Even at just 92 minutes, Hanging Up feels endless. Intended as a humorous, heartwarming take on dysfunctional family relationships, this film doesn’t work as comedy or drama or anything in between. Given its wealth of above-the-line talent — director and costar Diane Keaton, writers Delia and Nora Ephron and actresses…
Moviegoers, rejoice! The first fun movie of the year has arrived. Oh, Leo’s little seaside adventure was pretty to look at, but its attempts at depth were a real bummer. And let’s not even talk about Scream 3: Even the first one was highly overrated, and it’s been downhill from…
Beware the shrieking teenagers who saw Titanic ten or twelve times and have been conducting their own shipboard romance fantasies with Leonardo DiCaprio ever since. They will be massed and marching in Bombay-at-rush-hour numbers this week, maybe in Chinese-army numbers, and anyone over the age of seventeen who doesn’t feel…
The heroine of Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke is a bold and impressionable Australian girl named Ruth Barron (Kate Winslet), who flees her middle-class suburb with friends for a spiritual adventure in exotic India. Inevitably, she is thunderstruck by a saucer-eyed guru named Baba, who quickly reveals the source of absolute…
Film director Agnieszka Holland is the daughter of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, but she was raised in communist Poland in an atmosphere of state-imposed atheism. If those bona fides don’t qualify her to make a two-hour movie about the timeless tug of war between faith and reason,…
The subject matter is surely the stuff of which can’t-miss movies are made: Jacqueline Susann, author of the best-selling Valley of the Dolls and other jerk-off (pardon — “maddeningly sexy,” to quote Helen Gurley Brown) classic lit. There was nothing at all pedestrian about this woman regaled in her day…
The evening of March 14, 1885, was an auspicious one in the annals of musical theater. Less than four years had passed since the opening of London’s Savoy Theatre, which was built specifically for the productions of librettist William Schwenk Gilbert and composer Arthur Seymour Sullivan. The partners’ first six…
The besmirched hero of Sweet and Lowdown, Woody Allen’s valentine to swing-era jazz and the furies of creative temperament, is a fictitious ’30s guitarist called Emmet Ray. Self-absorbed but brilliant, crass but lyrical, Emmet is the embodiment of the notion that a great artist needn’t be a good guy or…
Boo hoo! Frank McCourt had a miserable childhood! Honestly, who can say their childhood wasn’t impoverished in some way…or in many ways? That Mr. McCourt survived and eventually published his inescapable memoir is nice, of course, and the book is indeed a poignant and crafty piece of work. Nonetheless, it…
In Cradle Will Rock, his third directorial outing, Tim Robbins takes on an almost insurmountably ambitious project: the re-creation of an era into which characters imaginary, obscure and famous are woven into a tapestry representing the texture of the time. It’s a tall order. E. L. Doctorow was able to…
It’s easy to see how Play It to the Bone, writer-director Ron Shelton’s latest comedy-drama, got started. Shelton obviously wanted to do for boxing what he’d already done for baseball in Bull Durham, golf in Tin Cup and pick-up basketball in White Men Can’t Jump. But somewhere along the way,…
Director Chen Kaige is best known in the U.S. for Farewell, My Concubine, the most successful Chinese production ever released here. As many pointed out at the time, the Oscar-nominated 1993 epic of modern Chinese history may have been wholly Chinese in both content and viewpoint, but it was still,…
Although some people really are crazy, “crazy” is a relative term. Does it apply to someone who feels he might spin off into outer space and never be able to get back down to earth? Or is it only crazy when you have to cling to the nearest table or…
Of the readers who bought four million copies, in no fewer than thirty languages, of David Guterson’s 1995 bestseller Snow Falling on Cedars, many have been looking forward to the movie version. Others have been dreading it. For better or worse, this multifarious story about nativist bigotry, forbidden love, sons…
Those who choose to dismiss Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson’s dark (and darkly humorous) meditation on loneliness and regret in the San Fernando Valley, will probably see it as self-important and philosophically inflated — the kind of three-hour ordeal that university professors can dissect at their leisure while ordinary folks shy…
You hope for Dorothy Lamour, reclining against a palm tree in her sarong, when you hear the title The Hurricane. Instead, you get well over two hours of Denzel Washington huddled in a cell. In the poster art, Washington glowers, one bandaged fist cocked for a right to our jaw…
In Albert Brooks’s summer comedy The Muse, a ravishing daughter of Zeus — in the person of Sharon Stone — gives a burned-out Hollywood screenwriter a fresh jolt of inspiration. For a price. Brooks’s desperate scribbler must first lavish Tiffany trinkets on his newfound benefactor, put her up at the…
Let’s hear it for sports movies! Although the most avid sports fan is occasionally bored by lackluster games on the field, even a casual spectator can appreciate what the big screen can do for an athletic contest: the closer-than-life closeups, the dramatic use of slo-mo (preferably highlighted by driving rain),…
At first glance, Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother seems uncharacteristically grim for a filmmaker with such a demonic sense of humor. Within ten minutes, the heroine’s seventeen-year-old son is hit and killed by a car, which propels her and the events of the film into motion. In the next…
Millennial hysteria takes many forms. Some people fall prey to a travel agent and book a cruise to the Aegean, bent on passing New Century’s Eve with Aristotle’s ghost and a nice plate of moussaka. Others of appropriate age and inclination vow to get drunk and copulate at the stroke…
It is rare to find a movie that is as accomplished, multilayered and rewarding as the novel from which it was adapted, but The Cider House Rules is such a film. Directed by Lasse Hallström (My Life as a Dog, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?), the film displays the kind of…
Nobody is innocent in America, but there is one segment of the population that seems doggedly determined to deny its own ignorance, ugliness and violence. So hands up: Who really likes rednecks? The sludge on the bottom of the melting pot, this embarrassing offshoot of European ancestry continues to this…
