The Brooklyn Hasidic community, an interesting locale in itself, provides something essential to old-fashioned soap opera and presently hard to come by: a solid social and moral structure against which a curious-minded heroine might meaningfully and dramatically struggle. Here reinstated, and without recourse to a period setting out of Henry …
The best-selling roman à clef by "Anonymous," a/k/a journalist Joe Klein, on Bill Clinton's drive to the Presidency, is short on imagination: just take the reality and tweak it a little. Clinton becomes "Stanton," George Stephanopoulos becomes black, and so forth. And the further the story ventures from established fact …
In essence an animated remake of Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments, with Val Kilmer supplying the voice of Charlton Heston, and Ralph Fiennes supplying that of Yul Brynner. Or in other words: religious kitsch for the kiddies, the strict equivalent of My Very First Golden Bible or The Read'n …
Gus Van Sant's remake (in color for a new generation unable to discern shapes and forms in black-and-white) scarcely merits discussion, but not because it desecrates the work of the Master. The 1960 original, already sullied by two sequels and a prequel, was below-average Hitchcock; and several better films of …
Gus Van Sant's remake (in color for a new generation unable to discern shapes and forms in black-and-white) scarcely merits discussion, but not because it desecrates the work of the Master. The 1960 original, already sullied by two sequels and a prequel, was below-average Hitchcock; and several better films of …
The quest for True Love in the superficial and illusional worlds of fashion photography and soap opera. The cast is large and diverse, and there are some committed performances, especially from Matthew Modine and that diva of the American independent cinema, Catherine Keener. But the comic material is mostly commonplace …
The opening shot, a travelling overhead crane shot, is a horrific horizonless panorama of a WWI battlefield of gunpowder-gray mud and embedded bodies -- a sight never thereafter equalled or approached. The scene soon shifts to a Scottish "loony bin" for some somber contemplation, in well-crafted dialogue, of the high …
Under the direction of rap-video alumnus Antoine Fuqua, this is as lean as possible in the quasi-balletic, semi-hallucinatory, hyper-pyrotechnical mode of action film that threatens to be the death of action films. Among the bits of trimmed fat are suspense, tension, credence, concern. Bullets outnumber words, and it is permissible …
Moral crisis. Three American party-heartiers are on holiday in Malaysia. Two leave together, and leave the third holding the bag (so to speak) of "good cheap hash," and facing a death sentence unless the others agree to come back and serve prison time (three years if both return, six years …
Cryptic cloak-and-dagger adventure, with the Russians and the Irish in competition for the unidentified contents of a metal suitcase currently in the possession of unidentified secret agents. One of the two credited screenwriters is David Mamet under the pseudonym of Richard Weisz (apparently he refuses to share credit under his …
Seemingly straightforward situation: the heroine's boyfriend, a gangster's bagman, has carelessly left behind a sack of loot on the subway, and his girlfriend now has twenty minutes to reach him and somehow to come up with the matching cash on the way -- or else. So she is off and …
Seemingly straightforward situation: the heroine's boyfriend, a gangster's bagman, has carelessly left behind a sack of loot on the subway, and his girlfriend now has twenty minutes to reach him and somehow to come up with the matching cash on the way -- or else. So she is off and …