Email Author Peter Rainer

1998 Stories by Peter Rainer

• Mission: Unfilmable

  published October 15, 1998

  The Jonathan Demme-directed Beloved runs nearly three hours, and it's a long slog. This adaptation of the 1987 Toni Morrison novel bursts with... More >>

• Fatal Detraction

  published October 8, 1998

  With all that is truly scandalous in the movies these days--namely the dimwit dramaturgy and the anything-for-a-buckism that passes for Hollywood... More >>

• Workers' Compensation

  published October 1, 1998

  The ants in Antz show a lot of personality. The film is the best example yet of how a fully animated computer-generated feature can delineate... More >>

• The Family That Frays Together

  published September 17, 1998

  One True Thing, directed by Carl Franklin, is trying to be the Terms of Endearment of the Nineties. Scripted by Karen Croner from the 1995 Anna... More >>

• Burnt Offering

  published September 17, 1998

  Who would have guessed that a movie called Firelight could give off so little warmth? William Nicholson, the screenwriter of Shadowlands (1993)... More >>

• Jews in the 'hood

  published August 27, 1998

  Slums of Beverly Hills is the first feature by the young writer-director Tamara Jenkins, and it has its mild amusements. It's one of those movies... More >>

• Sinergy

  published August 20, 1998

  As the lights came up after a screening of the new Neil LaBute movie Your Friends and Neighbors, a colleague next to me growled disapprovingly,... More >>

• Hot and Bothered

  published August 6, 1998

  Nicolas Cage has never seemed more dazzling than he does in the new Brian De Palma thriller Snake Eyes. Playing Rick Santoro, a corrupt Atlantic... More >>

• A Star Is Borin'

  published July 30, 1998

  Do we really need to see the great Kevin Spacey fuming and fussing in one of those we-do-things-my-way-or-we-don't-do-them-at-all roles? In The... More >>

• No Cojones

  published July 16, 1998

  In The Mask of Zorro, Anthony Hopkins plays the eponymous masked hero as if he were doing Shakespeare. He's trying to turn a kitsch hero into a... More >>

• A True Disaster

  published July 9, 1998

  Michael Bay is the director of Bad Boys and The Rock and the new asteroid-attack movie Armageddon--which should be called The Very Big Rock. Bay... More >>

• Afterthought Special

  published July 2, 1998

  The 1967 musical Dr. Dolittle, which starred Rex Harrison, was a commercial disaster for its studio, Twentieth Century Fox. The new, non-musical... More >>

• And Now a Word From Godzilla

  published May 21, 1998

  The "Size Matters" marketing campaign for Godzilla is far more ingenious than the movie. It's also highly annoying--and somewhat misleading. After... More >>

• Not Much of a Hit

  published May 14, 1998

  Most disaster movies would be a lot better with more disaster and less "human drama." In Deep Impact, the impending obliteration of much of Earth... More >>

• White Like Me

  published May 14, 1998

  It's the tail end of the 1996 California primary election, and incumbent Democratic senator Jay Bulworth (Warren Beatty) is having a nervous... More >>

• Saints and Sinners

  published April 30, 1998

  From its very first frame, Neil Jordan's The Butcher Boy whooshes us inside the rollicking, deranged world of twelve-year-old Francie Brady... More >>

• Man's Best Frenzy

  published April 23, 1998

  In writer-director James Toback's quicksilver sex comedy Two Girls and a Guy, Robert Downey Jr. plays Blake Allen, a struggling New York actor who... More >>

• Playing It Safe

  published March 26, 1998

  The John Grisham industry has claimed another heavyweight. A few months back, Francis Ford Coppola delivered up John Grisham's The Rainmaker, and... More >>

• Political Animal

  published March 19, 1998

  If ever there was an "op-ed" movie--a movie destined to be written about in an "elevated" realm beyond just the movie pages--it's Primary Colors.... More >>

• Lower Your Expectations

  published January 29, 1998

  In the new Great Expectations, directed by Alfonso Cuaron and scripted by Mitch Glazer, the teeming world of Charles Dickens's 1861 novel is very... More >>

• Flesh and Spirit

  published January 15, 1998

  Martin Scorsese's Kundun is a deeply ceremonial experience: It's like watching a serene pageant of colors, rituals and costumes. The film is about... More >>

• Hype and Holler

  published January 8, 1998

  While not a movie year to go down in infamy, 1997 was still mostly full of hype and holler. If the annual yield is judged by how many great films... More >>