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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...
The family that frays together

Wrestling with mom and dad and familial dysfunction in One True Thing

By Peter Rainer
Sep 17, 1998

One True Thing, directed by Carl Franklin, is trying to be the Terms of Endearment of the '90s. Scripted by Karen Croner from the 1995 Anna Quindlen novel of the same name, One True Thing pushes the same high-gloss homilies about making peace with your family, and it caps everything...
Oys in the 'hood

Restraint and good taste keep this film from knocking us on our tuchas

By Peter Rainer
Aug 27, 1998

Slums of Beverly Hills is the first feature by the young writer-director Tamara Jenkins, and it has its mild amusements. It's one of those movies that gets bonus points for being "personal"--it bops along from episode to episode, as if the filmmaker were discovering her subject as she went along...
Hellfire

In his follow-up to In the Company of Men, Neil LaBute rigs the game again

By Peter Rainer
Aug 20, 1998

As the lights came up after a screening of the new Neil LaBute movie Your Friends and Neighbors, a colleague next to me growled disapprovingly, "That was a nasty movie." For LaBute--whose divisive debut film, In the Company of Men, is probably the worst date movie ever made--this comment would...
A knockout

De Palma gets down and dirty with the jagged, funky Snake Eyes

By Peter Rainer
Aug 6, 1998

Nicolas Cage has never seemed more dazzling than he does in the new Brian De Palma thriller Snake Eyes. Playing Rick Santoro, a corrupt Atlantic City cop who likes to think he's "everybody's friend," Cage for almost two continuous hours is boogying to his own inner beat. It's like watching...
Talking down

Samuel L. Jackson and Kevin Spacey can't negotiate their way through this thrill-free thriller

By Peter Rainer
Jul 30, 1998

Do we really need to see the great Kevin Spacey fuming and fussing in one of those we-do-things-my-way-or-we-don't-do-them-at-all roles? In The Negotiator, he's playing Chris Sabian, an expert hostage negotiator for the Chicago police, whose job it is to talk down Samuel L. Jackson's Danny Roman, another police expert who...
Life and death during wartime

Spielberg perfectly--and horrifyingly--captures the humanity and horror of WWII

By Peter Rainer
Jul 23, 1998

The first shot in Steven Spielberg's remarkable World War II epic Saving Private Ryan is an American flag with the sun behind it. It's a delicate, almost diaphanous image--the fabric has the transparent delicacy of a chrysalis. This is the perfect introduction to a movie about the fragility--and fortitude--of compassion...
No cojones

Hopkins and Banderas don't bring much to this lame Zorro retread

By Peter Rainer
Jul 16, 1998

In The Mask of Zorro, Anthony Hopkins plays the eponymous masked hero as if he were doing Shakespeare. He's trying to turn a kitsch hero into a real one, and his efforts are so weirdly off-key that you don't know whether to applaud or titter. This dolorous Don Diego de...
The long trailer

The mega-hyped disaster flick Armageddon signals the death of storytelling

By Peter Rainer
Jul 2, 1998

Michael Bay is the director of Bad Boys and The Rock and the new asteroid-attack movie Armageddon--which should be called The Very Big Rock. He has, I'm afraid, perfected a new form: His movies are trailers for themselves. Every scene is all climax and no foreplay. When it's all over,...
Afterthought special

The classic children's story deserves better than this misconceived mess

By Peter Rainer
Jun 25, 1998

The 1967 musical Dr. Dolittle, which starred Rex Harrison, was a commercial disaster for its studio, Twentieth Century Fox. The new nonmusical Fox version of this material, starring Eddie Murphy, isn't in the same overblown category as the Harrison film--its disasters are more mundane. It's a kiddie comedy that really...
Art and angst

This indie film sends us in a pansexual, Fassbinder-like direction

By Peter Rainer
Jun 18, 1998

High Art is a low-budget, American independent movie about a junkie, lesbian photographer, Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy), who spends most of her time looking romantically mournful. She's famished and abrasive and oh-so world-weary. When she smokes cigarettes, she exhales in a way that can best be described as existential--the smoke...
Camera ready

In The Truman Show, a hypernormal Jim Carrey dives into the world of TV--and brings us a "message film" that almost works

By Peter Rainer
Jun 4, 1998

The Truman Show, starring Jim Carrey, is the zeitgeist movie of the hour. How could it not be? It's all about the omnipotence of television and how our lives seem scripted by some unseen force--a TV producer, perhaps? Zeitgeist movies, almost by definition, get written about not only by film...
Pint-sized

This enormous monster comes from small, TV-sized imaginations

By Peter Rainer
May 21, 1998

The "Size Matters" marketing campaign for Godzilla is far more ingenious than the movie. It's also highly annoying--and somewhat misleading. After all, as the ads for a new film called Plump Fiction remind us, "Width matters, too." Perhaps the best thing about this week's ballyhooed arrival of Godzilla is that...
Out of time

Narcissism drives Warren Beatty into the 'hood

By Peter Rainer
May 14, 1998

It's the tail end of the 1996 California primary election, and incumbent Democratic Sen. Jay Bulworth (Warren Beatty) is having a nervous breakdown. Sleepless for days, famished, he channel-surfs aimlessly in the darkness of his office where, in a rare moment of lucidity, he has an inspiration: He arranges to...
Born to kvetch

Europe's a blur to the self-absorbed Woody Allen

By Peter Rainer
May 14, 1998

In Barbara Kopple's new documentary Wild Man Blues, we follow Woody Allen around Europe on a whirlwind concert tour with his New Orleans jazz band. He's kvetching from the get-go. "I would rather be bitten by a dog than fly to Paris," he announces mid-air, then mellows on the Champs-Elysees...
Road to ruin

Deep Impact is a feel-good disaster movie

By Peter Rainer
May 7, 1998

Most disaster movies would be a lot better with more disaster and less "human drama." In Deep Impact, the impending obliteration of much of earth by a pair of comets is merely the sideshow. The main event is all that goopy human-interest stuff--the daughter who reunites with her estranged father,...
A dead horse

Les Miserables offers glowering and preening, simpering and pining

By Peter Rainer
Apr 30, 1998

Victor Hugo's 1862 novel Les Miserables, which he began in 1845, runs in most editions to around 1,500 pages. The latest film version--there have been five other adaptations for movies or television--runs a bit under two and a half hours. It's an expert piece of pruning--entire continents of plot and...
Promiscuous prudes

James Toback's startling new film dives into the messy mindlessness of sex

By Peter Rainer
Apr 23, 1998

In writer-director James Toback's quicksilver sex comedy Two Girls and a Guy, Robert Downey Jr. plays Blake Allen, a struggling New York actor who lives in a spacious loft in SoHo he probably can't afford. He's a pampered prince who has worked out for himself a cozy romantic subterfuge: He...