Arts & Culture

Every film adaptation of a preexisting work has its own unique set of problems; in the case of Jocelyn Moorhouse’s A Thousand Acres, the problem is compounded. Not only was Jane Smiley’s 1991 novel a Pulitzer Prize-winning best seller with a large number of (presumably) devoted fans, but the book…

Howard and Emily’s wedding is the talk of Greenleaf, Indiana, a small town idyllic enough to repel Norman Rockwell. The town has waited three years for the couple to make it official–and slimmed-down Emily (Joan Cusack) has waited three long years for Howard (Kevin Kline) to consummate their relationship. She’s…

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…

If you spent a lot of time during the early Eighties watching what were known in those days as “T&A” comedies–low-budget youth sex farces like Hardbodies or Private School–then the new film Butch Camp may amaze you. It’s made perfectly and unselfconsciously in the same cruddy nonstyle. It’s technically shoddy,…

Cold comfort though it must be to those who suffered through it, Great Britain’s Tory-era industrial collapse at least produced two delightful, defiant movie comedies. Mark Herman’s Brassed Off! followed a North England mining town’s brass band on its swan song. The film wasn’t escapist–it was pretty preachy at times,…

In Woody Allen’s early comedy Take the Money and Run, stickup man Allen’s wife complains about the unfairness that her husband never made the Ten Most Wanted List. “It’s who you know,” she bitterly insists. The makers of the period gangster epic Hoodlum seem to have felt the same snub…

When Time magazine columnist Walter Shapiro referred to himself last month as part of a generation that still believes “A Thousand Clowns holds all the secrets to human existence,” I thought he must be daft. Yes, high school students took Herb Gardner’s hit comedy about an urban dropout (played by…

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…

Excess Baggage, Alicia Silverstone’s first feature from her First Kiss Productions, turns out to be a rather shaggy and uninvolving jaunt. As Emily T. Hope, the moneyed teenager looking for love from her emotionally distant single dad (Jack Thompson), Silverstone pouts a lot while trying to wring our sympathy. Even…

In the Company of Men is about Chad (Aaron Eckhart) and Howard (Matt Malloy), two thirtysomething white-collar execs who have recently been passed over for promotions and rejected by their girlfriends. En route to a six-week business trip at the home office, Chad, the bristlier and wilier of the two,…

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…

In G.I. Jane, Demi Moore’s Naval Intelligence officer, Lieutenant Jordan O’Neil, is recruited as a test case to be the first female Navy SEAL. She gets a buzz cut and loses her period. She endures the indignities of the male volunteers snickering at her in the food line. She rolls…

When the beautiful entomologist rips open the chest cavity of a huge, bloodthirsty insect in the sci-fi nightmare Mimic, it turns into Thoraxic Park. This movie, like Steven Spielberg’s, features evolution gone haywire and dramaturgy gone to hell. In the prologue, the heroine–the reckless and courageous (or foolhardy and stupid)…