Bill Friedkin and Bill Clinton may not have noticed, but the death penalty has been abolished by all Western democracies save one, by the modern countries of the Orient, and by the newly minted republics of the former Soviet Union. That leaves China, Iran, assorted Third World dictatorships, and the…
As soon as Frank Capra stops spinning in his grave, he may find a couple of laughs in Eddie Murphy’s election year farce, The Distinguished Gentleman. This noisy burlesque about political shenanigans owes so much to the Capra classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington that Marty Kaplan — screenwriter, executive…
As you read this, Aladdin is drawing hordes of parents and preteen children to multiplexes everywhere. But is it a true kid flick, plugged directly into the subconscious of what Emerson might have called the Overtot? And is it really as timeless as its makers would like to think? The…
It’s no mystery why Home Alone became one of the most successful movies of all time. The first clue lies in that seductive title, a situation that kids with siblings daydream about: a little autonomy in their own houses. Flawlessly defending yourself and your turf, as Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) does…
Dead at 40, Malcolm X saw, did, and experienced more than most people who live to be twice his age. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which Alex Haley wrote as a first-person narrative after interviewing Malcolm for more than two years, is the sort of book that cries out for…
In The Year My Voice Broke, director John Duigan showed a feel for what Wordsworth called the “visionary dreariness” of a certain kind of rural landscape — rolling hills bare except for occasional clusters of giant rocks or the isolated gnarled tree — a landscape short on conventional picturesqueness that…
Remember Wait Until Dark, the 1967 thriller with Audrey Hepburn cast as a blind woman? Alan Arkin was the crazed thug who tormented Hepburn, moving her furniture around and hissing threats. Wait Until Dark was scary fun, yet it also generated an empathy for the disabled woman in her darkened…
Talk about Undead. Vlad the Impaler, Prince of Darkness, Aristocrat of Evil — call him what you will. Count Dracula has haunted the movies since 1921, when the great German director F.W. Murnau first rousted him from the coffin in a primitive silent called Nosferatu. Since then, this durable ghoul…
A member of a gang called the Reservoir Dogs — known only by his alias, “Mr. Blonde” — has just driven from a botched jewelry store heist with a patrolman stuffed in the trunk of his car. Although Mr. Blonde (Micheal Madsen), like his cohorts, suspects that one of their…
When Gary Sinise was playing Tom Joad in the acclaimed Broadway version of The Grapes of Wrath, he was fortunate enough to receive a visit from the author’s widow. After Elaine Steinbeck expressed her approval of Sinise’s interpretation of her late husband’s work, the actor mentioned it seemed high time…
Night and the City is a movie about bruisers and losers. Robert De Niro plays Harry Fabian, a perennially hopeful ambulance-chasing attorney living in New York City’s SoHo district, who decides — later in life and for no apparent reason — to realize dreams of hitting the big time. What…
Long before film critic Michael Medved became the insipid defender of family values and de facto darling of the Quayle campaign he is today, he had something a critic desperately needs or he’s dead in the water, a quirky sense of humor. Medved, with the help of his brother Harry,…
Never having been particularly enamored of fly fishing, male bonding, or Presbyterianism, I did not read Norman Maclean’s autobiographical novella, A River Runs Through It, until very recently — and only then to coincide with the film version directed by Robert Redford and at the prodding of some friends who…
To enter Ridley’s Scott’s 1492: Conquest of Paradise and its phantasmagoric fifteenth-century world, you will need to check your piddling prerequisites at the door. Historical scholarship, stylistic authenticity, narrative cohesion — attributes the dull, unsophisticated mind might expect in a portrait of Christopher Columbus and his times — are deemed…
I had the privilege of attending two Bob Marley concerts in my life. Both were in the Seventies and in England, an island not as far removed from Marley’s own, Jamaica, as their different climates and race denominations would indicate. The English worshiped Marley’s outsized personality and were equally captivated…
“Ingmar Bergman is, in my most carefully considered opinion, the greatest filmmaker the world has seen so far.” (The italics are mine.) Those words were written by critic John Simon in 1972 in what remains the definitive book in English about the Swedish director, Ingmar Bergman Directs. But twenty years…
Pulitzer or no Pulitzer, David Mamet’s 1984 play Glengarry Glen Ross is not a masterpiece. Its salient metaphor, the ritualistic hard selling of worthless marshlands with quasi-poetic names such as Glengarry Highlands and Glen Ross Farms, is bludgeon-heavy in the extreme, this despite the recessionary economy of the Bush years…
Mbongeni Ngema’s agitprop musical Sarafina! enthralled American audiences during its long Broadway run: The stark contrast between the infectious mbaqanga rhythms straight out of South Africa’s embattled black townships and the cruelties of apartheid made it a political placard you could tap yourfoot to. The movie version is admirable but…
With one Eighties-chic, progressively atmospheric TV series on his resume (Miami Vice), another (Crime Story) applying the music-video aesthetic to the Sixties, a feature film about a techno-burglar with a heart of gold (Thief), and another (Manhunter) introducing the cannibalistic serial killer, few in their right minds would offer Michael…
The under-the-table political ethic of LBJ, Richard Nixon, and Watergate, the ascent of the Gipper in 1980 preaching the gospel of “morning in America,” the still unresolved legacy of Iran-contra, Bush and “read my lips,” right up to the current presidential campaign, with the models of Bush, Bill Clinton, and…
Woody Allen has spent the past fifteen years since Annie Hall prolifically staking a claim for cinematic greatness. Hardly a year has gone by without one or two films from the myopic, diminutive writer/director/performer, who wants as much to be a great artist as Richard Nixon wants to be a…
With Mel Brooks on the skids, Eddie Murphy retooling as Mr. Romantic, and Woody Allen all tied up in divorce court, somebody in the movies had to pick up the slack…yukwise. Enter Andrew Bergman, the fellow New York Magazine dubbed “The Unknown King of Comedy” back in 1985. Unknown no…
