When asked to name the most erotic sequence they have ever seen in a film, people tend to pick moments like the love scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in Don’t Look Now or that indelible image of Kathleen Turner in Body Heat, standing just inside her house, silently…
In her first role since bagging the 1998 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress (for L.A. Confidential, the film that should have won Best Picture and Best Director as well), Kim Basinger trembles with fear. Notoriously insecure about appearing on camera, Basinger looks paralyzed by the prospect of doing a…
Even at just 92 minutes, this film feels endless. Intended as a humorous, heartwarming take on dysfunctional family relationships, Hanging Up doesn’t work as comedy or drama or anything in between. Given its wealth of above-the-line talent — director and costar Diane Keaton, writers Delia and Nora Ephron, and actresses…
La crème de la coiffure! A mock documentary about, of all things, a Scottish hairdresser who travels to America to compete in an international hairstyling tournament, The Big Tease is a mildly amusing romp that benefits enormously from an ingratiating performance by Scottish actor Craig Ferguson, who also co-wrote the…
Jane Campion’s 1992 film The Piano was an intoxicating work of art, a film of such beauty and power, it literally took my breath away. Nothing the New Zealand-born writer-director has done before or since even comes close to matching it in form, content, or sensibility. And her latest film,…
Sharon Stone doesn’t appear on-screen until halfway through this tale of three lives unraveling, but when she does, she makes quite an impression as Rosie, the third player in a horse-racing scam. Adapted from a play by Sam Shepard, Simpatico jumps back and forth between the present day and the…
The War Zone opens with a black screen and the sound of waves gently crashing against the shore. The methodical ebb and flow of the water produce a soothing rhythm and a sense of tranquility. The film’s first visual image is equally evocative — a beautiful section of seashore, buttressed…
Some people really are crazy; then, “crazy” is a relative term. Does it apply to someone who feels he might spin off into outer space and never be able to get back down to earth? Or is it only crazy when you have to cling to the nearest table or…
The spirit of Fellini hovers over Train of Life, the third so-called Holocaust comedy to come down the pike. Far superior to either Life Is Beautiful or Jakob the Liar, the French-language production has a silliness and a buffoonish humor reminiscent of Amarcord and Fellini’s Roma, yet somehow it feels…
1. The Cider House Rules No other film this year captures the complex, bittersweet nature of life so movingly. Michael Caine and Delroy Lindo are standouts in a terrific ensemble cast. Filled with grace, compassion, and humor, this is director Lasse Hallstrom’s best work since My Life as a Dog…
Although he couldn’t have known it at the time, growing up in Baltimore during the 1950s would prove to be filmmaker Barry Levinson’s smartest career move. First in Diner, then in Tin Men, Avalon, and now Liberty Heights, he has drawn on the specific time, place, and culture of his…
It is rare to find a movie that is as accomplished, multilayered, and rewarding as the novel from which it was adapted, but The Cider House Rules is such a film. Directed by Lasse Hallström (My Life as a Dog, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?), the film displays the kind of…
A tangible sense of sadness and longing hangs over The Legend of 1900, the mesmerizingly beautiful and poetic new film from Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore, best known in the United States for his Academy Award-winning Cinema Paradiso. Based on a dramatic monologue by contemporary Italian novelist Alessadro Baricco but filmed…
Susan Sarandon is one of the screen’s most gifted actresses, a fiercely intelligent artist who invests her roles with depth, compassion, wit, and humor. She has the ability to elevate even mediocre material, taking a potentially schmaltzy part, as in Stepmom, and making it totally believable. In her best films…
Am I a traitor to my gender because I didn’t find this unabashed film about female sexuality erotic, brave, or even — can I say it — interesting? The ironically titled Romance, directed by the audacious French filmmaker Catherine Breillat (36 Fillette), has become something of a cause célèbre wherever…
A classic that fully merits the designation, Jean Renoir’s 1937 anti-war masterpiece Grand Illusion is, quite simply, one of the greatest films ever made. Recently restored, with a new print struck from the film’s original camera negative — confiscated by the Nazis after the fall of France and thought to…
It is the wry humor and amazing equanimity of the men profiled in the documentary Return With Honor that proves most astonishing. They were among the 462 American fighter pilots who were shot down over North Vietnam and became prisoners of war during the Vietnam War. Some were held in…
The joke that opens Jakob the Liar, the new Holocaust comedy (and talk about an oxymoron) starring Robin Williams, captures the bittersweet quality — the grim reality mixed with laughter — that the rest of the movie tries and fails to embody. The story takes place in an unidentified Jewish…
There is something fairy-tale-like, but also deeply human, about Twin Falls Idaho, a gentle, beautifully realized tale of love and intimacy that marks the feature-film debut of Mark Polish and Michael Polish. Identical twin brothers, Mark Polish wrote the script, Michael Polish directed it, and both brothers star. It is…
Ten-year-old Fraser Pettigrew leads an idyllic existence. He lives on a bucolic estate in Scotland with five siblings, four dogs, his gentle mother Moira (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), eccentric inventor father Edward (Colin Firth), and indomitable grandmother Gamma Macintosh (Rosemary Harris). For Fraser (Robert Norman, making his professional acting debut), life…
London-born novelist-screenwriter Hanif Kureishi doesn’t have Margaret Thatcher to kick around anymore, as he did so incisively and effectively in My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, but his concerns have not wandered too far afield. Rather, the hard edges merely have been softened. Universal issues still inspire…
Twice Upon a Yesterday seems almost too geared for the Sliding Doors crowd. Because this romantic fable relies on the same kind of conceptual sleight of hand as that recent Brit hit (which owed a giant debt of its own to Groundhog Day), its sense of originality and wit is…
