Jonathan Demme's ill-advised remake. The main point to be made about the 1962 original is that, with its historical co-ordinates of McCarthyism, the Cold War, and the Yellow Peril, it dates rather badly, and thus cries out for a major overhaul. But while the John Frankenheimer version — positing a …
The full title is Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today (the Schulberg/Waletzky Restoration). The official film of the postwar Nuremberg war-crimes trial, which was released in Germany but not in America, is a captivating testament starring one of the supreme rogues’ galleries. Suave Albert Speer, odious Hans Frank, morosely bored Hermann …
Calculatingly released in theaters on 06/06/06 (i.e., 666, get it?), but not, heaven forbid, a fourth sequel, an Omen 5, but rather a straight remake of the 1976 original, about the advent of the anti-Christ (presaged now by the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, 9/11, the Indian Ocean tsunamis of 2004) …
Somerset Maugham's middlebrow brew of sin and redemption among colonial Brits in mid-Twenties China, where a brave bacteriologist but vindictive cuckold (Edward Norton) drags his faithless spouse (Naomi Watts) into the midst of a cholera outbreak in the backcountry. The spiritual growth of the flighty wife ("When love and duty …
It’s tough to make a compelling character out of someone suffering from mental illness; ultimately, all you can do is look on with pity and horror. (And also sympathy, thanks to some hammer-subtle backstory.) It’s even tougher to make a national hero out of one. But when it’s 1972 and …
Joanna Going has a great face for a horror film, but preferably for the part of a zombie, a vampire, a revenant, a sorceress, a Satanist, a somnambulist, not, as here, a garden-variety damsel in distress (politically correct damsel, naturellement: a sensible doctor). Rose McGowan, physically well cast as Going's …
Grisly vision of the future, where artificial organs are sold on the installment plan and are repossessed by force when the recipients fall behind in their payments, and where one such repo man receives a transplant of his own and grows a conscience. The ending is terrible from several angles …
The Cold War refrozen: a subterranean population of Russian “sleeper” agents in a Destroy America operation that dates back to Lee Harvey Oswald. For a short time the film, like its patient spies, puts up a decent front. Director Phillip Noyce, who owns such respectable credits in the genre as …
The sequel maintains the slightly elevated level of cleverness of its forerunner, or at least level of aspiration to cleverness. It starts out with a sneak-preview screening of a Hollywood cheapie called Stab, based on a "true-crime" book by "Gale Weathers" about the "real" serial killings in Scream (difficult to …
The sequel maintains the slightly elevated level of cleverness of its forerunner, or at least level of aspiration to cleverness. It starts out with a sneak-preview screening of a Hollywood cheapie called Stab, based on a "true-crime" book by "Gale Weathers" about the "real" serial killings in Scream (difficult to …
Dizzying science-fiction extravaganza. The head-spinning sensation is caused in part by some hectic ER-type camerawork, and in part by some hard-to-read underwater sights, but for the most part by the gobbledegook in explanation of the origins of that submerged spacecraft, coated with three-hundred-years' worth of coral, and its strange cargo. …
A light doomsday snack, unsatisfying even for the duration. One wonders whether, out of post-9/11 sensitivity, or trepidation, or something, the images of a nuclear blast in Baltimore (at a football stadium where "Chicago" is for some reason lined up against "Florida"), not to mention its immediate aftermath, haven't been …
Ang Lee, evidently still banking on the critical goodwill since Brokeback Mountain, whips up some innocuous nostalgia around the milestone music festival of the summer of 1969, a fortieth-anniversary fictionalized addendum to Michael Wadleigh’s official Woodstock, complete with imitative split-screen effects. This docucomedy, so to call it, never gets near …
A nice, not thrilling run-through of conventions in the private-eye genre, taken at a totteringly slow tempo, and lowered in pitch for the gravelly voices of old-timers. Watching Paul Newman working with the likes of Gene Hackman, Susan Sarandon, Stockard Channing, and James Garner — wily veterans whetting some already …
Madame Bovary on the Borscht Belt, a Jewish housewife in a dalliance with the travelling "blouse man." (For a touch of authenticity, Mal Z. Lawrence has a cameo as the obligatory stand-up comic.) An inconsequential little domestic tempest, set amid the momentous events of the summer of '69: Woodstock and …