Irvin Kershner’s The Empire Strikes Back, the continuation of George Lucas’ Star Wars, is a classic fantasy in its own right. I vastly prefer it to the first film. Its textures are richer, its emotions deeper, and it’s an honest-to-Jedi movie–not a dozen jammed-together entries of a serial. On its…

Elmore Leonard’s Touch is identified on the paperback as a mystery and carried in stores next to Leonard’s celebrated crime novels (like Get Shorty). But this wan little book is actually the problem child of Leonard’s oeuvre. It’s about a former Franciscan monk named Juvenal (played in the film by…

At a 20-year remove, George Lucas’ Star Wars comes off less as the work of a wizard than as the weird obsessional by-product of an eccentric American primitive. If you’re not a Star Wars fanatic, and you re-see this movie now varnished to a sheen in its self-consciously spiffy new…

When an incredulous Jane Campion fan asked what I hated about her version of Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, I immediately responded, “Everything.” Actually, I thought Barbara Hershey, as the subtle villainess, Madame Merle, made a good first impression: I laughed appreciatively when the heroine, Isabel Archer (Nicole…

For people who grow up loving movies, returning to old favorites can be as jarring and illuminating as blowing the dust off a family photo album. Even if our judgments about the films are identical the second time around, our emotional reactions, if we’ve grown at all, change or deepen…

Terry George, the director and co-writer (with Jim Sheridan) of Some Mother’s Son, has more complicated feelings about Northern Ireland than he can express coherently. They explode in penetrating shards of action and rhetoric from both the gutter and the pulpit. The story of an imprisoned IRA group known as…

Robert E. Howard created the sword-and-sorcery genre with his Conan stories. The subject of Dan Ireland’s wonderful debut film The Whole Wide World, Howard had a grand yet coarse-grained consciousness. The Conan stories, set in a fictitious, primordial age full of demons and killers, boasted swift, cartoon-flavored action (“He moved…

Some amusing stuff about sports agentry drowns in the emotional shallows of Jerry Maguire, which stars Tom Cruise (in the title role) as a hotshot dealmaker whose first bout of conscience torpedoes his future at his firm, the monolithic Sports Management International. After visiting a hospitalized hockey player who skates…

Hope doesn’t spring eternal: It flickers like an old streetlamp or porch light. That’s the bittersweet message of this beguiling, humane farce about three Jersey City buddies who spiral ever deeper down on their luck while planning to heist an armored car. Sid (William Forsythe), Jerry (Adam Trese) and Russ…

Watching Reese Witherspoon incandesce in the role of a 16-year-old girl stumbling through the reform school of hard knocks in Freeway, I was reminded of what Pauline Kael said about John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever: “There is a thick, raw sensuality that some adolescents have which seems almost preconscious.”…

Anthony Minghella believes in ghosts–and, at his best, makes believers out of viewers, too. The writer-director of Truly Madly Deeply and this heartfelt, eye-filling (but problematic and puzzling) adaptation of the Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient salts his movies with passionate specters. In Truly Madly Deeply, the main ghost…