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Peter Rainer

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Not nearly Beloved

Toni Morrison's novel makes an awkward transition from page to screen

By Peter Rainer
Oct 15, 1998

The Jonathan Demme-directed Beloved runs nearly three hours, and it's a long haul. This adaptation of the 1987 Toni Morrison novel bursts with ambition. On one hand it tries to get inside the fevers of the African-American slave experience, but it also wants to be an epic family saga and...
Screen tests

Usual suspects, small wonders, and the new Bertolucci at the Montreal and Toronto film fests

By Peter Rainer
Oct 8, 1998

The Montreal World Film Festival runs for 10 days through Labor Day, and the Toronto Film Festival picks up a few days later and carries on for another 10. Twin colossi of the Great White North, they each unspool some 300 movies, and, as in the past three years, I...
Fatal detraction

Adrian Lyne's Lolita takes the high-minded low road

By Peter Rainer
Oct 8, 1998

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita still has the power to scare off people. Proof is the book's new movie adaptation, directed by Adrian Lyne and scripted by Stephen Schiff and starring Jeremy Irons as the passionate pedophile Humbert Humbert, a man entranced by nymphets. Completed more than two years ago, the movie...
Workers' compensation

A way underground film with a cast of millions!

By Peter Rainer
Oct 1, 1998

The ants in Antz show a lot of personality. The film is the best example yet of how a fully animated computer-generated feature can delineate facial movement. Toy Story (1995), the first such feature to be released, was brasher and more child-friendly, but Antz is more of a--how shall I...
Burnt offering

Too much head and not enough heat keep Firelight from really igniting

By Peter Rainer
Oct 1, 1998

Who would have guessed that a movie called Firelight could give off so little glow? William Nicholson, the screenwriter of Shadowlands (1993) making his directorial debut here, isn't attempting to be ironic. He wants to create a love story in which the ardor pours through the confines of upper-class decorum...

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