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…
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…
In Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, based on the late Robert Heinlein’s 1959 sci-fi opus, the killer arachnids upstage the humans. Not that it’s much of a contest, since the humans are all raging dullards. We’ve seen these young men and women with their square jaws and pert noses emoting their…
The Joe Eszterhas who wrote the screenplay for Telling Lies in America is a kinder, gentler soul than the hard-nosed hipster who got a couple million bucks for turning Sharon Stone into the lethal temptress of Basic Instinct or conceived that masterpiece of the cinematic arts, Showgirls. This new Joe…
The quirky documentarian Errol Morris finds human drama in strange places. His most renowned film, 1988’s The Thin Blue Line, made such a compelling case for the innocence of a convicted Dallas cop-killer that the prisoner eventually walked off death row. Morris has also examined the genius physicist Stephen Hawking…
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…
The ongoing anxieties and agonies of the American family don’t make for a pretty picture. Divorce and disorder have replaced macaroni and cheese as the domestic commonplace, but most people can give little credence to either the self-righteous prescriptions of the fundamentalist right or the ecstatic bleatings of the new-agers…
In Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca, the cleverest (if not quite the most convincing) science-fiction movie of the year, the near future is inhabited by designer humans whose DNA codes have been rigged down at the lab for conformist perfection and by “in-valids,” the inferior products of parents who’ve relied on mere…
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…
Just when you thought you couldn’t stand to watch another movie about a household concealing a dark secret–or sit through another Thanksgiving reunion–along comes The House of Yes. Adapted from Wendy MacLeod’s award-winning play We Are Living in the House of Yes, it’s a black comedy of manners concerning a…
The twentieth edition of the Denver International Film Festival gets under way tonight, October 23, with a showing at the Continental Theatre of The Wings of a Dove, Iain Softley’s adaptation of the Henry James classic, and closes October 30 with The Ice Storm, novelist Rick Moody’s harrowing tale of…
Stylishness without substance can become wearying real fast. Twenty minutes into A Life Less Ordinary, the new movie from the producing-directing-writing team of Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, I was already into overload. It’s not that director Danny Boyle doesn’t have imagination. It’s just that sometimes imagination is all he has…
The true-life incident of the Cottingley fairies is so full of possibilities, so thought-provoking and hilarious at once, that it’s amazing it’s never been filmed before. Making up for lost time, the story has suddenly appeared (on its eightieth anniversary) simultaneously as the basis for two films. Photographing Fairies, with…
Here’s a wonder. The dirty little pleasures of Boogie Nights, which chronicles the follies and the fondest dreams of a group of L.A. porn stars in the late Seventies and early Eighties, have almost nothing to do with sex or debauchery. Instead, this sly and hugely entertaining flashback to the…
The Seventies were so awash in Fifties nostalgia that it’s surprising that Dan Wakefield’s 1970 bestseller Going All the Way is only now turning up in big-screen form. Of course, not all Fifties coming-of-age stories are the same: Unlike The Last Picture Show and American Graffiti–which pretty much dominated the…
Once again we are being bombarded by movies in which a new generation vents its anger at the sins, real and imagined, of the older one. The most eloquent of these outcries, I think, are David O. Russell’s vivid 1996 black comedy Flirting With Disaster, in which a baffled yuppie…
Jennifer Jason Leigh, who’s played everything from an acid-tongued Jazz Age sophisticate in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle to a drug-addled Nineties narc in Rush, has a lot to live up to as the heroine in the new adaptation of Henry James’s classic Washington Square. First there’s the literary…
Seven Years in Tibet feels more like Seven Days in the Movie Theater. It refuses to come to life–not even when Brad Pitt, as hirsute as a yak, wanders the frozen Himalayas with an Austrian accent that probably gave his dialogue coach the hives. It’s an epic about how an…
Now that Oliver Stone has explained to us (at some length) that the CIA killed JFK, that Nixon was a paranoid loser, but not quite the paranoid loser his enemies have always imagined, and that violence in America is really a conspiracy between the celebrity-hungry public and the cynical mass…
Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s La Promesse is that rare thing, a coming-of-age drama that carries real moral weight without seeming ponderous and transforms a hot political topic into flesh-and-bone drama. The story introduces us to Igor (Jeremie Renier), a fifteen-year-old Belgian boy who’s forced to live a double life in…
The fact that director Gary Fleder imposed the dismal Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead on Denver and the world is no good reason to kick his next movie in the butt. There are plenty of other reasons. For one, Kiss the Girls is a movie about a…
The adventurous moviegoer who doesn’t mind wrestling with a little bafflement will probably find many things to admire in Wim Wenders’s The End of Violence–not least its coolly ironic title, the Germanic vigor with which it seeks to whip the causes, effects and flagrant merchandising of violence into a heady…
