TROPICAL ANESTHESIA

God, we’re sometimes told, is in the details. Most of us have had some epiphanic moment or another at which it seemed likely that this notion was true, but the Vietnamese period film The Scent of Green Papaya may lend it a different kind of credence. It’s intensely focused on…

X WITHOUT GUILT

Threesome has the look, and the all-important soundtrack, of another entry in the Generation X youth-movie sweepstakes, along the lines of Reality Bites. It’s a comedy set on a college campus, and it has just three characters of any significance–dormmates Eddy (Josh Charles), Stuart (Stephen Baldwin) and Alex (Lara Flynn…

VICTORIAN PRINCIPLE

Hugh Grant, star of Mike Newell’s current Four Weddings and a Funeral, is also the star of the Australian John Duigan’s new Sirens. Grant plays a young, vaguely liberal English vicar who is sent by the bishop of Sydney to the outback. His mission is to persuade painter Norman Lindsay…

SOUTH AMERICAN GOTHIC

Chilean novelist Isabel Allende’s epic The House of the Spirits is set in a fictitious South American country. About the most charitable term one can apply to the South American setting of the film version, which was directed by a Dane and shot in Denmark and Portugal, is that it’s…

VICTORIAN PRINCIPLE

Hugh Grant, star of Mike Newell’s current Four Weddings and a Funeral, is also the star of the Australian John Duigan’s new Sirens. Grant plays a young, vaguely liberal English vicar who is sent by the bishop of Sydney to the outback. His mission is to persuade painter Norman Lindsay…

VICTORIAN PRINCIPLE

Hugh Grant, star of Mike Newell’s current Four Weddings and a Funeral, is also the star of the Australian John Duigan’s new Sirens. Grant plays a young, vaguely liberal English vicar who is sent by the bishop of Sydney to the outback. His mission is to persuade painter Norman Lindsay…

SOUTH AMERICAN GOTHIC

Chilean novelist Isabel Allende’s epic The House of the Spirits is set in a fictitious South American country. About the most charitable term one can apply to the South American setting of the film version, which was directed by a Dane and shot in Denmark and Portugal, is that it’s…

SOUTH AMERICAN GOTHIC

Chilean novelist Isabel Allende’s epic The House of the Spirits is set in a fictitious South American country. About the most charitable term one can apply to the South American setting of the film version, which was directed by a Dane and shot in Denmark and Portugal, is that it’s…

WED AND BURIED

Weddings, or incipient weddings, are the traditional tags of English comedy. The idea is, if everybody ends up paired off at the end, then everything must have worked out all right. Director Mike Newell, a Brit not known as a laugh riot until recently–he gave us Dance With a Stranger…

FERNANDO’S HIDEAWAY

This year’s Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, Belle Epoque, is set “somewhere in Spain”–somewhere rural and sun-dappled and placidly lovely–in 1931. It wasn’t such a beautiful epoch elsewhere in Spain that year, what with the mad, factional contentions by which the Second Republic was beginning its brief existence before…

WED AND BURIED

Weddings, or incipient weddings, are the traditional tags of English comedy. The idea is, if everybody ends up paired off at the end, then everything must have worked out all right. Director Mike Newell, a Brit not known as a laugh riot until recently–he gave us Dance With a Stranger…

FERNANDO’S HIDEAWAY

This year’s Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, Belle Epoque, is set “somewhere in Spain”–somewhere rural and sun-dappled and placidly lovely–in 1931. It wasn’t such a beautiful epoch elsewhere in Spain that year, what with the mad, factional contentions by which the Second Republic was beginning its brief existence before…

FERNANDO’S HIDEAWAY

This year’s Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, Belle Epoque, is set “somewhere in Spain”–somewhere rural and sun-dappled and placidly lovely–in 1931. It wasn’t such a beautiful epoch elsewhere in Spain that year, what with the mad, factional contentions by which the Second Republic was beginning its brief existence before…

WED AND BURIED

Weddings, or incipient weddings, are the traditional tags of English comedy. The idea is, if everybody ends up paired off at the end, then everything must have worked out all right. Director Mike Newell, a Brit not known as a laugh riot until recently–he gave us Dance With a Stranger…

FERNANDO’S HIDEAWAY

This year’s Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, Belle Epoque, is set “somewhere in Spain”–somewhere rural and sun-dappled and placidly lovely–in 1931. It wasn’t such a beautiful epoch elsewhere in Spain that year, what with the mad, factional contentions by which the Second Republic was beginning its brief existence before…

WED AND BURIED

Weddings, or incipient weddings, are the traditional tags of English comedy. The idea is, if everybody ends up paired off at the end, then everything must have worked out all right. Director Mike Newell, a Brit not known as a laugh riot until recently–he gave us Dance With a Stranger…

HOOP AND GLORY

Because Joel and Ethan Coen are such a couple of precocious sophomores, it’s not hard to find them annoying, or to wish to debunk them. The trouble is, there’s no denying that they always put on a great show. Even when they aren’t sure what they’re doing, as with Barton…

NIELSEN RATING

Suppose you were to travel backward in time to, say, 20 years ago. You start telling the people you meet about life in the 90s: The Berlin Wall is gone, the Soviet empire is in ruins, Virginia is the first state to have elected an African-American governor, and a Democratic…

NIELSEN RATING

Suppose you were to travel backward in time to, say, 20 years ago. You start telling the people you meet about life in the 90s: The Berlin Wall is gone, the Soviet empire is in ruins, Virginia is the first state to have elected an African-American governor, and a Democratic…

HOOP AND GLORY

Because Joel and Ethan Coen are such a couple of precocious sophomores, it’s not hard to find them annoying, or to wish to debunk them. The trouble is, there’s no denying that they always put on a great show. Even when they aren’t sure what they’re doing, as with Barton…

IS THIS STRIP NECESSARY?

In “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” what was the Emperor’s actual state? Hint: It’s the title of Mike Leigh’s new film. Naked, a black comedy, is built around a flawless performance by a superb young actor named David Thewlis. Thewlis and several of the other actors are so good, and some…

DENIS THE MENACE

A friend of mine was a classmate of comedian-actor Denis Leary at Emerson College in Boston in the mid-’70s. He showed me a copy of the college literary magazine, to which both he and Leary had contributed some poetry. I confess I was hoping for an expos, hoping to find…