After The Bridges of Madison County, after A Perfect World, after Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood the director opts to relax a little. But not right off the bat. The first half-hour or so (of a characteristically unhurried two hours) is as focussed and concentrated an opening stretch as anything this side …
Mike Leigh comes back from his change of pace and change of scene in Topsy-Turvy, back to his normal pace and his old stomping ground, a working-class milieu in modern-day London, more exactly a utilitarian housing complex and three downtrodden families therein. He gives us (among other things) over a …
The Coen brothers (director Joel, producer Ethan, writers both) cut right to the heart of the role of the artist in Hollywood. They are too much artists themselves, however, to abide any idealizing or universalizing of their proxy on screen: a Broadway Bolshevik (modelled roughly and rudely on Clifford Odets) …
Bob Rafelson's next-generation film noir re-establishes, to a noteworthy degree, the connection of the genre to reality and realism. It is not an hommage. It is not an imitation. It is not a hand-me-down. It is a legitimate continuation in a contemporary setting. And if it has lost something in …
Battle-of-the-sexes romantic comedy accurately hits numerous notes of stridency, nastiness, pain, and so on, and next to none of laughter. More of an unromantic uncomedy. (The screenwriters, Jeremy Garelick and Jay Lavender, and the director, Peyton Reed, are all male, so no equal representation.) Vince Vaughn, Mr. Glib, comes across …
Negligible Woody Allen effort. The fact that Allen the actor is nowhere in the cast is no doubt part of the problem, but chiefly because his substitute, Kenneth Branagh, is a problem unto himself. (The Purple Rose of Cairo managed to become one of Allen's best films without his on-screen …
Tony historical romance centered around the affair of the twenty-three-year-old Alfred de Musset and the six-years-older George Sand, "poetry and prose," perhaps not a perfect match but an ignitable one. Not half, not a quarter, not an eighth the fun of the cooler-headed and farther-distanced Impromptu, navigating the same social …
Comedy about Commies: the one-night fling of a comely Australian firebrand and old Joe Stalin himself, and the resulting offspring. It could hardly have been any unfunnier had it been made by card-carrying Party members. With Judy Davis, Geoffrey Rush, Sam Neill, F. Murray Abraham; directed by Peter Duncan.
Not a title to mobilize the masses, although the proper name would seem to be widely and warmly regarded as audience-friendly: When Harry Met Sally, Dirty Harry, The Trouble with Harry, Harry and Tonto, Harry and Son, Harry and the Hendersons, etc., etc. One of Woody Allen's better efforts in …
Out for revenge, seamstress-turned-sleuth Kate WInslet returns to her rural Australian hometown and, using haute couture much the same way Sherlock Holmes would apply deductive reasoning, cracks a decades old crime that positioned her as a murderess. Thankfully, this was a lot darker than anticipated. For over half its running …
Community opposition to an urban renewal project in Sydney receives a setback when its spearhead, the editor of a radical newsrag, disappears without trace. Her closest associate tries to fill her shoes and at the same time to pick up her trail. The socio-political concerns never derail the movie from …
Slight, retiring, wallflowery movie with a stout, commanding, towering performance by Judy Davis as a hard-drinking, bottom-rung "entertainer" who must confront the daughter she long ago abandoned. Some nice tacky atmosphere, though an air of bookishness too (short-novel-ishness, to be more exact). Directed by Gillian Armstrong, who provided the same …
Woody Allen's experiment with the hand-held camera. At its worst, the camerawork suggests the manic manneredness of those jostled-elbow, buckled-knee TV advertisements currently in vogue. At its somewhat better -- at its somewhat more rationalizable -- it suggests the informal intimacy of a home movie or the formless immediacy of …
The beginnings of the great affair between pants-wearing, cigar-smoking George Sand (pseud.) and pasty-faced, consumptively coughing Frédéric Chopin (she falls in love with the music before she first catches sight of the man -- truly a Romantic notion). The largest chunk of the action is set at a gathering of …
Literary cinema at its most numbingly loquacious, most crampedly illustrational. Because the D.H. Lawrence novel is autobiographical, you get not just a piece of literature by him, but him himself -- under the pseudonym of Richard Somers, and in the form of Colin Friels, looking as much like Lawrence as …