A blood-soaked, spineless story that takes more
than two hours to crawl through its own pretensions.
Given that even the best of actors cannot make magic with a
terrible script, it is surely the writer of this movie who must
take a tomato in the face.
8 WOMEN & SWEET HOME
ALABAMA If you missed these five small triumphs that passed too quickly
through your neighborhood theater on the weakened wings of small
advertising budgets, you can rent yourself some real pleasure at
the video store.
He disarms us.
Clint Eastwood wants to tell us a few things about presidential
morals, campaign financing, and the general state of Beltway
politics, and he does it through the person of Luther Whitney,
master thief.
What else can be around
this dark corner but redemption?
Chris Cooper, toothless, ragged, and passionate, and Meryl Streep, with a big
wink in her eye, decide to embrace the crazy tale. Given just one deft comic, the flat visual jokes fail to cover
the real mistake of trying to build a romantic comedy on a nasty
premise.
A character study without compelling characters is doomed.
Spending night after night watching her old B-movies in a pedestrian flat,
Phyllis thinks she is getting exactly what she deserves.
Those who broke the code weren't snubbed, one character said,
they were eradicated.
The movie offers two hours of uninterrupted anxiety.
I was hard pressed to figure out exactly why Alex is such a dim bulb. Mr. Almovodar's marvelous film announces simply that, in today's mad world, the kindness of strangers-civility-is life's essential element.
Either you're somebody, or you're nobody... As for Hollywood, self-congratulation on splashing the screen with bathroom humor is its own form of awkward adolescence.
This movie is a first-rate romantic comedy in which everything works.
He has created a consistently creepy portrait of self-worship.
In a great opening scene, a huge black and white cow observes the procession
of black Mafia cars winding up his hillside while a terrific 1950s
voice-over sets the stage.
As secrets go, this film has a big one.
The movie is massive, sentimental overkill, but it's also a
no-lose deal for everyone between three and ten as well for big
people who want to believe that an angel is waiting at their
shoulders to offer an assist in a tough situation.
Filmed without embellishment, the film cries out the haunted
thoughts of survivors fifty years after they bore witness to
organized annihilation at a time when the world considered itself
civilized.
Denzel Washington puts himself on line for both the credit and the blame They have covered the lack of a good story with almost three hours of the clanking of colliding fiberglass, while the sky overhead is filled with visions of dollar bills.
This tale becomes a real white-knuckler that manages also to
capture the best of our national essence without waving the flag.
This is a man of wild passions, a sermonizer ready to use his
fists to defend his beliefs, or a baseball bat to erase the man
who has won his wife and children away from him.
The film alternates between
heavy-handed irony and a plunge into the grotesque.
The movie does offer a haunting question: Is this paranoia, or is this the new reality?
It is an absorbing evening spent in the seventeenth century.
The sad thing about this fiasco is that Whoopi Goldberg, with her
abundant wit and intelligence, could easily have made great fun
with the fertile field of gender resentment in the business
world.
The movie opens with a sublime standoff between Melvin (Jack
Nicholson) and a small dog so well trained that he easily handles
a starring role in this zany ballet.
Most of the cast breathe
heavily and in high volume from some degree of desire or fear or guilt. The sight of the patient
and caregiver losing their shared life is unbearably sad.
I think I don't want to know anybody who doesn't like it.
The witty and sophisticated animals of Babe have been dropped
into a violent script that strips them of their delicacy.
The emotional exhaustion of watching this
film is a measure of its expert director, writer, and cast. That bit of bad taste is strike two. They spring full-blown from the kitchens and beds of the men they
served, hang holsters on their hips and make their way as
ex-hookers bent on a new life.
The universal language,
it seems, is not music. daughters and a husband with the human potential of a snail We're not bank robbers, Martine. It will be an insider's laser vision of a narrow slice of
privilege, and it will make our skins crawl. (Barcelona)
They set a table in the desert with cloth, fruit loops and
hormone pills. (The Adventures of Priscilla...)
A two hour dose of computerized images is intolerably insulting
to an audience waiting to be invited into the fun.
How did this happen? The connected strangers stroll the night away on the streets
of the unfamiliar city in a marvelous conversational courtship
that is free of competition and full of trust.
It will be a snap. No violence, no problems. It's very hard to film a popular American movie star as a cave
man without making him look silly.
In an utterly restrained performance, [Oprah] Winfrey sets the slow,
mournful tone of the reluctant survivor,
while director Johnathan Demme tells Morrison's story slowly, through
images and words.
I wish I could tell you how the story of this nice family turns out, but just when Mick was being pounded to a pulp by a giant wielding an iron chair, just as his little girl threw her face into her mother's protective shoulder and his son's eyes grew wide in horror, I was seized with an overwhelming desire not to see a second more of their collective suffering.
He will find the process a bit like
trying to separate Boardwalk taffy. This modernized, brittle version of "La Cage" is very funny, it
is also without heart.
It leaves us punch drunk in thought. On the wedding day that is the result of much family plotting, flower bedecked white linens blow in the breeze while the brother of the bride celebrates by shooting up the sky with his pistol and a gangster juggles hand grenades.
It's a gorgeous road trip set to a rousing truckers' score with a
running commentary about "frying the brakes" and the
technicalities of jackknifing.
Even fiction, especially when it is disguised as documentary, is a direct route to people's emotions when it holds the promise of possibility.
Wacky from start to finish and wildly uneven, the movie is funny far more often than it is dull.
“All is lost.” This is an ugly, mean-spirited movie.
Nature covers the warriors' tracks with beauty as their
stories become history.. His trip into greed and excess is all his own doing.
The movie is a virtual catalogue of the inanities of such topics
as the politics of lensless eyeglasses, the temperature of
Belgian Waffles, and the need for a "bag snagger" to retrieve the
plastic bags that get caught in the trees that grow in
Brooklyn. -- (Blue in the Face)
In good hands, there is something very moving about a small slice
of the lives of people who never leave home, and this movie is in
good hands. (The Run of the Country)
Forty years ago, institutionalized erasure was pervasive.
"...studded with newsreel footage that is immediate and raw."
BOLLYWOOD/HOLLYWOOD These are gamblers without souls, salesmen without scruples.
On this night he spots Eddie the nightclub busboy, pulls him into
the family, and turns him into Dirk Diggler, porn star
extraordinaire.
"...death by guns - Japan 39, America 11127." Daniel Day-Lewis, carrying Danny's transformation in his eyes,
can convey more without speaking than most actors can in a
monologue.
She gets to the core of a girl brimming with cocky self-confidence who is murdered for her dream.
It is a road movie with a love affair, an illness, and
relationship problems, but this time around the disease is AIDS,
and the love affair is between two women.
Let the grumps get lost.
The emotional isolation
of intelligence work exacts an awful price on marriage. It is extremely difficult to live for a few hours in a world of
depravity brought on by men in the name of God.
That bad book has come a long way.
Whenever Bridget ends up at home, wrapped in a bathrobe and mired in the sloppiness of her despair, we love the sight because we know this woman will triumph.
BRIDGET JONES: THE EDGE OF REASON This grisly movie is an insult to the scale and the magic of the 30-foot
screen.
There is not one false note in Palminteri's performance, and if a
hood can have grace, this hood has it.
Raised in a Catholic Church that still clings with bloody
fingernails to dictates that contradict human nature, the
brothers ponder the forbidden sins of premarital sex, birth
control, abortion, and masturbation--and then get right on with it.
...an absolutely
glorious landfill of random information, some of it substantive, much of it
useless.
The simplest equations in life are usually complicated only by
the tortured egos of the players, and these players twist
themselves into pretzels trying to make life work.
Best of all, he has done it not with a lecture, but with an
incoherent, nearly delirious humor.
Strachey and Carrington were known for wit and substance, but
you'd never guess it from this film. (Carrington)
If the movie is sluggish, the travelogue is terrific. (A Month by the Lake)
One caretaker in particular spreads her arms and her love as widely as she can. Ace sums it up: "Keep them playing; keep them coming back; in the
end we get everything."
Is he ready to be granted the double O rating that is a license to kill? This 85-minute visit to the Kerrigans just might put you in a good mood for a week.
Laughter punctuates the path of the imposter. Under the relentless force of Thomas
Vinterberg's hand-held camera, we watch the celebrants dance to the music
of disintegration.
Good lines and innovative acting make
the movie worth seeing, but neither can erase the empty nastiness of
table talk at Elaine's.
Watching Hollywood dancing around the Hays Office is grand sport.
Central Station is the reward that puts a smile on the face of movielovers
who search diligently, and so often in vain, for small jewels.
This is a conventional story driven by suspense and images
instead of bodies and blood.
Nothing happens in this movie to refute the accusation hurled out by Gavin’s
wife Cynthia Banek (Amanda Peet), “Law is based on finding ways to cheat.Lawyers know how the world works.”
"Thuds, tears, and cracks assault the audience." Without a trace of self-congratulation, Mr. Smith becomes the
first person to portray gay women as something other than a
subculture toying with a lesser alternative.
Their collective achievement is herculean considering the risks they took It would be inconceivable to think of this movie as anything but
Australian.
It's a wonder the audience didn't let out a collective shriek,
"Surprise me, please!"
Pro-choice and pro-life extremists take a pounding in this good
movie about a grizzly subject.
There is an awful sadness in a place that nobody loves. The first film charmed the audience into rooting for each man to
discover his core in the comic ups and downs of an alien
adventure, but now the lines and chemistry among the players are
thoroughly flat.
After stumbling, they continue-anonymous power players in the
new culture of life as a movie where a
stumble is merely a short new scene.
Democrats, it seems, are into sex, while Republicans
hyperventilate on power.
A guy who says, "That's what high school is about: algebra, bad
lunch and infidelity," is not likely to be touched by the
pressures of duty, drive, or goals.
It has Tommy Lee Jones and Susan Sarandon; a bad plot couldn't
get a better break
The British and Irish film industries, studded with huge talents that have entranced us in the past, need to take a deep breath and realize they have slipped into the habit of gentle comedies filled with cliches.
She is a 16-year-old ray of light offering momentary reprieve
from the current deluge of movies devoted to the dark side of
adolescence, in a self-punishing diet of crime, drugs, sex, and
shock.
Except for the lagging as the film introduces us to the
inhabitants and the rhythms of Cold Comfort Farm, the whole thing
builds nicely to the final wedding breakfast, where a dozen or so
Starkadders and assorted peripherals gather, dressed to the nines
with all their eccentricities spilling out the seams.
The harshness and isolation have produced an Icelandic Jimmy Stewart to guide the determined young foreigner on the perilous last leg of his journey.
“If you are fighting, stop fighting;
if you are marching, stop marching. Come
back to me.” The therapy group of four men and one woman is a ludicrous
gathering of overacted wackos who should be in solitary therapy
if not solitary confinement.
Faced with a cauldron of zany possibilities, we can only
surrender to the laughs in this wildly unpredictable film of
time-release surprises.
Ignore the parts of this movie that deal with earthly silliness,
and sink into the visual fantasy that is grand enough to
encourage us to explore the universe and to debate the questions
that will challenge us.
In a maelstrom of exploding vehicles, nothing is as affecting as
Larkin manning an abandoned snowplow to protect his troops in a
desert sandstorm that covers up the flaws in both script and
production.
When the acting is this good, nothing is more fun than watching full-blown Southern characters behave outrageously in defense of their version of a higher moral value.
James Mangold has written and directed a good but complicated
movie that requires too little time from each of his very good
actors, and a great deal of effort from his audience.
I have a real reservation about a movie that celebrates the
cleverness of real life psychopathic killers.
The abrupt shift to meanness of spirit is out of place at
the end of a movie that for most of its length plays a gentle
love story.
It was this kind of
skill set that was required for survival. The house and gardens that make up "Canterbury" were brought to
full colonial flower by the founding father, only to fall into
slow decay in the hands of his widow and son Jack.
Fine cast, troubling issues, searing sights--tough stuff.
Beyond chill, it's a standard thriller that rivets attention by
the best of all devices--casting.
Stella strolls slowly around the circle, touching a foot here,
reading a dial there, tugging at her own ear, cocking her head,
until we know surely that this movie intends to skewer the
medical profession just as "Network" riddled television.
The movie is a mad, marvelous verbal war, an uninterrupted battle
of comic insults, and it starts with a grandiloquent verbal
explosion.
The plot has the feel of an opera.
CURSE OF THE JADE SCORPION, THE This is a movie you must see, not to believe it, which cannot be done, but to feel it, which cannot be avoided.
There's fun to be had if you aren't demanding.
We watch not a story, but a series of unrelated daily events.
Not good, but fun.
It is a measure of their accomplishment that we also leave in a
state of thoroughly grim but provocative confusion.
Grow up, Woody; all the world may love a clown, but it hates a whiner.
Her gentle approach gives us plenty of time to ponder the details
of what happened to the proud dinosaurs who once owned the earth,
and to wonder whether the human race has been just an
evolutionary stage between impacts.
The shadow that falls on Margaret’s daily routine still doesn’t erase her
obligations to family and community. "Sweet Land" wins the race over "The Departed," going away. Because the emotion behind the imagery seems real, the movie
narrowly avoids becoming a horror show.
Daily headlines tell us the movie isn't far off the mark.
I know it's film noir made with great skill, but it's hard to
care about anyone in this self-conscious period piece.
The running exchange of wisecracks and affectionate insults sets
the tone for violence so far-fetched that it lifts itself quickly
and comfortably to the level of high camp spoof.
The rhythm of their verbal dance allows us to dissolve in waves of welcome laughter.
...wickedly funny as she spews forth perfectly articulated insults that
pierce the customers’ pretensions.
We are treated this time not to death, explosions, and car
chases, but to that good old-fashioned device: a rousing story.
It is funny and full of the quirky Australian humor that is a national trademark.
I never want to see his face again. As we get to know
Josef and Marie gradually, frame by frame, the film becomes their love story.
Too many people, too much confusion.
DIXIE CHICKS: SHUT UP AND SING Anyone who doesn't see the reverent sensibility behind the cardinal's new image of a thumbs-up Christ with a wink in his eye is doomed, if not to Wisconsin, at least to dreary acceptance of earthly righteousness.
If you are a Kathy Bates fan, that may be enough to keep you in
your seat during the various shades of bedpans, bedsores and
murderous impulses.
Why, when the acting is so good, does the violence have to be so graphic?
Don Juan's delusion has become Jack's romance, and for a light
and lovely evening, it becomes ours.
The real belly laugh comes with Zellweger’s accomplished monologue. ...a grand show of the glitter and glitz
that can accompany ascension
Whoopi Goldberg is probably the only woman around who can
hold her own in a huddle of seven-foot-tall men.
With David Mamet's terse dialogue and Lee Tamahori's superior
direction, it's easy to ignore the flaws and be happily riveted
by a good man determined to triumph over the adversity thrown at
him by man and nature.
Oh, the wearisomeness of watching a mediocre movie.
This is a world where a woman is judged by the aura of the man
whose arm holds hers, and while they maneuver, they dabble.
"The Emperor's Club" is a peculiar movie Playing both roles in an actor’s field day, Ian Holm switches deftly from the kindly peasant who
acquires arrogance to the emperor who learns humility. Americans love to obsess, and they do it about racing cars,
surfing, skiing, hang gliding, flying vintage planes--an endless
array of off-center sports that become the focus for both the
enthusiast and the obsessed who are blinded to any other
dimension of life.
The atmosphere and language are captivating.
Director Anthony Minghella has evoked the awful romance of war.
ENRON: The Smartest Guys in the Room In good hands again at long last, the cerebral action thriller has never looked better.
Of our hero, one thug observes, "Who's the tree trunk?"
So atrocious is the reputation of L.A. that most of the
unfortunates choose the proffered option of electrocution in the
mainland deportation center over life in the dreaded island city.
Charlie Kaufman must have a direct line to the future. You have only to listen to Robbins' words on the soundtrack to
know that what is unfolding on the screen can't catch what he
saw.
We might be forgiven for wondering just how long Woody Allen can
go on playing the anguished lover caught in the rhythmic whining
that is his perpetual beat.
What, after all, can be said about a film this awful?
On a symbolic level this movie might have worked, but Mr. Kubrick's unflinching look at fidelity, fantasy, and marriage is too often undermined by silliness.
Bravura acting and an astonishing plot are rare commodities that
could have made this a major film.
...the suburban culture of 1957 in the bright colors of exaggerated perfection The realization that brutality is the accepted norm washes over a
westerner who waits and hopes in vain for some restraining force
that never comes.
We are invited to ponder the reasons why humans have never
been able to adapt to the planet in the way animals have, to
consider a future that requires suspension of universal
assumptions about life itself.
Some movies are just bad ideas, some are good efforts that fail,
and some, like this one, are cynical insults to the audience.
Nothing captures the failure of this movie better than the
suburban seduction scene where Kathy tries to ignite her husband,
who lies on the floor, dreaming in mathematical theorems.
A movie this ugly either sinks like a stone or, rarely, hits a nerve and becomes a cult film for some vulnerable group in the cultural landscape.
The writers, producers, and director who allowed this to happen
share blame for assaulting the audience with their laziness.
They take all the terrible thoughts we suppress in the name of
being charitable, stoic, brave, and enduring, dip them in acid,
and hurl them into the audience.
It's grim and it's good.
The cartoon's irreverent take on modern values through the prism
of an imaginary Stone Age is a comic howl that things never
change.
The movie is a sharp suggestion that we take ourselves far too
seriously, that we reason the love right out of our lives.
This lovely movie makes you realize that a poignancy of our time
is that few adults would take the time to attend to an
unessential miracle.
He builds his case with a chilling persuasiveness What better situation for the man with the soulful eyes and
wounded psyche to find himself in than the city of romance with a
dead body?
Apatow's work is
proudly dumb while Coward's is proudly smart. Public figures fall to bullets while Forrest moves through life
just a couple of inches off the ground in a cloud of truth.
Farce is an English specialty that Americans may love, but the
making of it eludes us.
Curtis and Lohan, playing four roles between them, manage to keep everything
straight – and funny. Hilary Swank risks being
a cliche here and wins the bet.
The small group of citizens we come to know responds to the
seriousness of the unemployment dilemma with a heavy dose of
denial, humor, and resourcefulness that brings the house down
both on the screen and in the theater.
Scorsese is after an epic, settling for nothing less than a majestic view of a city being born.
The walls that protect them will
imprison them. This spooky, imaginative movie hangs disturbing questions on a mediocre story line.
A new and absolutely unnecessary standard for gratuitous violence.
It's a downer, but it doesn't get much better than this
Maxwell's achievement is that he conveys the immensity of
the battle as it unfolds as well as the tortured decisions of the
officers who direct it.
The fierce reality of the opening newsclips dwarfs the Hollywood
courtroom drama that follows.
Good story, good acting, good movie, with one major reservation -- the gore.
His callers count their fantasies in minutes, but he smothers us
for almost two hours with his own.
Those of us whose ignorance of the French language makes us ill-equipped to fill in the blanks feel gypped.
The deliberate and exacting pace of “Girl With a Pearl Earring” is a gift. Mr. McKellen conveys this so vividly that he is likely to send older people
out into the night with new resolve to embrace change and design new worlds
for themselves.
It's bodies, bullets, and blood--carnage, American style.
They want us to understand fully the meaning of life with no horizon. Don't undermine your enjoyment of this one by picking on flaws
and improbabilities: this is a fable, and we need not mess with
fables.
Director Goldbacher assembled good actors, great locations, and a
genuinely interesting twist with the photography, but the movie fails
because the momentum slipped through her fingers.
....the random, brutal
humiliation of the everyday life of southern blacks Playing a WASP is beyond the grasp of most contemporary actors.
In this anemic movie, a toxic family gathers for the 80th
birthday of the patriarch to check out the state of his health
and their inheritance.
It is true, I think, that the Holocaust is best written about, not filmed. Because the immensely likable John Cusack understands the
subtleties of understatement, he gives this movie the essential
ingredient of absurdist comedy: style.
It's painful to watch all this talent trying so hard to make
something of nothing.
The frozen Minnesota landscape is a great setting for the
shenanigans, and the premise is funny: two old men obsessed with
ice fishing and Ann-Margaret.
The movie is a merry skirmish with great underlying warmth.
As grotesque as it is, the film is an announcement that computer
power is passing from nerds to cool guys, that juvenile hackers
are taking over white-collar crime as surely as street gangs
stole neighborhoods.
There is great fun
in the sight of Hamlet’s fax rolling off the machine, of Horatio and Hamlet
driving in from the airport, of Hamlet’s apartment wall of family pictures.
Only the subject matter makes it intolerable.
Todd Solondz asks us to consider the humor and sadness of people
grappling with their problems alone, and he makes sure we understand
that each is truly alone even when surrounded by family.
With flair and compassion, the film shows us the buoyant
pre-war spirit that had begun to
unravel as people began to understand what was happening around them.
HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF ASKABAN This movie is so bad that it's an insult to the audience.
This absorbing film is a harrowing look at the tortures of
adolescence.
May this filmmaker remain eccentric and original in his success.
If you’re doubtful, invite your favorite child or two and share their
pleasure. HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY ...a compulsive liar whose very core is a
fabrication mechanism. This is a whale of a tall tale that unfurls intelligent surprises. The inevitable custody battle pits mother and abuser against gay
father, with the scales weighted toward the conventional
couple.
...a film whose signature scene shows Harvey Keitel dancing in the desert
wearing a bright red dress and one black boot.
Jodie Foster has taken a lighthearted look at the imperfections
in all of us and, with a great big wink of her eye, reminds us
that we can get through it if only we will laugh. --
It is a measure of the film's power that we find ourselves
rooting for the boys to succeed within the corrupt system instead
of loathing the hypocrisy that makes the stakes of the game so
high.
When performances and photography are this good, there's no need
to poke holes in the story.
If the choice is between Richmond and death, I choose death. And the reason it all works so well lies in the performances of Shohreh
Aghdashloo and Ben Kingsley. Either of these films is likely to make its intended audience
happy. Resonating with universal experience, these tales convey the
certainty that innocence is the beauty of youth, and passion the
preserve of the experienced.
For those of us of simple sensibilities, this is a very silly,
very noisy movie.
For a short while, this family's life seems just slightly on the
wrong side of normal; then the movie plunges headlong into the
grotesque.
A false note anywhere could have derailed this subtle dance.
Beautifully filmed, it provides the crackling edge needed as the
wife-swapping key party comes to full boil and then sinks into
its own damage.
It's a good evening, but Oscar Wilde would not be pleased.
This family has a touch of the grace that allows them to appreciate their new
life in spite of their surroundings.
This is a perfectly awful movie on all but two big counts:
absolutely riveting visual images and a zestful new concept of
the all-American hero.
The shield between concentrated power and the public has become thinner by one.
The cocky hunter, suddenly scared of his prey, becomes haggard, unable to sleep
in the midnight sun. We are invited to think grandly about the powerful notions
of death by lust and the horror of immortality, and are submerged
instead in a one-note movie: bites and necks.
When mother, daughter, and lodger end up in the same bed, the
absurdity of the 13-year-old accomplice is a comic, if unnerving
sight.
A dazzling white horse races from the ocean, down a beautiful
beach and into the lives of two of the most beguiling little
Irish boys ever to enchant an audience.
“What I lacked,” he says, “was extravagance.” Forget that this is Ernest Hemingway, and you'll be O.K.
If the murder of their son erased their lives, it is the prospect of leniency
for the murderer that erodes their souls. Widely discussed as a provocative shot in the war between men and
women, it is instead a sharply etched study of male rage that
clings long after it's over, a tenacious barnacle attached to our
peaceful selves.
What's more fun than stepping into a darkened theater to soak up the feel of a country through its culture, landscapes, and lifestyles as depicted in a foreign film?
The power of this story is its truth, and it jumps to life
with superb acting.
“Islander” rises to that state where
lovers of good movies like to dwell. A cop who helps blind people cross the street and won't buy
coffee without leaving a tip could never, ever have fallen for
Muriel, so their parting is neither funny nor sad, just overdue.
Now, as then, the stars overwhelm a plot so loosely knit you
can drive a news truck through the holes.
Be warned that by the end of this clever film, you will want to
bolt from your seat and run outside for air.
Speedboats roar through the narrow canals, disturbing both the peace and the
architecture, chased by waterborne competitors and police.
The sight of James bravely flying his giant peach to New York is
enough excitement for any little mind to absorb; and surely
"Flipper" could have sustained itself with its comic scenes of an
uncle who blowtorches his toast and washes dishes in the shower
with his feet.
Merchant Ivory has fallen under its own carriage wheels.
Crowe, holdingback his ending, tantalizes and teases the
audience, now thoroughly hooked on his story of five good guys
against the evil sports establishment.
Mark Rappaport wrote, directed, and edited this clever film,
using Seberg to deliver a whole string of bitter, sharp
observations on her own life and the politics of her day.
The whole production outshines its story, making it look like the
first-class thriller it isn't.
Think of Sean Connery, Laurence Fishburne, Ed Harris, Ruby Dee,
Hope Lange, Chris Sarandon, and then imagine them twisting in the
wind, left there to die by the director and the scriptwriters.
A landscape of bright ice slit by the black conning tower and peppered with
small figures cavorting is breathtaking.
It is unsettling to root for a good guy who is obsessed by the
grisly details of serial killings and a gal who is trying to make
her fortune with photographs of erotica and S&M.
Forget the plot and the people; just soak up the feel of Robert
Altman's Depression-era Kansas City.
These miserable adolescents cannot be said to be outside of
prevailing standards because no standards exist.
The sound of breaking bones will stay with you – and then there’s that
swinging door. It is a grizzly, tense, unpleasant film that is unredeemed by anything that
smacks of fun or, to be unpardonably earnest, justice.
By pandering to whatever public appetite exists for tabloid gore,
it insults the audience while emptying their pockets.
the grace of the kite
flyers and runners.....their kites spinning and feinting over the ancient city
below.
Affection fairly flows
from the audience to the screen.
In this movie, the L.A.P.D. is involved in both causing and
correcting the cesspool that swirls around it.
"Where is she going? What does she want? We'll never know."
Just sink into the romantic illusion, and ask no questions. You will not forget David or Blanca or any of their comrades and
you will be grateful for a film so strong that it pulls you to
its center.
These people are aging, moving into the next phase of their lives
that will provide Whit Stillman with his next movie and us with a good deal
of uncomfortable pleasure.
Amin is crazed With never a hint that some inner complexity or outer
circumstance might explain Bridget's behavior, she's plays her as
cruel and opportunistic, with the brain to know just how to
capitalize on that gruesome gumbo.
We are reminded that the student who says, "We're liberals; we do
the right thing," usually grows up to be a conservative, while
the student who consistently tries to do the right thing grows up
to be the conscience of democracy.
LAUREL
CANYON Sandrine Bonnaire and Isabelle Huppert are so effective in this
chilling cautionary tale that this viewer hopes never to lay
eyes on either of them again.
It’s a measure of real talent when the older generation steals the show from
the young. "Why isn't this more fun?"
With fine support from their colleagues, Daniel Auteuil and
Catherine Deneuve perform with a riveting honesty that holds
sentimentality at bay throughout this tough-minded movie.
This is a movie often at odds with itself-standup comedy and lost lives.
Anything that lightens the tragedy is
risky business, even in the hands of these devoted filmmakers.
Limbo is a lousy place to leave an audience.
This story inflicts an additional affront: it's a pure patriarchy
in which Simba's mom was merely a pregnant vessel.
"...his smile jumps straight from a toothpaste commercial."
All this is grim, but not pedestrian. Everyone pretend to be normal.
For one thing, all these fine actors crank up their performance volumes one notch too high, creating a pitch of sustained frenzy.
It is beautifully boring.
The Stasi cast a shadow
over all the citizens within reach This movie is a startling oasis in a summer of the action
cartoons Hollywood feeds the public in the belief that the entire
nation goes brain-dead for three months.
With his documentary, Writer/director Mark Jonathan Harris has made an
invaluable contribution to our understanding of the ugly reality of the
immediate post-war years that were justly celebrated by the victorious Allies
while the Jews, without justice, continued to suffer and die.
The diagram of a 90s adoption dilemma is sketched: a black single
mother, white adoptive parents, lawyers and social workers
dedicated to their causes.
Even if it were good, and it isn't, the movie is too long by half.
"Bill Murray, whose face is somewhat
like a rumpled bed sheet that needs one more tug... " So genuine is their feeling that we feel we have intruded, that
we need to step back quietly and close the door on their emotion.
The emotional wallop of this movie unfolds after Giles has
installed himself in a seedy motel in Chesterton, Long Island.
This is a family, a real one, and each character belongs in it.
If history's strongest constant is the struggle for power,
this movie is another reminder of the fragile nature of power.
What may linger the longest, though, is Costa-Gavras's angry
portrayal of the ugly politics of the media, the police, and a
citizenry hungry for ten seconds of nationally televised tragedy.
He has cut to the rancid core of the nightly news.
Lethal weapons wielded by a sick high school senior are a
singularly unappetizing subject at a time when real life is rife
with such tragedies.
Danny Aiello seems to become appropriately embarrassed as the film goes on.
The zinger in this movie is a scene between Bill Pullman and Ann
Bancroft that is surely the best mother-in-law/son-in-law
confrontation on record.
A love story wrapped in indolence and the language of the mall
might not be your choice, but it's all around us, and Smith has
caught it sharply.
The watch pot bubbles
with resentment and verbal cruelty. Better luck next time,
Harry. Every actor in this movie leaves his/her own personality at the
door to become the character.
Everyone sinks. At the top of this pyramid stands Russell Crowe’s Jack Aubrey. This is an irreverent, zestful romp for three stars who team up
to poke fun at every imaginable Western cliche.
Kind, if befuddled, the parents, grandmother, teacher, a
therapist struggle to understand, to redirect the boy who
maintains that when God distributed chromosomes, the one that
would have made him female fell by mistake into the garbage.
The story is slow and full of cardboard characters, but Anthony Hopkins's
lusty performance makes this one a safe bet for a rainy day.
Even when she offers him the simple pleasures of time in the country, he
manages to ruin the day.
Hollywood has tried to make a weeper without
understanding that audiences
don't like to be told when to cry.
Though focusing specifically on the fiery Collins, the film
delivers an impressionistic overview of a period of violence
among countrymen that is infused with the same awful waste as our
own Civil War.
With guns that fall out of pant legs, a lap-dancing moment, a caricature of a gay FBI man, and giggling bridesmaids, the film simply disappears into its own quicksand.
The
world at last has figured out how to get cars from a high-rise park garage onto
the thruway.
We live in a time of broken promise and frenzied lifestyle, not
the best of times to contemplate the meaning of Santa Claus.
Vanessa Redgrave, sporting a dowdy wig and a wicked gleam in her
eye, steals the show whenever she's in it, which is far too
seldom.
The scriptwriters got it all wrong
There is no possible reason to endure the ordeal
except for the inspired performance of Charlize Theron What should be light and funny becomes labored.
Now back to that fatal flaw...... Errol Morris has painted a portrait of the banality of evil.
A passionate teacher is a welcome hero.
There are no redeeming features.
The British, who seem uniquely able to enliven their history for
our pleasure, are at it again.
There are certain roles in this world that should be played only
by Vanessa Redgrave, and Clarissa Dalloway is one of them.
If the movie creates a mood of the time, it fails, with the
exception of Parker herself, to flesh out any of these colorful
people.
It's an odd movie with great style.
The writer has deposited these two gentle men in our crazy chaos to remind
us that we live now in a world where no one listens, everyone has a secret
life, and we all need second chances.
In violation of the federal guidelines that mandate 19-day
maximums for solitary confinement, Glenn orders three years of
physical torture and isolation in a black dungeon five feet high -- no
light, no water.
The special fun of this movie is watching a teacher pull children into that beautiful world when they are young and receptive.
The landscape sparkles with food and fountains and a supporting
cast of imbeciles.
MY ARCHITECT & TOUCHING THE VOID He, the only son of two zipped up WASPs and she, the daughter of a hundred
perfect Greeks.
This is a story of people who cannot be understood by the people
they left behind, and cannot themselves understand their new
life.
"The filmmakers have spent their energy on their centerpiece
surprise." The boys grow into men through the cracks in the cement.
It's hard to go wrong with a cast that includes Jill Clayburgh,
Tony Curtis, Quentin Crisp, Kathleen Turner, Whoopi Goldberg and
Timothy Dalton, but wrong it goes, and all the way.
It is a story rife with
loneliness and identity concerns. It is often profound. While commentators and politicians argue about health care and a
band-aid crime bill, children are shooting each other and, quite
often, their parents.
There's nothing like a cerebral touch when the bullets are flying.
She is luminous in the title role of this beautifully filmed
story of a child of the wild slipping into civilization; but the
movie cannot recover after its premise is undermined by
production errors.
It's just a recycled chase film with Cyberspace aspirations.
It is a very silly movie.
At the end of his tortured farewell speech, he stands naked
before the nation, fake to the end, riveting in his transparency.
...an unfolding of rage, betrayal,
discovery, and resolution NOTHING TO LOSE & DREAM WITH THE FISHES
NOWHERE IN AFRICA Charm has become synonymous with unctuousness in our culture, but in the best sense of it, charming is the only way to describe the teaming of Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts.
You will laugh and think, as well as squirm, and you may leave the theater in a profound state of restlessness.
The comedy and the pathos of the movie lie in the old truth that,
whether the setting is gay or hetero, little time passes before
the players try to control the plans and dreams of each other.
It's time to pull the plug.
Carting crates of beer from the neighborhood bar to parties in
his house, he drinks until he explodes in the most barbarous and
realistic wife beating even seen on a movie screen.
You will wish that on the way in, the multiplex had offered you
valium along with their popcorn.
“No one ever takes a photograph of something they want to forget.” In those days, it was reward enough for mothers to send their families
out to meet the world, prepared.
When the marvelous Marisa Tomei is made to say, "I was born to
kiss you," you know producer/director Norman Jewison hired the
wrong writer.
The film is a Woolfian exercise in wit and reach, but is
curiously flat.
This year's Oscar nominations are the innovative, often bold
work of some extraordinarily talented filmmakers.
In a very thin year for movies, the Motion Picture Academy
has managed to choose five very good ones for its Oscar
nominations.
If their choices show a new generosity of spirit, they
also reflect the weakness of the American film pool in 1995.
With Oscar talk flooding the media, it's easy to forget that
some of this year's best movies flew by too fast.
The 1997 Oscar nominations are a riotous celebration of independent films.
In a troubling trend, most of the best films came out in a
cluster toward the end of the year, leaving movie lovers stranded
from January to September.
Three of this year's nominations for Best Picture take place during
World War II, two are set in Renaissance England, and each of the five is worth an evening of your time.
five worthy contenders have bubbled to the top...
Strike or no strike, one of
these films will win the award for Best Picture The sight of the glass church floating on a river barge ranks
high on any list of memorable metaphors.
Call it leaden, call it lackluster; things don't get much flatter than this.
The American solution: incinerate the town with a single nuclear
bomb.
Impossibly, the coolest girl on campus falls for him, and they enjoy the most unsupervised prep school romance on record.
Impossibly, the coolest girl on campus falls for him, and they enjoy the most unsupervised prep school romance on record.
They could make risktakers of us all if only they didn't
have to navigate so much dead space between laughs.
In an otherwise lackluster year, five films made magic with the complexities of acting, directing, writing, and visual art.
Theirs is as fine an acting duet as any this year Unable to articulate what it is they want to say about young
graduates in the 90s, the filmmakers have made a kind of Gen X
superprobe into the nothingness of being young instead of
capturing a real piece of today's culture.
A muddle from start to finish, it traps its actors in a terrible
script and reduces them to sputtering.
It's a just-in-case escape with concrete walls, steel doors, and a bank of
monitors that follows the movements of intruders.
Encumber a newsman with husbandly duties and he is utterly
diminished.
Don't waste a second being annoyed that you are mainlining
sugar syrup: that's the point.
Torture has made its way into the national fabric.
This $135 million movie is a bewildering mishmash of bad and almost good.
Grisham lets us down again by denying us the fun of trying
to fit the pieces together by tossing in a confusion of villains,
until at long suffering last, we give up and wait for his
resolution.
This blazing film carries a serious, endangered message: "Congress shall
make no law abridging freedom of speech."
Only the intended victim wins our loyalty, and that leaves us
adrift in our seats, uninvolved and watching the plot details.
The movie simply pulls us in and holds us there, in one degree of horror or another, for more than two hours.
Teaching family values with a twist on the cross-Texas road trip,
Butch tells Phillip he has "all-American rights" to carnivals,
trick or treat, cotton candy and roller coasters.
John Travolta, with fine support across the board, makes George
Malley an invitation to think about compassion and humanity.
This is a movie more for those of us who watch from a distance
than for those who have AIDS and know better.
A German who has the power to kill him, doesn’t. This is an extraordinary exploration of passion and betrayal
as it explodes in the remote bush, removed from the eyes of
conventional society, but judged with brutal intensity by the
players themselves.
With part of the town "colored" as their newly impassioned selves,
those who resent change remain colorless, mired in conformity.
In an ugly insight, we realize Jerry will use the little girl as bait.
In trying to do a good thing, Disney has tried to atone for fifty
years of negative movie images of Native American life by making
all Native Americans beautiful, heroic, and wise.
This is a town where work pays the bills and life begins after five
o'clock.
Considering Pollock's drinking, womanizing, and marital battles, it is astounding that he produced the paintings that changed the course of modern art.
Jane Campion has crafted a darkly elegant film without an ounce of heart.
We also know that researchers, once on the scent, sink into a kind of glorious
private passion for their work that is both comic in its scale and enviable in
its excitement. The friendship of the unlikely pair speaks the sad truth that we
can rarely tell our friends about the inner forces that drive us
through life.
Throwing cold water on "The Preacher's Wife" is a little
like criticizing a children's Christmas pageant.
If the movie is a polemic, it is an attack not just on the Catholic
Church but also on the hypocrisy that infects mankind.
It's a good story with a grand villain and a fine portrait by
Richard Gere of the loneliness of the long-distance defense
attorney.
They sketch a flabby electorate that accepts managed news from
spin doctors and mannequin anchors; and then, with clear-eyed
compassion, they explore the nature of the master seducer who is
both their protagonist and our president.
Anyone who is public enemy #1 for the fundamentalists can't be all bad.
What erupts is so original, so funny, obscene, violent,
outrageous and clever that the film will be remembered as one
that added a new dimension to the already zany world of movie
making.
Perhaps we can be forgiven for wanting gods, not monsters, to deliver us from air to ground.
Let
Helen Mirren’s regal Queen Elizabeth roll over you.
As good-natured burlesque, it is a rib-tickling look at the
cliches that pepper every Western we have ever loved.
The defining core of the sorry mess was the extraordinary
spectacle of a father who represented an incorruptible side of
our national tradition and the son who betrayed his legacy, his
family, and profession to become the symbol of America's descent
into cynicism.
You will remember their faces for a long time If you aren't excessively troubled by watching the ordeal of a
kidnapped child, and if you accept a great deal of spilled blood
as a contemporary given, then you will be amply rewarded by the
considerable pluses of this movie.
The closest statement of the film's viewpoint is voiced by one
character: "Women make clothes for women; men make clothes for
the women they want to be with, or in most cases, for the women
they want to be."
The giant size Big Gulp from the Seven Eleven is the spark plug
of their diet, and TV talk shows are their drug of choice.
The simple fact of its survival is a credible miracle considering that other superb violins have survived war, climate, and general neglect in the chain of ownership.
Alien to our experience but part of our heritage, the profession
of the perfect English butler is a complicated business that is
entrusted here to very talented hands that turn it into a
profoundly sad movie.
Because the community must work as a team to live, each person’s life is
interwoven with the others. What a pleasure it is to watch actors create multilayered characters who
surprise us repeatedly with their candor.
No mysteries here, no good lines or characters, none of the
layers of revelation so essential to mystery.
A flashy entertainment with a good cast headed by a mighty river
that never loses its power to scare the absolute devil out of
you.
This is, after all, a movie about hit men, vengeance, and betrayal, but it is more about men than
gore. The movie shows in excruciating detail the symbolic and
actual devastation wrought by a small bag of money.
Too much blood, too long by a third, too violent in a violent
world--but Connery, Cage, and Harris dodging the special effects
are irresistible.
Helping your sixteen year old nephew cast off his virginity in the seamy side of
the Manhattan night isn’t a spectacular premise. The saving grace of this dreary film is the friendship between Romeo and Gavin. Serious movie makers should make poker movies only when they can make
the game an intriguing element of their film.
Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones are incendiary actors who can make even standard stuff look good.
Don't look for credibility; this is a fairy tale that correctly insists on sprinkling fairy dust on a large number of endearing oddballs.
Filmed in brilliant colors dominated by reds and yellows, and set to a restless, rhythmic musical beat, the movie rushes as desperately as the time frame within it.
It is mesmerizing to watch someone so caught up in his obsessions that
he has not a whit of an idea that he is driving everyone around him crazy.
Instead of a wan remake, this movie is an affectionate tribute to
the staying power of its predecessor.
In a time of crisis, the predictability of the parents' behavior
and their sons' knowing ways of handling it are drawn at once
with subtlety and exaggeration--a neat trick.
Things can't get much worse than this.
Once the writers came up with the idea of having Tim Allen
drafted as a reluctant Santa Claus, they were so pleased with
themselves that they put their pencils down.
Steven Spielberg has made it his mission to make sure that when we live
with the sounds of peace, we never forget the men who made it possible.
The backstory was in his
belly. May the world not think from now on of Hester Prynne as Demi
Moore in a candle cap.
To deny the implicit acceptance by the general populace would be
to say that Ford produced 6,000,000 cars without the knowledge
and cooperation of Detroit.
The film builds to the match between the unlikely challenger from upstart
California and the star of the Eastern Establishment. This flawless ensemble cast has enabled Mike Leigh to take the
risk of using a small story to tell a large truth.
Emma Thompson and Jane Austen are quite a team.
It seems Americans are doomed to envy the English for their
dignity and to mock them for their repression.
The parallels drawn so gleefully between Elizabethan London and our own time fly through the air like merry potshots.
This is a sweet, sad, innocent tale with a big message, and it is
absolutely charming.
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