The new Mel Gibson movie, Payback, is arguably the first major-studio release this year to have even a modicum of aesthetic ambition. For his directorial debut, Brian Helgeland–who won an Oscar for his screenplay for 1997’s L.A. Confidential (cowritten with director Curtis Hanson)–has chosen to adapt The Hunter, the first…
In the 1993 hit Groundhog Day, Bill Murray played a show-biz smart-ass who grew into a human being. Murray added a core of warmth and romance to his comic arsenal without losing his zinging wit and crack-up irony, and he’s kept that progress going, even in piddling vehicles such as…
Nearly everyone–certainly every film buff–who saw the last James Bond movie, Tomorrow Never Dies, came away excited, though the film was certainly no match for Goldfinger or From Russia With Love. Audiences were buzzing, not about the gadgets or about Pierce Brosnan, but about Michelle Yeoh–the Hong Kong actress who…
Between the current nostalgia for platform shoes and the epidemic of midlife crises that has so many baby boomers in its grip, director Brian Gibson’s Still Crazy just might be able to find an audience among the disturbed, the deafened, and the disenchanted. It is, after all, the comic tale…
Elevate The Jerry Springer Show a notch or two–in other words, dispense with the one-legged serial killers who are having sex with their blind mothers, and other such nonsense–and you’ve got Willard Carroll’s Playing by Heart. Too harsh a judgment, some will say. After all, this well-meaning, relentlessly sincere ensemble…
“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” Kris Kristofferson sings in his most beguiling song, “Me and Bobby McGee.” Stephen Frears’ The Hi-Lo Country tries in vain to be just as lyrical about love and liberty. In this 20th-century Western, a cattle rancher named Pete (Billy Crudup) narrates…
Directed by Walter Salles (1995’s Foreign Land), the Brazilian film Central Station concerns the relationship between a homeless 9-year-old boy and the insensitive, acerbic woman who reluctantly agrees to help him find his father. Winner of the Golden Bear for Best Film at the 1998 Berlin Film Festival (as well…
Viewers who find Hurlyburly one of the most weirdly annoying movies they’ve seen–which is likely–will probably locate different “last straws” in the self-indulgent bundle of hay that has been made from David Rabe’s grueling 1984 play. For me, it was watching Eddie (Sean Penn) stretched out beneath a glass coffee…
For critics (and for audience members who enjoy thinking too much), there are movie devices and there are movie effects. Movie devices–happy endings, sad endings, emotion-wracked confessions, harrowing confrontations–are those stock contraptions that filmmakers employ with varying degrees of subtlety to induce movie effects–making you laugh, making you cry, creating…
Somewhere under the glossy imbecility of Varsity Blues lurks an idea that could make a great American movie: a coming-of-age story in a setting where no one else has come of age, a place where the hero must find his way to maturity without a mentor. The setting, in this…
The great attorneys of our time–Tom Cruise, Susan Sarandon, Tom Hanks–must now make room in the firm for a new partner. John Travolta, who in past lives has been a disco king, a hip hit man, and a deep-fried presidential candidate, reinvents himself in A Civil Action as a greedy…
Writer-director Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, the filmmaker’s adaptation of James Jones’ 1962 bestseller about the World War II battle for Guadalcanal, arrives in theaters with an almost unbearable weight of expectation. After graduating in the first class at AFI’s Advanced Film Studies program and working briefly as a…
Silver lining or slender thread? That question nags at me as I go over my best-of-the-year list. There were some terrific movies in 1998–eight, according to my count. But the average film keeps on getting worse. If movies remain as synthetic and incompetent as they are for the most part,…
The past year has been filled with good films…interesting films…worthwhile films. In fact there were many that I think of as being wonderful or droll or whatever. But 1998 failed to produce a single film to which the term “great” might be applied. Most years have at least one great…
British actress Jane Horrocks is thrice-gifted: She can act, she can sing, and she can sing like Judy Garland–and like Shirley Bassey, Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, and a host of other legendary performers. Horrocks’ ability to mimic the singing and speaking voices of these artists lies at the heart of…
In 1933, producer Merian C. Cooper, director Ernest B. Schoedsack, and pioneering animator Willis O’Brien created one of this century’s most indelible and powerful archetypes: King Kong. Then they did a peculiar thing: As if appalled at what they had wrought–but also delighted at the money it made them–they spent…
Given the manipulative tendencies of many mainstream pictures, Stepmom easily could have slipped into a sticky morass of sentimentality and melodrama. Instead, it proves a genuinely affecting movie that approaches its adult themes with intelligence, maturity, and rare authenticity. The film stars Susan Sarandon as Jackie, a divorced mother of…
The talents of Maya Angelou–she is or has been a teacher, memoirist, prizewinning poet, actress, civil rights activist, editor, playwright, composer, dancer, producer, theater and TV director, and advisor to three presidents–range so far and deep that no feat she accomplishes could come as a surprise. Give this quick study…
At the heart of Pat O’Connor’s rich, bittersweet Dancing at Lughnasa lies the quaint notion that once upon a time, people–especially women–whose youthful dreams were dashed, even those who lived entire lives of quiet desperation, might attain a state of grace, a kind of ascetic nobility to which the rest…
Geniuses often come across unimpressively in the movies. Amadeus presented Mozart as a giggling fop. Both Kirk Douglas and Tim Roth gave us Van Gogh as a pathetic head case. I.Q.’s Albert Einstein was a cupid-playing old duffer. Ken Russell’s freaky depictions of Liszt and Mahler speak for themselves. The…
Old-fashioned romantic comedies are an endangered species, and in these generally unromantic days it’s always a pleasant surprise to find a decent one like Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail. Ephron, of course, made her bones five and a half years ago with the huge hit Sleepless in Seattle, but since…
DreamWorks’ grandiose attempt at an animated feature for adults is a flimsy musical about Moses–a Sunday-school filmstrip writ ultra-large and decked out with the spectacle of Hollywood Bible epics. Slender sermons nestle among flashy action sequences and diaphanous fashion statements from the more tasteful pages of the Nefertiti’s Secret catalog…
