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…
The abundance of golden light flooding James Foley’s Two Bits lets you know right away that you’re in trouble. Nostalgia trouble. That light, which never lets up, is the same color as sap, and there’s nothing quite so sappy as a memory movie in which an aging man looks way,…
Mel Brooks has clearly lost a step in recent years. But before writing him off as the literally 2,000-year-old man, have a look at Dracula: Dead and Loving It. It’s a satire that has some of the old Brooksian flash and fizz. The Guinness Book of Records tells us there…
The distinction in Oliver Parker’s new film version of Othello is that Shakespeare’s tragic hero is being played for the first time on the screen by a black actor. Despite seeming out of his depth for much of the proceedings, Laurence Fishburne brings raw, lusty power to the great role,…
The four disparate filmmakers who contributed episodes to Four Rooms apparently have one thing in common: a nasty streak that won’t quit. Set in a down-at-the-heels hotel on New Year’s Eve and loosely linked by the presence of a scummy bellhop named Ted (Tim Roth), all the vignettes are resolutely…
BEST TEN OF 1995 1. The Usual Suspects. Bryan Singer’s dark, twisting crime thriller restores the old glory of film noir, then presses on into uncharted territory with Kevin Spacey, Stephen Baldwin, Kevin Pollak, Gabriel Byrne and Chazz Palminteri in tow. Best advice: See it twice. And look out for…
If you’re going to put a bearded lunatic wearing a suit made from banana leaves in your movie, the lunatic probably should be Robin Williams. He’s from another planet anyway, isn’t he? If you’re going to run a herd of elephants, rhinos and zebras down the main drag of a…
Many Americans who spent the better part of three decades with Richard Nixon may not want to give him three hours and twenty minutes more of their time now. But Oliver Stone, a moviemaker who’s always had more nerve than sense, is betting that the familiar Nixon ambiguity–half idealist, half…
The relief and joy most South Africans feel at the passing of apartheid in their country is everywhere reflected in Darrell James Roodt’s new film adaptation of Cry, the Beloved Country. Nelson Mandela himself has endorsed it as “a monument to the future.” Co-stars James Earl Jones and Richard Harris…
If there’s anything Michael Mann savors more than the closeup so tight you can count the pockmarks on a hit man’s nose, it’s the betrayal so violent you feel like taking a shower after watching it. Martin Scor-sese and Quentin Tarantino notwithstanding, writer/director Mann is Hollywood’s real master of street-hardened…
Four decades and a year after Humphrey Bogart won Audrey Hepburn’s hand in a sparkling comedy of manners called Sabrina, Sydney Pollack has tempted fate with a $50 million remake. Luckily, Pollack’s been around: The man who directed Tootsie, Absence of Malice and Out of Africa wasn’t afraid to pay…
There was a time when Sean Penn was better known for punching out photographers and headwaiters than for anything he did on a movie screen. So it comes as no surprise that The Crossing Guard, Penn’s second stab at screenwriting and directing, depends on a sullen and seedy look and…
The sun continues to set on Western movies, but there’s still time for a picture about Wild Bill Hickok that doesn’t make him out to be a saint, a singer or romantic fiction from a dime novel. Wild Bill, written and directed by an old hand named Walter Hill, purports…
It’s unlikely that Mike Figgis’s eloquent tragicomedy Leaving Las Vegas will be a smash hit down at the local AA chapter. Because this is one movie about alcoholism and the algebra of need that doesn’t go in for sanctimony, self-help solutions or any kind of moral uplift in the final…
The crux of Patricia Rozema’s When Night Is Falling is a woman’s sexual awakening, which in itself has all the cinematic originality of a San Francisco car chase or a cowboy riding into the sunset. But Rozema is no commonplace filmmaker, as anyone who saw her cult hit I’ve Heard…
Following a high-toned promenade through Edwardian New York, The Age of Innocence, Martin Scor-sese is back doing what he does best–wallowing in the Age of Corruption. Casino, Scorsese’s three-hour journey through the back rooms, bedrooms and killing grounds of Las Vegas, is tinged with hip satire and studded with scenes…
