Rowan Atkinson's Mr. Bean used to be a hilarious British fop, until he made a movie
By Peter Rainer,
November 06, 1997
Family films are often pitched for "the child in us all," but Bean doesn't have an ounce of "inner child" in it. It's been worked out to appeal... More>>
Critical Care tries to do for medicine what Network did for TV, and fails
By Peter Rainer,
October 30, 1997
A glance at the cast list for the new Sidney Lumet hospital drama Critical Care might lead you to expect an embarrassment of riches. Instead, the... More>>
Red Corner aspires to political bravado, but can't avoid bombast and cliche
By Michael Sragow,
October 30, 1997
Despite its muckraking pretensions, Red Corner is a rickety throwback to escapist
adventures that featured beautiful foreign idealists spouting... More>>
Filmmaker Agnieszka Holland recharges her battery with a Henry James classic
By Jimmy Fowler,
October 23, 1997
After earning worldwide accolades for her superb 1993 adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett's children's classic The Secret Garden, Polish-born... More>>
FairyTale is charming, sometimes inspiring--and almost entirely fraudulent
By Andy Klein,
October 23, 1997
The true-life incident of the Cottingley Fairies is so full of possibilities, so thought-provoking and hilarious at once, that it's amazing it's... More>>
The hugely ambitious Boogie Nights looks at the exalted, debased world of porn
By Peter Rainer,
October 16, 1997
Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights opens with a sinuous, breathlessly extended tracking shot that swoops us into a San Fernando... More>>
This story of blue bloods trying to keep up with the Kennedys is well-acted and too much
By Paul Cullum,
October 16, 1997
It's hard to fault The House of Yes, the wry toast of this year's Sundance Film Festival, for its limitations as a film. In fact, it's hardly a... More>>
Soderbergh operates far too much on Gray's Anatomy
By David Kronke,
October 16, 1997
Steven Soderbergh's cinematic version of Spalding Gray's Gray's Anatomy opens with a hokey educational trailer from the 1950s about the crucial... More>>
By its very definition, a thriller should, you know, thrill. It should not only scare its audience with a quick jolt, that sudden noise in the... More>>
Oliver Stone's low-budget, hopped-up film noir, U-Turn, is being billed as a change of pace for the Conspiracy Dude, but actually it looks quite... More>>
Kicked in the Head reveals the truth about nothing
By Robert Wilonsky,
September 25, 1997
Kevin Corrigan doesn't act as much as he seems to stumble from scene to scene, like a guy who doesn't follow a script as much as his own internal... More>>
It's big and loud, but this Peacemaker is still a dud
By Peter Rainer,
September 25, 1997
The Peacemaker is the first feature from DreamWorks Pictures, the studio headed by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen. It... More>>
The terrific L.A. Confidential captures our worst suspicions of how the world works
By Peter Rainer,
September 18, 1997
The 1950s-era Los Angeles of L.A. Confidential is Noir Central. Its denizens are tattooed in shadow; the play of light and dark--in the streets,... More>>
Lange, Pfeiffer, Leigh topple the patriarchy in a heavy-handed A Thousand Acres
By Andy Klein,
September 18, 1997
Every film adaptation of a preexisting work has its own unique set of problems; in the case of director Jocelyn Moorhouse's A Thousand Acres, the... More>>
Howard and Emily's marriage is the talk of Greenleaf, Indiana, a small town idyllic enough to repel Norman Rockwell. The town has waited three... More>>
How Curtis Hanson turned James Ellroy's epic crime novel L.A. Confidential into one of the year's best films
By Michael Sragow,
September 11, 1997
Bernardo Bertolucci once dubbed Los Angeles the Big Nipple. Writer-director Curtis Hanson has been suckling at it all his life. Just how much... More>>
Guantanamera is a director's warm, compassionate farewell
By Robert Wilonsky,
September 11, 1997
Tomas Gutierrez Alea's final film, Guantanamera, shares a tone of wistful romanticism with the late Cuban director's Letters From the Park (a... More>>
