Assorted ecologists, armchair philosophers and meddlers have been wringing their hands in recent years over the nature of nature documentaries. Are the lives of various species disturbed by the filmmaking process? Do camera and microphone falsify? Does Homo sapiens have any business peering into the lion’s den or the spider’s…
In The Mirror Has Two Faces, Barbra Streisand plays Rose Morgan, a Columbia University Romantic Literature professor who endures a drab, romanceless life. She lives with her imperious, fault-finding mother, Hannah (Lauren Bacall)–a beautician, no less–and wards off the attentions of a nebbishy suitor (Austin Pendleton) while pining for the…
San Francisco isn’t just the setting of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: It’s the movie’s muse. Along with composer Bernard Herrmann, who transforms convoluted psychology into resounding lyricism, and co-star Kim Novak, whose pheromones and otherworldliness give body and soul to tortured romance, San Francisco enables Hitchcock to conjure a netherworld of…
The fussiest Shakespeare buff should find little to fault in Trevor Nunn’s gorgeous and playful adaptation of Twelfth Night. The most popular and oft-performed of the Bard’s comedies has sailed along for four centuries on the glories of mistaken identity, confused passion and matchless poetry, and Nunn does them all…
Ron Howard, the child actor turned movie director, has grossed a billion dollars exalting firemen and astronauts. There’s no surprise in that: A guy who spent most of his youth on the make-believe sets of The Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days has a better excuse than most people for…
There are some pretty good reasons why it took 44 years for Truman Capote’s coming-of-age novel The Grass Harp to make its way to the movies. There are even better reasons why the movie’s on-again, off-again release schedule has meandered across most of the last nine months. First off, Capote’s…
Moviemakers are on one of their periodic Shakespeare binges, which is always good for the English language, if not necessarily for the advancement of the cinematic arts. Last year we got a radical Richard III, with powerful Ian McKellen reinterpreting the treacherous brute as a 1930s fascist, along with a…
In Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins, we learn nothing of the Irish revolutionary’s early life, and we get but scant patches of the long, tragic history that impelled him to invent urban guerrilla warfare. Instead, Jordan throws us immediately into battle. In this case, it’s the last moments of the Irish…
Mike, the lovesick protagonist of Swingers, has the slab-jawed, slightly baffled appeal of a young William Bendix–and only about half the savoir-faire. A struggling comedian with no gig and not many jokes, obsessed with a girlfriend who’s left him and gone back to New York, poor Mike is stranded high…
The emotion in a Mike Leigh film is as plain as dirt and as valuable as gold. This most gifted of all British moviemakers may, in fact, be a kind of miracle worker: He takes the stuff of ordinary working- and middle-class life–trying and failing, the terrors of aging, small…
For those who don’t already know that Pablo Picasso was a great artist and a cruel son of a bitch, filmdom’s beacons of good taste, Merchant, Ivory and Jhabvala, now step forward, shoes all shined, to oh-so-gently kick him in the derriere. In Surviving Picasso, they have once again chosen…
In a land most Americans associate with single-malt whiskey, four-putt greens and the lyrics of Robert Burns, a major literary and cinematic revival continues apace–and the Scottish tourist office is probably still hiding its head. No sooner has the dark and brilliant Trainspotting painted Edinburgh as a nest of roving…
Lovely Geena Davis doesn’t look much like Arnold Schwarzenegger. But once the prop department for The Long Kiss Goodnight outfits her with enough high-tech assault rifles, .45 automatics and shark-fin hunting knives to take out a fair-sized army, it’s pretty hard to tell the difference. Like Big Arnie on a…
With six straight hit movies in the bank and a pair of Oscars on the mantel, Tom Hanks has inflated into a major Hollywood power. So when he tells the guys in suits he wants to write and direct a film all his own, the suits start nodding vigorously into…
In Larry and Andy Wachowski’s Bound, film noir gets one helluva gender-bending. But when the scamming and shooting stop, the genre looks healthier than ever. Envision Double Indemnity with two Barbara Stanwycks, no Fred MacMurray and a couple of enflamed lesbian love scenes. Throw in a briefcase stuffed with 2…
The best movie of the year has nothing to do with space aliens blowing up the White House. Or the durability of the Klan in Mississippi. Or shooting heroin in Scotland. The best movie of the year is about a couple of Italian immigrant brothers struggling to keep a restaurant…
Imagine a Quentin Tarantino movie made by a grownup. A movie fueled by Tarantino’s brand of daredevil adrenaline but with none of his schoolboy nihilism. A movie drenched in blood that also understands loss. A swaggering black comedy stuffed with betrayals that still takes time to glimpse the soul of…
All right, buffs, let’s see if we can get this straight. In 1961 the great director Akira Kurosawa made a lightly veiled homage to American Westerns called Yojimbo, starring Toshiro Mifune as a cold-eyed samurai-for-hire who teaches an overdue lesson to both warring factions in a lawless town–now located in…
In the final scene of The First Wives Club, a comic fantasy in which three middle-aged women take revenge on the husbands who have traded them in for newer models, the triumphant heroines, all dressed in stylish, sinless white, link arms in the glistening dawn streets of lower Manhattan and…
If Cameron Diaz knows what’s good for her, she’ll settle down with a nice, stable insurance salesman in rural South Dakota, have five kids and vote Republican forevermore. Hey, it could happen. For now, though, the spectacular blonde who helped transform Jim Carrey from geeky bank clerk to strutting superstud…
Look out below. Here’s another movie about a child’s grief, a hard-shelled grownup’s loneliness, and the healing power of imagination. It unfolds in Las Vegas (the city of illusions) and Newark, New Jersey (Harsh Reality, U.S.A.), and features Gerard Depardieu in, roughly speaking, the role of Harvey the invisible rabbit…
When movie actors talk in reverent tones about David Mamet, Team Hollywood’s designated thinker, it’s probably not because they regard him as the nation’s leading playwright. Or because of his famous insights into the emptiness of the American Dream and the casual cruelties of the business world. Or even because…
