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 …
Soft-boiled thriller about an alcohol-impaired bodyguard (Denzel Washington) who goes on a revenge rampage after his button-cute charge (Dakota Fanning) gets snatched by a Mexico City kidnapping ring. Long and lugubrious, the movie sets aside a full hour for the guard to bond with the body, dropping his defenses under …
Here’s hoping Denzel Washington’s ambition to bring August Wilson’s ten-play Pittsburgh Cycle to the big screen hasn’t stalled at number two. A deal with HBO generated one picture (the Washington-directed Fences) before production moved to Netflix for this vastly superior day-in-the-life of blues architect Gertrude “Ma” Rainey. (It was Rainey …
Ordinary murder mystery benefitting considerably from the Jamaican locale, less considerably from some tricky direction, more considerably from a performance by Denzel Washington that approaches middle-period Poitier in warmth and charm. James Fox, Mimi Rogers, M. Emmet Walsh, Robert Townsend; directed by Carl Schenkel.
Mira Nair, director of Salaam Bombay, pursues her calling as a cultural documentarian -- Idi Amin's eviction of Asians from Uganda in 1972, the proliferation of Indian-run motels in the American South ("How many times I got to tell you? They're not that kind of Indian!") -- in this romantic …
For all Spike Lee's unflagging efforts to assert himself as a director -- not a "black director," a just plain director, and not really a just plain director either, but a very fancy director -- his chief claim on our attention remains the ease and comfort with which he moves …
Shakespeare, naturally, and nearly as naturally, Branagh. As always with Shakespeare, even without Branagh, there is a period of adjustment. The opening recital of the "Hey Nonny, Nonny" lyric, with the widely spaced and overarticulated words spelled out on screen in almost a follow-the-bouncing-ball fashion, is meant to make the …
Familiar situation (in movies, not in life) of the framed lawman steering a murder investigation away from himself, staying one step ahead of his estranged wife, the newly appointed homicide detective. For a while the movie feigns an interest in human relationships -- a romantic triangle or quadrangle, depending on …
This is for Wesley Snipes what Ricochet was for Denzel Washington, a chance to show that he is a good sport, will play ball, is not too proud, is not uppity, has nothing against making money. Lots and lots of it. His role -- the titular passenger -- is that …
In essence, Nancy Drew Goes to Law School. (And Solves the Murders of Two Supreme Court Justices, Where the FBI, the CIA, and the DCPD Have Failed.) (Or as the heroine herself puts it: "The hubris of the young, huh?") (Or as the White House Chief of Staff puts it, …
For an encore to his Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme offers an olive branch to the homosexual protesters of his depiction therein of a serial killer. His atonement takes the form of a courtroom drama about the wrongful-termination suit of an AIDS-afflicted yuppie lawyer and closet gay: a talking-heads …
Penny Marshall transplants the half-century-old The Bishop's Wife into the present-day black community, but not in quest of greater and grittier social relevance. A dapper angel in pearl gray, name of Dudley ("Don't call me Dud"), comes down to Earth in answer to the prayers of a beleaguered ghetto clergyman, …
Boaz Yakin's big sellout. The independent director of Fresh and A Price above Rubies yokes himself to producer Jerry Bruckheimer (Top Gun, Crimson Tide, etc.), for a Disneyfied "inspirational" sports film about the black football coach at a desegregated high school in an all-white conference in Virginia in 1971. (The …
A prideful hitman cannot forget or forgive the honey-tongued policeman, now Assistant D.A., who put him in prison. (He's a real bad one, all right: "The parole board's ready, Blake. I hope you remembered to floss." "I did!" he replies. "With your wife's pubic hair!") He doesn't just want to …
We open on our titular character reading along with an affidavit as it is spelled out across the screen, a thudding note of cinematic redundancy that sets the tone for what was to follow. Denzel is great, Denzel is good, let us honor Him with sainthood. The Equalizer brought him …