Right on screen at the outset, the viewer, or reviewer, is enjoined not to reveal the identity of "the client." (The Miramax company, hoping to recapture past fortune, even makes specific reference to its The Crying Game.) But this willfully misrepresents, or misunderstands, the nature of the narrative. The client's …
This creature-feature has, and is, a good time, but it works very hard and spends a lot of money in order to have it. The question is, is it worth it? This question comes up not only because this movie seems much too heavily endowed for the simple, 1950s-style monster …
This creature-feature has, and is, a good time, but it works very hard and spends a lot of money in order to have it. The question is, is it worth it? This question comes up not only because this movie seems much too heavily endowed for the simple, 1950s-style monster …
Woody Allen's followup to September: more of the same, but a bit better. It's true that Allen still isn't on screen in it. And his dialogue continues to be overly declarative and explanatory, so that characters' utterances sound more like psychological profiles and biographical backgrounds from the author's Preliminary Notes: …
Although snugly at home in the burgeoning genre of the food film (Babette's Feast, Like Water for Chocolate, etc.), this is much more food for thought than food for tummy, an "issues" movie about the artist versus the businessman in the American marketplace. The metaphor for this takes the amusing …
The forces of Good versus the forces of Evil in modern Manhattan, more specifically the forces of radiant serene ethereal CG imagery versus those of dark dirty squirmy CG imagery. Kim Basinger, a pair of worried eyes in a face of geisha-like immobility, inherits the newborn of her drug-addicted sister: …
Anglophilia on the rampage. The factual story concerns two rival British runners, one a Christian (and a charmer of an actor: Ian Charleson), and the other a Jew, who appear to be heading toward a showdown in the 1924 Olympics until Fate (not always the best plotter) finds a way …
True story of The Last Woman to Be Hanged in England, a "nightclub hostess" (read "tart") named Ruth Ellis, who shot her high-born lover in the mid-1950s. Although the sympathies of the filmmakers are quite certainly anti-capital punishment and pro-feminist (the screenwriter is Shelagh Delaney of A Taste of Honey, …
Mrs. Alice Hargreaves, née Alice Liddell, the "real" Alice in Wonderland, is brought to America at age eighty to receive an honorary degree from Columbia University on the centenary of Lewis Carroll's birth -- a promising germ of an idea, that promises more than it delivers. It does deliver some …
Alternative history lesson revealing how Napoleon escaped St. Helena, leaving behind a dead ringer to fool his British jailers, and how he returned to France but not all the way to the throne as planned. A well-mounted production, handled with care by television director Alan Taylor (The Sopranos, Sex and …
David Cronenberg reverts to the science-fiction genre after a lengthy time away from it, although one hesitates to employ the standard opposition to genre fiction -- "straight" fiction -- to categorize such extravaganzas (or perhaps that should be eXtravaganZas) as Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, M. Butterfly, and Crash. In his …
An earth-shaking — or shaky, anyway — hypothesis as to the identity and motives of Jack the Ripper. It issues not from hell, exactly, but merely from a "graphic novel" by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. The Hughes brothers' adaptation, taking its cue, is extremely graphic, in addition to gruesome, …
Small-screen actor Zach Braff, who also wrote and directed, as the most impassive sadsack this side of Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate: impassive amid the surrounding panic of a plane-crash dream scene; impassive in the sanatorium ambience of his bedroom, lying motionless on his back and listening to the news …
An abecedarian, biographical approach to Edgar Rice Burroughs's Jungle Man (never called by the name of Tarzan; called only by John Clayton, Earl of Greystoke). This approach ensures some dull stretches, as we pick up the story before birth, proceed through infancy, childhood, and adolescence, hit all the major milestones …