Writer-director Anthony Minghella has chosen to follow up his Oscar-laden The English Patient with another literary adaptation — this time, of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. Highsmith is best known to film buffs as the author of Strangers on a Train, the basis for one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best…

The last half-decade has been very good to Jane Austen: Besides Ang Lee’s estimable 1995 version of Sense and Sensibility, we’ve been given film or TV adaptations of Emma, Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice, not to mention Clueless, Amy Heckerling’s remarkably apt updating of Emma. Now Miramax and the BBC…

The wide-screen debut of Pokémon has two subtitles: The First Movie, which implies, with almost tragic inevitability, the promise of a Second and a Third and so on, stretching out into the infinite reaches of posterity; and Mewtwo Strikes Back, which implies almost nothing, presumably even to those immersed in…

Poor old MGM — the once-golden studio that has been battered and abused by ever-changing ownership and management for nearly three decades now — still has one sure-shot franchise among its assets: the James Bond series, whose longevity is astounding. If nothing else, the series’ overseas popularity keeps the films…

How do you make a sequel to a nearly perfect film? Toy Story, the 1995 hit from Disney and Pixar, was not only the first fully computer-animated feature; it was also as brilliantly written and directed a film as any of the classic Disney releases. Pixar did nearly everything right…

Much like the religion that has swirled around the Star Wars trilogy for twentysome years, the fanaticism evidenced among American fans of Japanese anime remains a mystery to some of us. Writer-director Hayao Miyazaki’s megahit Princess Mononoke does very little to cast light on this obsession: More’s the pity, since…

Luc Besson, director of La Femme Nikita, The Professional and The Fifth Element, is not the first name that would leap to mind to helm a biopic of Joan of Arc. Sure, he’s French, and, sure, most of his films have women/girls as protagonist or savior; but this is a…

And now . . . a G-rated movie from David Lynch! No, Lynch hasn’t lost his mind. He hasn’t gone soft in the head. And he hasn’t sold out to the smiley-faced bean counters at Disney. While the notion of America’s King of Weird — the man who brought us…

Steven Soderbergh may have had some rocky times after his 1989 breakthrough with sex, lies, and videotape, but these days he’s on a roll. Last year he produced Pleasantville and directed Out of Sight, two of the year’s most praised films. This year he has The Limey, a complex, introspective…

There’s a long tradition of stories about mysterious drifters who arrive in a small town and either create trouble or catalyze an explosion of long-simmering problems. Mark Twain used that hook, as have Dashiell Hammett (Red Harvest), Akira Kurosawa (Yojimbo), and Sergio Leone (A Fistful of Dollars). Now Hampton Fancher…

Modern word processing has made life easier for screenwriters: no need to retype some old classic with your own little changes; nowadays you can just download the screenplay for, let’s say, The Exorcist, search for “adolescent girl,” replace with “twentysomething single woman,” and — voilà! — you’ve got a brand-new…

Since his TV show ended, Martin Lawrence has gotten more ink for his off-camera life than for his movie career. There’s nothing about Blue Streak that is likely to change that. It’s a shame, because the basic plot — which sounds like something from one of Donald E. Westlake’s Dortmunder…

It’s bad enough when a major studio — in this case Warner Bros. — blows $40 million (or more) on a by-the-numbers film. It’s worse when they blow it on a by-the-numbers film made by people who don’t know how to count. We’re not talking literal math here, but rather…

As a filmmaker, actor John Turturro clearly believes in drawing from personal experience: His directorial debut, the 1992 Mac (which won the Camera D’Or at Cannes), was avowedly based on his father’s life. For his second feature, Illuminata, Turturro takes a look at the theater, showing us the ambitions, fears…

Robert Wise’s 1963 version of The Haunting (from Shirley Jackson’s novel) has long been considered one of the milestones of the horror film. After 36 years, DreamWorks has bankrolled a new version under the direction of Jan de Bont (Speed, Twister) — an idea that should sound unpromising, even to…

You can tell the first wave of summer blockbusters has shot its wad when the studios start tossing out their second- and third-string films. In the old days, these would have been called “programmers”–thoroughly competent entries that reiterated all the conventions of their reliable, easy-to-market genres. Such is Lake Placid,…

The animated TV show South Park was the big sensation of the 1997-98 season–or at least as big a hit as a cable channel like Comedy Central can manage. It was almost inevitable that creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone would take their batch of foul-mouthed 8-year-olds to the big…

Anthology films are an odd-duck genre: While there once was a time–long gone–when books of short stories were published with nearly the frequency of novels, their cinematic equivalent has never amounted to even 1 percent of the fictional films released. You could argue that Pulp Fiction counts as an anthology,…

The Love Letter has the dubious distinction of being the other studio film to open this past week. In a week when all the other majors have run for cover, DreamWorks has taken a gamble with a classic bit of counterprogramming–in nearly every way, this sweet romance/romantic comedy is the…

Nearly a quarter of a century after the fall of Saigon, only a small film industry has managed to grow on Vietnam’s war-scarred soil. And what has emerged is rarely seen outside of local cinemas. If ever there was a country that needed to seize back control of its cinematic…

The Castle is a modest little comedy from Australia and director Rob Sitch that falls into the subgenre of Capraesque idealism, in the little-guy-triumphs-over-evil-powers-that-be division. The story revolves around the unpretentious Kerrigan clan. Darryl (Michael Caton), the father, has his own little towing business. Sal (Anne Tenney), the mother, is…

Has any major American director had quite so many career swings as Robert Altman? Maybe not, but if there’s one thing the last 30 years have made clear, it is that it’s never safe to count Altman out. The mid- and late ’90s have been particularly unfriendly to him. After…