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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Wes Craven, creator of the Nightmare on Elm Street series and writer/director of its two best entries (the first and the last), works whispering distance from the commercial Hollywood mainstream, just far enough to allow for more rude wit and less comfortable resolution than most studio product. His films open…
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…
Beavis and Butt-head, the slow-witted, lewd-minded, giggling, teenaged sofa reptiles from MTV, may be the most acquired taste in current pop culture–for adults, at least. At a quick glance, your reaction may be revulsion at the crude animation and the repetitive gags. But let the show’s subtle rhythms work on…
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,…
The stodgy works of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, makers of Howards End and Jefferson in Paris, have encouraged the sad notion that costume dramas must be leaden and respectable. Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility helped rehabilitate the form, and now Patrice Leconte’s Ridicule ventilates it with yet more fresh…
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,…
Western civilization has taken its fair share of direct hits over the ages, but never has it been threatened with destruction by such markedly unempowered foes as Beavis and Butt-head, which debuted on MTV in 1993. How unempowered? Consider that those who most rightfully should be offended by the doltish…
Whitney Houston has had a Movie Star Moment–just not in a movie. Near the end of the “Saving All My Love for You” video, she turns toward the camera with a luminous smile that wilts into heartbreak when she realizes she’s been dropped by her, um, boyfriend. It’s a moment…
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…
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 golden age of Hollywood, no less than the likes of Frank Capra owned Christmas on the big screen. But if you want Proof Number 496 of how far things have fallen, consider that in the ’90s, holiday cinema is a wholly owned subsidiary of Chris Columbus–hired gun of…
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.”…
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…
Given his commercial success as a novelist, Kurt Vonnegut hasn’t seen many of his works translated to the big screen. And, given the results with the few that have been filmed, he may wish he hadn’t seen them, either. Counterbalancing George Roy Hill’s interesting and spiritually faithful version of Slaughterhouse…
