Genius can be a terrible, destructive gift. Jacqueline du Pre, the brilliant British cellist who enraptured audiences in the Sixties and Seventies with her musical passion and intensity, lived a life of great renown and acclaim, but also one of harrowing loneliness and emotional turmoil. Her story is movingly told…
“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” sings Kris Kristofferson in his most beguiling song, “Me and Bobby McGee.” Stephen Frears’s The Hi-Lo Country tries in vain to be just as lyrical about love and liberty. In this twentieth-century Western, a cattle rancher named Pete (Billy Crudup) narrates…
Writer-director Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, his adaptation of James Jones’s 1962 best seller about the World War II battle for Guadalcanal, arrives in theaters carrying an almost unbearable weight of expectation. After graduating in the first class at AFI’s Advanced Film Studies program and working briefly as a…
Somewhere under the glossy imbecility of Varsity Blues lurks an idea that could make a great American movie: a coming-of-age story in a setting where no one else has come of age, a place where the hero must find his way to maturity without a mentor. The setting, in this…
Because it revealed the coke-snorting, ego-fueled corruption of Hollywood in the early 1980s with such acid wit, David Rabe’s play Hurlyburly became a huge audience hit when it burst on to Broadway in 1984. Here was the inside stuff from the Left Coast, gotten up in a frenetic new language…
The great attorneys of our time — Tom Cruise, Susan Sarandon, Tom Hanks — must now make room in the firm for a new partner. John Travolta, who in past lives has been a disco king, a hip hit man, and a deep-fried presidential candidate, reinvents himself in A Civil…
The relentless charm of Kirk Jones’s Waking Ned Devine lies in its embrace of two lovable Irish geezers who manage to work beautiful mischief on the world, in the raw beauty of their sun-splashed coastal village, and in the general notion that Ireland is the land of poetic conversations, enduring…
Denmark was the first Scandinavian country to have a film industry, but with the exception of the revered Carl Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc, Ordet), whose career lasted from the middle silent era through the Sixties, the nation’s filmmakers until recently functioned in the shadow of Swedish directors…
Silver lining or slender thread? That question nags at me as I go over my best-of-the-year list. There were some terrific movies in 1998 — eight, according to my count. But the average film keeps on getting worse. If movies remain as synthetic and incompetent as they are for the…
In 1933 producer Merian C. Cooper, director Ernest B. Schoedsack, and pioneering animator Willis O’Brien created one of this century’s most indelible and powerful archetypes: King Kong. Then they did a peculiar thing. As if appalled at what they had wrought, but also delighted at the money it made them,…
The talents of Maya Angelou — she is or has been a teacher, memoirist, prize-winning poet, actress, civil rights activist, editor, playwright, composer, dancer, producer, theater and TV director, and adviser to three presidents — range so far and deep that no feat she accomplishes should come as a surprise…
Given the manipulative tendencies of many mainstream pictures, Stepmom could have easily slipped into a sticky morass of sentimentality and melodrama. Instead, it proves to be a genuinely affecting movie that approaches its adult themes with intelligence, maturity, and rare authenticity. The film stars Susan Sarandon as Jackie, a divorced…
Directed by Walter Salles (1995’s Foreign Land), the Brazilian film Central Station (Central do Brasil) concerns the relationship between a homeless nine-year-old boy and the insensitive, acerbic woman who reluctantly agrees to help him find his father. Winner of the Golden Bear for Best Film at the 1998 Berlin Film…
Geniuses often come across unimpressively in the movies. Amadeus presented Mozart as a giggling fop. Both Kirk Douglas and Tim Roth gave us Van Gogh as a pathetic head case. I.Q.’s Albert Einstein was a Cupid-playing old duffer. Ken Russell’s freaky depictions of Liszt and Mahler speak for themselves. When…
British actress Jane Horrocks is thrice-gifted: She can act, she can sing, and she can sing like Judy Garland. And like Shirley Bassey, Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, and a host of other legendary performers. Horrocks’s ability to mimic the singing and speaking voices of these artists lies at the heart…
At the heart of Pat O’Connor’s rich, bittersweet Dancing at Lughnasa lies the quaint notion that, once upon a time, people, especially women, whose youthful dreams were dashed, might have been able to attain a state of grace, a kind of ascetic nobility to which the rest of the world…
DreamWorks’ grandiose attempt at an animated feature for adults is a flimsy musical about Moses, a Sunday school filmstrip writ ultralarge and decked out with the spectacle of Hollywood Bible epics. Slender sermons nestle amidst flashy action sequences and diaphanous fashion statements from the more tasteful pages of the Nefertiti’s…
On May 30, 1957, the Los Angeles Times reported that the body of “the distinguished film producer and director James Whale” had been found floating in the swimming pool at his home in Pacific Palisades. Fully clothed, Whale’s corpse exhibited a head wound. “Whale,” the Times went on to point…
Old-fashioned romantic comedies are an endangered species, and in these generally unromantic days it’s always a pleasant surprise to find a decent one like Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail. Ephron, of course, made her bones five and a half years ago with the huge hit Sleepless in Seattle, but since…
Ultratough guy Jesse “The Body” Ventura says he means business as the new governor of Minnesota. But for now the nasty crime wave in that state continues unchecked — in the movies anyway. Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan, a psychological thriller that shows us how dangerous life can get after…
Here we go again. Enemy of the State is Fascism in America 1998, Chapter Four … or Five … or whatever we’re up to. It readily invites comparison to The Siege, but for better or worse its goals are more mundane. While The Siege seems like an ideological agenda driving…
First of all, if you’re among the benighted who’ve never seen Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 shocker Psycho, stop reading at the end of this paragraph. A movie review, even one as incisive and elegant as this, is no way to be introduced to Hitchcock’s horror masterpiece. Your assignment is to rush…
