Yes, The Deep End is almost as stylish as it’s been built up to be, and it does have an unreservedly brilliant central performance from Tilda Swinton (Edward II), but rather than being a truly great film, it’s instead just a very good one. It’s easily the best neo-noir since Memento, but I wouldn’t put […]
It’s Shameless Oscar Bid Time at the movies, and Kevin Kline, having lost the equally shameless bid with last year’s Life As a House, is back again with The Emperor’s Club. This time it might just pan out for him. Whether or not he deserves it is another matter. One thing is certain: This movie […]
Sure, it’s not much more than a souffle of a movie, but what a grand, graceful, gorgeous souffle it is. It’s a classic historical romp of the sort that briefly flourished in the early 1930s with movies like The Affairs of Cellini and Madame DuBarry and has occasionally been visited since, mostly in British films […]
The Exorcist, William Friedkin’s film treatment of William Peter Blatty’s best-selling novel about a young girl possessed by a demon, was more an “event” than a great movie. Its popularity had less to do with any intrinsic merit than with the fact that it contained the most overt depictions of horror ever seen in a […]
Something old, something new, something borrowed … and something blood red. Despite claims by writer-director J.S. Cardone and producer Scott Einbinder in press releases about originality, The Forsaken isn’t quite the absolutely fresh “re-imagining” of the vampire film it thinks it is. Cardone claims, “There are no fangs, no bullets, no garlic” — yet the […]
I’m no scholar of the film versions of A.E.W. Mason’s 1901 novel, The Four Feathers — first filmed when it was a scant 14 years old and still being filmed at the ripe old age of 100. The 1915, 1921, 1955 and 1977 renderings have escaped my gaze. I will say that Shekhar Kapur’s version […]
If you’re expecting the teaming of Sam Raimi (director) and Billy Bob Thornton (co-screenwriter) to result in The Evil Dead Meets Sling Blade, you both will and won’t be disappointed. The Gift does indeed blend the in-depth characterizations of Sling Blade with the stylish filmmaking of Raimi’s Evil Dead movies, but Raimi seems uncharacteristically subdued […]
You know a movie’s in trouble when the soundtrack is drowned out by the sound of theatre seats flipping up with the staccato rhythm of a burst of machine-gun fire before the final fade-out has faded to black. Any audience that hell-bent on getting out of the theatre — especially with a film where all […]
If the idea of a Merchant-Ivory film based on a novel by Henry James automatically makes your eyes glaze over, The Golden Bowl may come as a pleasant surprise. No, it’s not what you’d call action-packed (the Pearl Harbor set will be chagrined to learn that nothing explodes), but it is more briskly paced than […]
With The Good Girl it’s safe to say that Jennifer Anniston has arrived (ironically, in the same week that ought to send Friends co-star Matthew Perry back to the small screen). Anniston has come a long way from that TV stint, her early days as the star of Leprechaun, and her thankless role in the […]
What’s the most positive thing that can be said about the new Rob Schneider vehicle? Well, it’s not as pathetic as The Animal. (Now there’s a breakout quote for a newspaper ad if ever I saw one!) Once again, we have a movie that exists mostly because Adam Sandler likes Rob Schneider and apparently thinks […]
It’s been said that an ounce of pretension is worth a pound of manure, and while that’s certainly true, and while it’s also true that Stephen Daldry’s The Hours has a lot more than an ounce of pretension to it, this is that rare instance where a film justifies, and warrants, its pompous airs. This […]
Once upon a time — before it died in development hell — Edith Whaton’s novel, The House of Mirth, was slated to be directed by Milos Forman from a screenplay by Ken Russell. That might have been something. What we now have instead is writer-director Terence Davies’ airless approach to the material. That’s also something, […]
I’m not sure what to say about an action thriller that starts with Johnny Cash gravely intoning the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited.” I admit that I was at first startled, but that soon gave way to a mild bafflement, which in turn gave way to a sense that I was in the […]
Oscar Wilde’s “trivial comedy for serious people” was last filmed in 1952 by Anthony Asquith, a somewhat overlooked British director who specialized in intelligent transfers of respected theatrical works (Pygmalion, The Browning Version). That version — brilliantly cast with Michael Redgrave, Dorothy Tutin, Edith Evans and Margaret Rutherford — remains the perfect encapsulation of Wilde’s […]
The only possible reason that this 72-minute abomination didn’t go to its proper direct-to-video home is the one quantity for which Disney is better known than family entertainment: greed. The original 1967 Jungle Book wasn’t one of the studio’s more shining moments to begin with, but next to first-time director Steven Trenbirth’s sequel, the original […]
Robert Evans was the one-time Wonder Kid of Hollywood. “Discovered” in the mid-1950s by Norma Shearer as the perfect person to portray her late husband, Irving Thalberg, in the James Cagney biopic on Lon Chaney Sr., The Man of a Thousand Faces, Evans started his Hollywood career as an actor. Landing a plum role in […]
I’m going to be swimming upstream with this one. Most of my critical comrades-in-arms are four-square against Alan Parker’s latest offering, The Life of David Gale, and while I understand where they’re coming from, I have to admit I don’t share their antipathy for the film. It may be that I am more in tune […]
The immediate question, of course, is whether The Two Towers lives up to The Fellowship of the Ring, and the answer is … not quite. But that’s not a complete answer, since The Two Towers is, in many respects, a very different film than its predecessor in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It’s much […]
“How long have you been playing chess?” Natalia (Emily Watson, Breaking the Waves) asks chess genius Alexander Luzhin (John Turturro) during one of their early meetings in Marleen Gorris’ film of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, The Luzhin Defence. “Nine thousand, two hundred and sixty-three days, four hours and five minutes,” he answers matter-of-factly before she can […]
It ain’t fer nuthin’ that there’s a poster from Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life festooning a wall of the crumbling Majestic Theatre in Frank Darabont’s The Majestic, a movie that tries its damnedest to bring the kind of movie Capra used to make back to theaters. Therein lies the intent and therein lies the […]
