East-West, the new film from Oscar-winning French director Regis Wargnier (Indochine), is, like Wargnier’s earlier film, a drama about how political circumstances can dominate personal relations. (Also like Indochine, East-West was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language film, but lost out to Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother.)…
The highfalutin soap operas in W. Somerset Maugham’s fiction earned him a huge reading public in his day and made him a favorite of movie producers on both sides of the Atlantic. Maugham’s stories and novels — every one stuffed full of romance, deceit, and tragedy — have inspired nearly…
After some hectoring and pleading, the Dallas Observer got another crack at USA Film Festival coverage. And if we get our face slapped again, we just hope good intentions and honest impatience justify our impudence. Last year, as you may recall, the Festival chose to deny access to the Observer…
Conrad Hall, who by his own account has been “gainfully employed” behind a film camera since he graduated from UCLA in 1949, is dreaming of his own paradise: a house with five acres of coconut trees on a lagoon some 600 yards from mainland Tahiti. Hall will return there shortly…
Norman Jewison’s filmography is almost unfathomable, as though it’s an amalgam of several directors’ résumés. On the surface, it doesn’t add up; it’s two plus two equaling . How does one reconcile a body of work that includes Doris Day-Rock Hudson films (Send Me No Flowers); slick fashion ads dolled…
Go get a few grains of salt to accompany these observations of tenable consistency and enduring potential: The movie industry is run by big kids; nifty sci-fi trickery may distract an audience from emotional shoals; cops and criminals are divided by a fine line; nostalgia and evil are cheaper by…
You’re just going to have to accept that Natalie Portman and Ashley Judd are far too glamorous for the roles they inhabit in Where the Heart Is. It’s an issue that probably won’t hurt the film’s reception: Remember Julia Roberts in Steel Magnolias? Your average moviegoer loves movie stars and…
Unless you’re iron-willed Margaret Thatcher or some other sort of imperialist nostalgiaphile, it’s hard to get choked up these days about the demise of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. For one thing, it’s now 80 years after the fact; for another, joint government in Ireland remains a dicey proposition, and the Troubles…
Although its themes are about as revelatory as those of the average “Cathy” comic strip (clothes don’t fit, job too busy, male not clairvoyant, AACK!), there’s something irrefutably charming about Philippa “Pip” Karmel’s debut feature, Me Myself I. The editor of Academy darling Shine has scripted a laundry list of…
There should be more submarine movies. They provide a no-brainer formula for success: claustrophobic setting, invisible enemy whose approach must be estimated, inherent threat of drowning and depth pressure, and from a budgetary standpoint, one key set is really all that’s needed. There’s even a solid track record to draw…
In the rich mythology of the New Yorker, a periodical renowned for the quality of its writing and the quirks of its writers, no legend carries more weight than that of Joseph Mitchell. On the occasion of the magazine’s 75th anniversary, it is great sport among the literati to remember…
Love & Basketball is divided into four quarters; thank God there’s no overtime. The directorial debut from writer Gina Prince-Bythewood, who once penned scripts for A Different World and Felicity, is a film built upon transitions so weak and obvious it’s astonishing the entire thing doesn’t collapse on itself. You…
Despite the title East Is East, the big message of this flavorful domestic memoir is really that West is West. In the tug-of-war between East and West for a soul, East, the film suggests, may hold out for a while through a combination of nostalgia, pride, national resentment, and simple…
Before we see anything in Croupier, the new film from director Mike Hodges and screenwriter Paul Mayersberg, we hear the grainy whirr of the ball spinning around the rim of a roulette wheel. When the image of the wheel appears, the sound drops out, to be replaced by the affectless…
It’s quite possible American Psycho is a brilliant movie. It’s also quite possible that it’s a dreary, obvious chop-’em-up dressed in Alan Flusser suits and Ralph Lauren boxers, drenched in Pour Hommes aftershave, all to disguise it as bracing satire on the greed-is-good ’80s. The option one chooses to accept…
You will cry when Keeping the Faith ends, if only because, after 130 minutes, the damned thing is over. They will be tears of gratitude, like those shed by marathon runners as they cross the finish line, broken and spent. There is only so much the human body can endure…
Where the Money Is is the latest attempt at a geezer vehicle — in this case for Paul Newman. Despite his unassailable movie-star credentials and his still-handsome mug, Newman is faced with the inevitable dilemma of the leading man: Either make a film that appeals only to other oldsters, step…
Rehab, sweet rehab. Last resort of the alcoholic, the drug addict, and the would-be suicide. Free room and board, lots of tender loving care, and a whole herd of fellow recovering screw-ups who’ll always be there for you, who are willing to apologize and admit their imperfections at the drop…
Editor’s note: This review originally ran in the Dallas Observer on April 29, 1999, when the film was shown as part of the USA Film Festival, before it was released nationwide. Too often baseball players are reduced to statistics, hollow numbers that resonate with the fetishist who drifts off to…
On the surface — and that’s all the movie is, a puddle instead of a lake — Return to Me is a hackneyed, silly, slapdash film. Whole scenes look, if not out of focus, then at least a little blurry, as though we’re missing something just out of frame. And…
Allow pitch-perfect Bijou Phillips, who plays hip-hopping uptown white girl Charlie, to set the tone for Black and White with her address to her stern father: “I’m havin’ a good day, goin’ wit’ my friends to da liberry an’ shit, but you have to go and ruin it for me!”…
Merchant/Ivory Productions has long been America’s quintessential purveyor of classy, “literary” films. At its best, the team of director James Ivory and Ismail Merchant has given us A Room With a View (1986) and The Remains of the Day (1993); at its worst, Slaves of New York (1989) and Jefferson…
