In the new Great Expectations, directed by Alfonso Cuaron and scripted by Mitch Glazer, the teeming world of Charles Dickens’ 1861 novel is very loosely updated and transposed to Florida’s Gulf Coast and Manhattan. It wouldn’t be accurate to call this film an adaptation–at its best, it’s more like a…

Martin Scorsese’s Kundun is a deeply ceremonial experience, a serene pageant of colors, rituals, costumes. It’s about the Dalai Lama–recognized as the 14th reincarnation of the Buddha of Compassion and the spiritual and political leader of Tibet–from his childhood in 1937 through the Chinese invasion in 1949 and his journey…

Where would Irish filmmakers these days be without The Troubles? In just the past couple of years, we’ve seen The Crying Game, In the Name of the Father, Michael Collins, Some Mother’s Son and now The Boxer, the latest collaboration between director Jim Sheridan, screenwriter Terry George and actor Daniel…

The new Gus Van Sant film Good Will Hunting is like an adolescent’s fantasy of being tougher and smarter and more misunderstood than anybody else. It’s also touchy-feely with a vengeance. Is this the same director who made Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy? Those films had a fresh way of…

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 best seller Rum Punch, with the location shifted from Palm Beach,…

Explained Biblically, the sinking of R.M.S. Titanic 400 miles off the southern coast of Newfoundland in 1912 is an act of divine one-upmanship. The White Star Line’s 46,328-ton “ship of dreams” was struck down on its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, because mere mortals should not presume to blithely conquer…

Steven Spielberg’s Amistad is being given the Big Picture treatment–Schindler’s List Big, not Jurassic Park Big. Last week’s Newsweek featured the film on its cover, calling it “Spielberg’s controversial new movie,” even though it had not yet been released and the only “controversy” was a legal one about alleged cribbing…

A team of Russia-based international bad guys wants 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 tightlipped psychopath with an alarming collection of multicolored hair pieces. Willis’…

You can’t exactly call Alien Resurrection a pleasurable experience, but, then again, you wouldn’t say that about its predecessors, either. Directed by the 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…

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 preteens, let alone adults. This really is too bad, since Rowan…

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights opens with a sinuous, breathlessly extended tracking shot that swoops us into a San Fernando Valley disco and then does a curlicue around a succession of faces. Popping out like jack-o’-lanterns in the discotheque’s low light, they have the look of trashy royalty–exalted and…

Stylishness without substance can become wearying real fast. Twenty minutes into A Life Less Ordinary, the new movie from the producing-directing-writing team of Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, I was already into overload. It’s not that director Danny Boyle doesn’t have imagination. It’s just that sometimes imagination is all he has…

Seven Years in Tibet feels more like Seven Days at the Movies. It refuses to come to life–not even when prodded by Brad Pitt, hirsute as a yak, wandering the frozen Himalayas with an Austrian accent that probably gave his dialogue coach the hives. It’s an epic about how an…

Oliver Stone’s low-budget, hopped-up film noir, U-Turn, is being billed as a change of pace for the conspiracy dude, but actually it looks quite at home in the maestro’s hothouse. After all, aren’t conspiracies and the workings of fate what noirs are all about? Stone’s JFK pulped history with the…

The Peacemaker is the first feature from DreamWorks, the studio headed by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. It stars George Clooney and Nicole Kidman, and it’s about terrorists who steal Russian nukes. As an intelligence officer with the U.S. Army’s Special Forces, Clooney gets to model his jutting…

Everybody likes to run down Canadian movies, but Canadian film festivals–I speak of Montreal and Toronto–are something else again. How can a country turn out such mediocre movies and such terrific film festivals? In Hollywood, at least, we’re consistent: Our movies and our film festivals are equally lousy. I started…

The 1950s-era Los Angeles of L.A. Confidential is Noir Central. Its denizens are tattooed by shadow; the play of light and dark in the streets, the police stations, the morgues, is fetishistic. The postwar L.A. touted in the travelogues and billboards is a boom town, but what we actually see…

The Game is a puzzle picture, and beyond its premise there isn’t much you can divulge without giving the show away. I’m not one of those critics who likes to write Stop reading now if you plan to see this movie, so I’m tempted to wrap up things right now…

Mike Leigh’s new film Career Girls is compact and minor. I don’t mean that as a slam, exactly. After the dawdling expansiveness of last year’s Secrets & Lies, his latest one is something of a relaxation–it’s appealingly small-scale. Leigh isn’t doing anything here he hasn’t done better before, but at…

If you’re nostalgic for the cockeyed, let-it-all-out gabfests of the late John Cassavetes, She’s So Lovely will seem like dejà vu all over again. Cassavetes wrote the script more than a decade ago, and now his son Nick Cassavetes–whose first feature, Unhook the Stars, starred his mother, Gena Rowlands–has directed…