John Grisham’s The Rainmaker lulls you into the mindset you get while reading a bestseller at the beach. What a sad thing to say about a Francis Ford Coppola movie! Rather than heighten your awareness the way The Conversation or The Godfather did, The Rainmaker makes you feel lazy and…

Writer-director Mike Figgis has mastered a kind of style I usually mistrust: Jumpy and almost free-associative, it begs to be dubbed “arty.” At Figgis’s best (say, Leaving Las Vegas), this mercurial mode can be sensationally effective, allowing him to leap from one supreme expression of extreme emotion to the next…

Put brutally, The Wings of the Dove is the story of a romantic frameup that backfires. Thankfully, nothing is put brutally in this smart, lyrical movie. Director Iain Softley and screenwriter Hossein Amini cut to the thick of Henry James’s masterpiece about amorous extortion and moral purification. Helena Bonham Carter…

Mad City, a descendant of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, may irritate orthodox movie buffs. In the coruscating Wilder classic, Kirk Douglas’s supremely cynical newspaper reporter turns the rescue of a cave-in victim into “the big carnival” (the film’s alternate title). The protagonist of Mad City, a TV reporter…

Despite its muckraking pretensions, Red Corner is a rickety throwback to escapist adventures that featured beautiful foreign idealists spouting high-flown hooey to fighting Americans. The heroine, a scrappy Beijing defense lawyer, ends up whispering a whole succession of sweet somethings to the hero, a framed Yank. The banalities include (I…

When the beautiful entomologist rips open the chest cavity of a huge, bloodthirsty insect in the sci-fi nightmare Mimic, it turns into Thoracic Park. This movie, like Spielberg’s, features evolution gone haywire and dramaturgy gone to hell. In the prologue, the heroine–the reckless and courageous (or foolhardy and stupid) Dr…

Jerry Fletcher, the hero of Conspiracy Theory, is a comic, glamorous variation on Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Like Travis, he’s a New York cabbie obsessed with protecting a woman from the world’s hidden malignancies. Unlike Travis, Jerry snaps when he achieves sanity. Mel Gibson has been almost too willing…

187, a number favored by adolescent thugs, is the California state penal code for homicide–and a harsh sentence for all involved in this hopeless, hapless movie. The gifted Samuel L. Jackson stars as a high-school teacher who cracks under the constant threat of rabid teen machismo–and retaliates with his own…

Slapstick decadence is the dominant style at the Disney studios this summer, reaching all the way from Touchstone Pictures’ action hit Con Air to the 35th Walt Disney animated feature, Hercules. It’s a moviemaking mode that weds anything-for-a-laugh to anything-for-a-jolt, leaving imagination and authenticity in the lurch. Instead of creating…

When Masterpiece Theatre aired a multi-part Anna Karenina to mark the novel’s centennial in 1977, series producer Joan Sullivan said, “I think that great stories are what the series is about.” Now Bernard Rose, the writer-director of the new movie version, talks about how lucky he was to discover “this…

No one has exploited the historical-epic form better than David Lean. At his peak, he used its spaciousness and breadth to develop characters with conflicting points of view so that audiences could feel viscerally swept away, emotionally engaged and mentally sharpened–all at once. With the help of inspired actors, he…

Could the release of a three-and-a-half-hour director’s cut of the 1982 nautical spectacular Das Boot reflect some mass Oedipal desire to get closer to Mother Earth’s core as the millennium approaches? Perhaps. But there’s nothing vaguely feminine about Das Boot, the kind of man’s-man World War II adventure in which…

I spent the 68th anniversary of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre watching The Godfather with the new soundtrack prepared for its 25th anniversary. The scene was a mixing room in the Saul Zaentz Film Center in Berkeley, California, and the master of ceremonies was much-honored editor and sound expert Walter…

In Return of the Jedi, the last chapter of the Star Wars trilogy, an intergalactic window display of creepy and cuddly critters upstages the human characters. All the conflicts are resolved between the virtuous rebels–Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), Han Solo (Harrison Ford), and Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher)–and the wicked Imperials,…

Elmore Leonard’s Touch is identified on the paperback as a mystery and carried in stores next to Leonard’s celebrated crime novels (like Get Shorty). But this wan little book is actually the problem child of Leonard’s oeuvre–the only crime it involves is lack of truth in advertising, and that’s on…

Irvin Kershner’s The Empire Strikes Back, the continuation of George Lucas’s Star Wars, is a classic fantasy in its own right. I vastly prefer it to the first film. Its textures are richer, its emotions deeper, and it’s an honest-to-Jedi movie–not a dozen jammed-together entries of a serial. On its…

Robert E. Howard, the subject of Dan Ireland’s wonderful debut film The Whole Wide World, created the sword-and-sorcery genre with his Conan stories. Howard had a grand yet coarse-grained consciousness. His Conan stories, set in a fictitious primordial age full of demons and killers, boasted swift, cartoon-flavored action (“He moved…

At a twenty-year remove, Star Wars comes off less as the work of a wizard than as the weird obsessive outgrowth of an eccentric American primitive. George Lucas is a tycoon version of those self-taught craftsmen who fill backyards, storage rooms and cramped city apartments with paintings, gewgaws or wire-hanger…

When an incredulous Jane Campion fan asked what I hated about Campion’s version of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, I immediately responded, “Everything.” Actually, I thought Barbara Hershey, as the subtle villainess, Madame Merle, made a good first impression: I laughed appreciatively when the heroine, Isabel Archer (Nicole…

For people who grow up loving movies, returning to old favorites can be as jarring and illuminating as blowing the dust off a family photo album. Even if our judgments about the films are identical the second time around, our emotional reactions, if we’ve grown at all, change or deepen…

Some amusing stuff about sports agentry drowns in the emotional shallows of Jerry Maguire, which stars Tom Cruise as a hot-shot dealmaker whose first bout of conscience torpedoes his future at his firm, the monolithic Sports Management International. After visiting a hospitalized hockey player who skates hurt in order to…