Like a black Jay Gatsby with a bulging build, Muhammad Ali possessed a special radiance in his championship years that came from his ability to realize his wildest dreams. Nobody expected that his attention-grabbing line “I am the greatest” would prove to be the expression of a pride so enormous…
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 tales, set in a fictitious primordial age full of demons and killers, boasted swift, cartoon-flavored action (“He moved…
William Faulkner’s novella Old Man has a biblical magnetism, a primal moral pull. During the horrifying Mississippi flood of 1927, convicts are conscripted for disaster relief. A guard orders two of them to take out a boat, find a woman stuck in a cypress tree and a man clinging to…
At a twenty-year remove, Star Wars comes off as less the work of a wizard than the weird obsessive outgrowth of an eccentric American primitive. George Lucas is a tycoon version of those self-taught craftsmen who fill back yards, storage rooms, and cramped city apartments with paintings or gewgaws or…
When an incredulous Jane Campion fan asked what I hated about her 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…
Watching Reese Witherspoon incandesce in the role of a sixteen-year-old girl stumbling through the reform school of hard knocks in Freeway, I was reminded of what Pauline Kael said about John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever: “There is a thick, raw sensuality that some adolescents have which seems almost preconscious.”…
“Long live the consciousness of the pure who can see and hear!” That statement by pioneer Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov kept reverberating in my brain after my prime movie experience this year — watching his silent extravaganza, The Man with the Movie Camera (1929), with a score performed live by…
Early this year, in the psycho-gangster/vampire movie From Dusk Till Dawn, George Clooney of TV’s ER kept his head while all about him were losing theirs — literally. As a slick thief saddled with a lunatic brother (Quentin Tarantino) and beset by demons, Clooney demonstrated poise under duress. His professionalism…
Some amusing stuff about sports agentry drowns in the emotional shallows of Jerry Maguire, which stars Tom Cruise (in the title role) as a hotshot 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…
Anthony Minghella believes in ghosts — and, at his best, makes believers out of viewers, too. The writer-director of Truly Madly Deeply and this heartfelt, eye-filling (but problematic and puzzling) adaption of Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient salts his movies with passionate specters. In Truly Madly Deeply…
