My first impulse in putting together a ten-best list for 1996 was to dispense with the new stuff altogether and go for the revival gold. The best films of 1996 were the re-released restorations: Vertigo, Strangers on a Train, Lolita, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and…
“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…
When we first see the character of middle-aged Australian David Helfgott (Geoffrey Rush) in Shine, he’s standing in the driving rain and tapping at the window of a wine bar after closing time. Let inside by a sympathetic waitress, he keeps up a nonstop nonsensical patter that makes him sound…
The stodgy works of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, makers of Howards End and Jefferson in Paris, have encouraged the sad notion that costume dramas must be leaden and respectable. Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility helped rehabilitate the stifled form, and now Patrice Leconte’s Ridicule ventilates it with yet more…
A famous movie composer once told me a joke: Two songwriters are sitting around and one of them says to the other, “I just saw the most amazing thing. A man fell off the roof of a building, hit a ledge, fell to the street, got winged by a bus…
Wes Craven, creator of the Nightmare on Elm Street series and writer-director of its two best entries (the first and the last), works within whispering distance of the commercial Hollywood mainstream, just far enough away to allow for more rude wit and less comfortable resolution than most studio product. His…
Why a movie of The Crucible now? Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem witchcraft trials was first staged on Broadway in 1953, when McCarthyism was still in flower, and it was not a resounding success. Now, of course, it’s a staple of rep theaters and high school and college drama…
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…
Whitney Houston has had a Movie Star Moment — just not in a movie. Near the end of the “I’m Saving All My Love for You” video, she turns toward the camera with a luminous smile that wilts into heartbreak when she realizes she’s been dropped by her, um, boyfriend…
Forget Independence Day. If you really want to see Earth get it, you can’t do any better than Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! It’s a destructo orgy orchestrated without any phony-baloney sanctimony about the fellowship of man — or spaceman. Burton isn’t interested in intergalactic amity; he’s not even interested in…
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…
It’s impossible to capture on the printed page the anticipatory thrill of hearing Sylvester Stallone handle rapid-fire dialogue: the rumbling basso voice, the twisted mouth valiantly trying to wrap itself around an unruly stream of words, the consonants and vowels hurling forward like a toppled barrel of oranges. Will any…
Not long into the low-key 1994 Chinese murder drama The Day the Sun Turned Cold, writer/ director/producer Yim Ho serves up a defining moment in the marriage of husband Guan Shichang (Ma Jing Wu), the school principal in a rural village, and Pu Fengying (Si Ching Gao Wa), his tofu-making…
In the post-Babe era, can you make a live-action movie about animals and not have them talk to each other? For me, this is the deep philosophical question raised by Disney’s new 101 Dalmatians, a live-action remake of the studio’s 1961 animated feature — in which, by the way, the…
In the golden age of Hollywood, no less than the likes of Frank Capra owned Christmas on the big screen. But if you want Proof No. 496 of how far things have fallen, consider that in the Nineties holiday cinema is a wholly owned subsidiary of Chris Columbus — hired…
Thomas Hardy wrote Jude the Obscure in the mid-1890s, and to those of us professional critics who sometimes question the efficacy of our calling, it is considerably reassuring to note that the savage reception of the book actually discouraged Hardy from producing any more novels. Later on, English majors the…
On its 30th anniversary, Star Trek exists only as a fetish or a fool’s pastime. The original series continues to air as a faded relic; the Next Generation cast was put to pasture as a film enterprise before its time; and Deep Space Nine and Voyager run and rerun so…
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…
“I coulda been a contender,” Marlon Brando laments to Rod Steiger in On the Waterfront. Instead, he got “a one-way ticket to Palookaville.” Russ, Jerry, and Sid, the three unemployed Jersey City guys at the core of the droll, poignant new film Palookaville, share Brando’s ultimate destination. Like the ex-pugilist,…
Mother Night, a loving adaption of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 novel of the same name, should be required viewing as a companion piece to Casablanca. Like that Bogart classic, Mother Night has a powerful World War II love story at its core, and uses that tragic romance to address the tricky…
Looking for Richard is Al Pacino’s shaggy, nutty, wheedling documentary about a staging of Shakespeare’s Richard III and the art of performance. Filmed between acting stints over a period of several years, it shows us Pacino in a flurry of guises. We see him as Richard, of course, but also…
Thrillers that involve a threat to the nuclear family almost always have a reactionary subtext. Fatal Attraction, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and Cape Fear leap to mind. When a director of Ron Howard’s depth makes a film like Ransom, about a rich guy trying to best the man…
