If Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown didn’t arrive weighted with post-Pulp Fiction expectations, it might be easier to see it for what it is: an overlong, occasionally funky caper movie directed with some feeling. It’s derived from Elmore Leonard’s 1992 bestseller Rum Punch, with the location shifted from Palm Beach, Florida,…
The ad line for As Good As It Gets is “A comedy from the heart that goes for the throat.” Isn’t this simply another way of saying, “You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll gag”? Jack Nicholson plays, of all things, a prolific romance novelist who’s a virulent xenophobe and a hopeless…
Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry is a film made by a free man. Liberated, for whatever reason, of the need for playing a nice guy, playing the bad man he does here frees Allen of the optimistic sanctimony that has weighed down so much of his recent work. Allen the filmmaker…
Now that the Japanese Tora-san series–with fiftysome entries in 30 years–has presumably drawn to a close, following the death of star Kiyoshi Atsumi last year, the James Bond films constitute the longest-running continuous series around. They’ve had their ups and downs, but something about the Bond formula has proved enduring…
If one is in a Biblical frame of mind, the sinking of the White Star Line’s R.M.S. Titanic about 400 miles off the southern coast of Newfoundland in 1912 could well be characterized as an act of divine one-upmanship. The 46,328-ton “ship of dreams” was struck down on its maiden…
Was Steven Spielberg fated to make Amistad? “Amity,” you might recall, was the name of the shark-bedeviled island in his breakthrough picture, Jaws; my dictionary defines it as “friendship, esp friendly relations between nations.” Amistad, too, means “friendship”–although the ship the movie is named for is a slave ship, and…
It’s hard for anyone under, say, 35 to understand the impact that the so-called French New Wave directors in general–and Jean-Luc Godard in particular–had on cinemaphiles (and on the art of film itself) when their films suddenly burst upon American art-house screens in the early ’60s. There was almost nothing…
Wes Craven’s Scream, which opened almost exactly a year ago, was the surprise hit of an overcrowded Christmas season. In part, the success was a triumph of counter-programming: In the midst of a glut of classy Oscar contenders, Scream was the only teen horror film. And it was helped by…
Movie special-effects maestro Phil Tippett has won billowing praise for the jaw-dropping digital transformations that turned models of alien bugs into the fearsome insect armies of Starship Troopers. But the 46-year-old founder of Tippett Studio in Berkeley, California, is his own most astonishing piece of transformation. If he’s at the…
First, The Heiress was unofficially remade as Washington Square, then The Big Carnival as Mad City, and The Day of the Jackal as The Jackal. But now we get The Absent-Minded Professor, all dressed up in new threads, as Flubber. In this frenzy of plundering the past, is nothing sacred?…
You can’t exactly call Alien Resurrection a pleasurable experience, but, then again, you wouldn’t say that about its predecessors either. Directed by Frenchman Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who previously co-directed with Marc Caro Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, this fourth installment in the Alien onslaught is once again designed to…
John Grisham’s The Rainmaker lulls you into the mindset you get while reading a bestseller at the beach. What a sad thing to say about a Francis Ford Coppola movie! Rather than heighten your awareness the way The Conversation or The Godfather did, The Rainmaker makes you feel lazy and…
In John Berendt’s beguiling travel-cum-true-crime book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the people of Savannah, Georgia, (in Berendt’s words) “flourished like hothouse plants tended by an indulgent gardener. The ordinary became extraordinary. Eccentrics thrived. Every nuance and quirk of personality achieved greater brilliance in that lush enclosure…
This Australian answer to Bonnie and Clyde, inelegantly titled Kiss or Kill, is the kind of film that carries you along even as you know exactly where it’s headed. And where it’s headed, of course, is trouble–trouble for all involved. Two sweet and tender hooligans, Nikki and Al, pay the…
A team of Russia-based international bad guys want to knock off someone at the very top of the U.S. government. Who you gonna call? The Jackal. As personified by Bruce Willis, this assassin di tutti assassins is a rather tight-lipped psychopath with an alarming collection of multi-colored hairpieces. Willis trademark…
Put brutally, the marvelous The Wings of the Dove is the story of a romantic frame-up that backfires. Thankfully, nothing is put brutally in this smart, lyrical movie. Director Iain Softley and screenwriter Hossein Amini cut to the thick of Henry James’ masterpiece about amorous extortion and moral purification. Helena…
Documentarian Errol Morris is by far best known for his 1988 feature, The Thin Blue Line, which is often described as the only film that ever got an innocent man off death row. But he got his start with a very different sort of material: His first two films, Gates…
Mad City, a descendant of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, may irritate orthodox movie buffs. In the coruscating Wilder classic, Kirk Douglas’ supremely cynical newspaper reporter turns the rescue of a cave-in victim into “the big carnival” (the film’s alternate title). The protagonist of Mad City, a TV reporter…
In Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, based on the late Robert Heinlein’s 1959 sci-fi opus, the killer arachnids upstage the humans. Not that it’s much of a contest, since the humans are all raging dullards. We’ve seen these young men and women with their square jaws and pert noses emoting their…
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 to, at best, 8- to 10-year-olds; there’s not much to delight even precocious pre-teens, let alone adults. This really is too bad,…
Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee has carved out a place for himself as our leading director of comedies of manners. His first three films–Pushing Hands (1991), The Wedding Banquet (1993), and Eat, Drink, Man, Woman (1994)–combined humor with touches of pathos, while shedding a light on modern Chinese and Chinese-American family…
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 results are often just plain embarrassing. How could a film starring James Spader, Helen Mirren, Albert Brooks, Kyra Sedgwick, Anne Bancroft, Jeffrey Wright, Wallace…
