In Mother, Albert Brooks plays John Henderson, a science-fiction novelist recently divorced from his second wife who decides he can’t risk another relationship until he comes to terms with his mother. So he does the logical thing: He moves in with her. He hauls out of her garage all his…

World governments may topple, stock markets may soar and crash, deadly viruses may mantle the globe, but one constant remains: Woody Allen still hankers for a Cole Porterized New York. You have to be a deep-dish romantic, or else a blinkered snoot–or maybe both–to persist in such a demonstration. We…

The People vs. Larry Flynt is a Hollywood rags-to-riches success story with a twist. The inheritor of the American dream is a pornographer who admits to losing his virginity at 11 to a chicken and is known for saying things such as, “A woman’s vagina has as much personality as…

My first impulse in considering the top movies of 1996 was to dispense with the new stuff altogether and go for the revival gold. The best films of 1996 were the rereleased restorations: Vertigo and Taxi Driver. The movie business has finally figured out how to turn out new classics–just…

A famous movie composer once told me a joke: Two songwriters are sitting around, and one of them says to the other, “I just saw the most amazing thing. A man fell off the roof of a building, hit a ledge, fell to the street, got winged by a bus…

When we first see the character of Australian pianist David Helfgott (Geoffrey Rush) in Shine, he’s middle-aged and standing in the driving rain, tapping at the window of a wine bar after closing time. Let in by a sympathetic waitress, he keeps up a nonstop nonsensical patter that makes him…

Why a movie of The Crucible now? Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem witchcraft trials was first staged on Broadway in 1953, when McCarthyism was still in flower, and it was not a resounding success. Now, of course, it’s a staple of rep theaters and high school and college stages,…

Lots of hearts are in the right place in Rob Reiner’s Ghosts of Mississippi, but none is beating. Scripted by Lewis Colick (who wrote Unlawful Entry) and based on the true story of how the killer of civil rights activist Medgar Evers was finally brought to justice after three trials,…

Forget Independence Day. If you really want to see Earth get it, you can’t do any better than Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks!. It’s a destructo orgy without any phony-baloney sanctimony about the fellowship of man–or spaceman. Burton isn’t interested in intergalactic amity; he’s not even interested in preserving the Earth…

In the post-Babe era, can you make a live-action movie about animals and not have them talk to each other? For me, this is the deep philosophical question raised by Disney’s new 101 Dalmatians, a live-action remake of the studio’s 1961 animated feature–in which, by the way, the animals did…

In The Mirror Has Two Faces, Barbra Streisand plays Rose Morgan, a Columbia University Romantic literature professor who endures a drab, romanceless life. She lives with her imperious, fault-finding mother, Hannah (Lauren Bacall)–a beautician, no less–and wards off the attentions of a nebbishy suitor (Austin Pendleton) while pining for the…

Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins opens with Collins’ trusted aide Joe O’Reilly (Ian Hart) speaking of his departed leader: “He never did what anyone expected.” But, in fact, Collins (Liam Neeson) does pretty much what is expected of a movie hero: He fills the screen with noble bluster; he aches for…