Giuseppe Tornatore’s reputation on this side of the Atlantic rests on the 1989 Academy Award winner Cinema Paradiso, his engaging but sticky-sweet valentine to movie memory. That nostalgic box-office success sought to recapture a bygone filmmaking style, and it endorsed the prevailing American view of Italians as mushy sentimentalists who…
Anyone who saw Marleen Gorris’s militant fantasy A Question of Silence in the mid-1980s immediately understood the Dutch filmmaker’s no-holds-barred feminism. In a clever twist on Death Wish and four decades of male-dominated revenge Westerns, Gorris had three ordinary women–a housewife, a waitress and a secretary–heap their pent-up resentment and…
In these days of mindless Hollywood conformity and obscene movie budgets set aside for the destruction of cars and helicopters, the career of the magisterial Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray should be a lesson to us. In 1952, when the former economist and advertising man was working on Pather Panchali, the…
To hear Ethan and Joel Coen talk these days, they’re a couple of plain-spoken, rock-ribbed Midwesterners whose simple hearts remain in their home state of Minnesota. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course: The dominant qualities of the brothers’ work–from Raising Arizona to Barton Fink to The Hudsucker…
When it comes to portraying the TV news biz, Hollywood is naturally drawn more to the glitz than the grit. Why make a big deal out of a fatal prison riot when you can have Robert Redford massage Michelle Pfeiffer’s foot? Who gives a damn about Latin American politics when…
Kenneth Branagh’s A Midwinter’s Tale is another sweet comic valentine to those batty but lovable show folk. So if you’re less than enthralled by the vanities and insecurities of actors, you may as well stop reading this and start shopping for another movie. Now that half the house has departed,…
French director Barbet Schroeder’s fifth American film, Before and After, strains to say something important about families–what binds them together, what tears them apart–in an age of moral ambiguity. In a more oblique way, this was also the subject of Martin Scorsese’s harrowing remake of the classic thriller Cape Fear,…
Have Messrs. Ivory and Merchant shown you into one too many drawing rooms? Just about had it with the Jane Austen craze? Up to here with Victorian-class warfare? How about the eternal feud between manners and desire? That’s okay. A lot of people feel the same way. But before you…
My favorite public official, the profoundly corrupt James J. Walker, is said to have spent all his waking hours between 1926 and 1932 lolling in a first-base box at Yankee Stadium, visiting his tailor, brokering crooked deals in speakeasies and throwing dice in a back room at the old Central…
Assorted Hollywood hotshots are still going downhill fast in Aspen and Telluride, but for the most part they regard Denver as fly-over country. So when the Mile High City shows up in a movie–even a movie as scummy as Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead–it’s a good bet…
China’s great filmmaker Zhang Yimou has never gotten along with his country’s ruthless government, and his stock recently dropped with his longtime leading lady, the ravishing Gong Li. But Zhang is absolutely dedicated to his art: Shanghai Triad is another astonishingly beautiful film in a line that includes Red Sorghum,…
To call John Woo a loose cannon is to understate the case. The former star director of the bloody, flamboyant, no-holds-barred Hong Kong cinema is a blazing wall of machine-gun fire and two halves of a severed freight train smashing together. Woo is helicopters bursting into balls of flame, fighter…
Historians tell us that King Richard III’s reputation as England’s most ruthless monarch is a bit inflated. In all likelihood, he wasn’t even the original Tricky Dick: A century earlier, after all, Richard II murdered one of his uncles and confiscated his cousin’s estates before getting himself imprisoned in Pontefract…
If John Grisham wanted to sue the makers of The Juror for impersonation of a legal thriller, he’d have a pretty good case. Some might see the star combo of Demi Moore and Alec Baldwin as a Dream Team, but the movie is strictly lightweight stuff, and unintentionally dense to…
Now comes 25-year-old Noah Baumbach to say his comic piece for the generation that disdains the label “X.” As a spokesman–at least for the affluent, white, college-grad segment of the group–his credentials are all in order: Recent degree from upscale Vassar (yes, they’ve had boys there for years), fashionably hip…
The shenanigans of Charles, Di and Fergie may intrigue the tabloid-TV crowd, but the present British royals are simply no match for their misbehaving forebears. You don’t even need to crack a history book to see the difference: Filmmakers have recently given us satisfying new interpretations of George III’s lunacy…
If there’s a less popular cause in the land of three-strikes-and-you’re-out justice than abolition of the death penalty, I don’t know what it is. Maybe a salary increase for Deion Sanders. Or amnesty for Saddam Hussein. The current occupant of the White House, cops sipping coffee down at the station…
God knows that American schools need inspirational teachers and that the funding cuts that threaten arts education everywhere are lamentable. But when Hollywood third-stringers get their hands on such material, the results are doomed to flunk the test. Mr. Holland’s Opus, in which Richard Dreyfuss portrays a budding composer who…
Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s The City of Lost Children is a kind of crypto-Freudian fairy tale about a sinister mad scientist in a foggy harbor town who kidnaps children so he can steal their dreams. He also has philosophical arguments with a disembodied brain living in a tank of…
Put Charles Bronson into a nice Chanel pantsuit, then apply the right shade of lipstick, and he’d seem an awful lot like the avenging angel Sally Field plays in Eye for an Eye. Gee, maybe that is good ol’ Charlie up there. In any event, director John Schlesinger has given…
Jennifer Jason Leigh, a girlish wisp with huge eyes, has emerged as one of the movies’ most accomplished actresses on the strength of her fearless essays in depravity, which all go bravely against type. Her career credits include low-down prostitutes in Last Exit to Brooklyn and Miami Blues, a coke-addicted…
The foundation on which Terry Gilliam has built the exotic and impressive fantasy 12 Monkeys may seem awfully familiar–at first. For one thing, this paranoiac vision is partly set, again, in a grimy, post-apocalyptic future ruled by Orwellian slavemasters. For a second, it strenuously demonizes science and technology: The cackling…
