movie reviews
Where the Heart Is
Dabney Coleman, Uma Thurman, Joanna Cassidy
Directed by: John Boorman
John Boorman has made several remarkable films, including Point Blank, Deliverance and Excalibur. Best of all is Hope and Glory, based on the writer-director's reminiscences of growing up in England during the Blitz. He's also made some mistakes (Zardoz, Exorcist II). This whopper, unfortunately, belongs in the second category. An overscaled family comedy, handsomely shot by Peter Suschitzky, the film plays like the pilot for a moronic TV sitcom. Dabney Coleman, the tube's Buf... | More »
Mountains of the Moon
Patrick Bergin
Directed by: Bob Rafelson
Bob Rafelson's new movie has no stars, and its subject is British colonialism. Does this maverick director harbor a box-office death wish? Since the Sixties, Rafelson has dreamed of making a film about Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke, the English explorers who set out for Africa in 1854 (the first of two journeys) to discover the "mountains of the moon," the fabled source of the Nile. Now he's done it. The result is an occasion, and not one for napping. Rafelson's reflec... | More »
Stanley & Iris
Jane Fonda, Robert De Niro, Swoosie Kurtz
Directed by: Martin Ritt
In the minutes before a critics' screening of Stanley & Iris, I was thumbing through the program notes and read a quote from Jane Fonda, one of the film's stars, that filled me with dread. "I'm a believer that movies can make a difference," declared Fonda, who claimed that Stanley & Iris – in which she plays a recent widow who tutors an illiterate cook played by Robert De Niro – was a movie that could both "entertain and, perhaps, change things a bit." Ther... | More »
Men Don't Leave
Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates, Arliss Howard
Directed by: Paul Brickman
p>Paul Brickman made an auspicious directing debut with Risky Business, the raunchy teen satire – also written by Brickman – that put Tom Cruise on the map. That was in 1983. Clearly Brickman takes his time deciding what to do for an encore. Men Don't Leave, which he directed and co-wrote, doesn't quite live up to seven years of expectations – the tear-jerking tendencies of co-writer Barbara Benedek, who created the excruciating Immediate Family, may have cloude... | More »
Mack the Knife
Raul Julia, Richard Harris, Julia Migenes
Directed by: Menahem Golan
Never mind the new title. This film is still Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera, a 1928 musical about poverty and corruption that provokes frequent reinterpretation. A recent Broadway version featured Sting as Macheath, the infamous Victorian gang leader known as Mack the Knife. The show limped to a close after a mere sixty-five performances. Despite the contemporary window dressing – a rock-star hero and a chorus of homeless people – the show's ambition fa... | More »
Driving Miss Daisy
Jessica Tandy, Morgan Freeman
Directed by: Bruce Beresford
Alfred Uhry won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for his play about cranky Miss Daisy, a Southern Jewish widow loosely based on his own grandmother, and Hoke, her black chauffeur. Set between 1948 and 1973, the work is meant to illustrate the great social changes of the period through the evolving friendship of these two opposites. The play is earnest but tidy. If either of the roles is acted too broadly or uncertainly, you can hear the contrivances creak. Good news: In this funny and touching film ... | More »
Everybody Wins
Debra Winger, Nick Nolte, Will Patton
Directed by: Karel Reisz
Prize-winning playwright Arthur Miller wrote this original script – his first since The Misfits, in 1961 – so attention must be paid. Just don't expect it to be rewarded. Miller has buried a familiar story about small-town corruption under an avalanche of overblown dialogue. Nick Nolte, an actor whose reputation can survive anything if it survives this, stars as Tom O'Toole, a Boston lawyer turned Connecticut private detective. Angela Crispini, played by Debra Winger, is... | More »
Miss Firecracker
Tim Robbins, Holly Hunter
Directed by: Thomas Schlamme
I mean this as a compliment: Beth Henley's characters belong to the stage; they breathe best where they can stretch out in their own crackbrained Southern Gothic theatricality. Movies tend to constrict Henley's oddballs. Remember the arid, all-star (Diane Keaton, Sissy Spacek, Jessica Lange) 1986 screen version of Henley's Pulitzer-winning Crimes of the Heart? The Mississippi-bred Henley wrote Miss Firecracker right after Crimes. The former is much the lesser play and much the... | More »
The Plot Against Harry
Martin Priest, Ben Lang, Maxine Woods
Directed by: Michael Roemer
It may take you a while to get your bearings while watching this hypnotically funny curio about Harry Plotnik (Martin Priest), a Jewish mobster from the Bronx trying to reclaim his numbers operation after nine months in jail. For starters, the choice actors are unknowns or amateurs. No matter. The period details are immediately engaging: Clothes, makeup and slang have such a Sixties resonance you feel you've slammed into a time warp. And Robert Young's gritty black-and-white photogr... | More »
Internal Affairs
Richard Gere, Andy Garcia, Laurie Metcalf
Directed by: Mike Figgis
Just what we didn't need: another kick-ass cop flick in which we know the guys are macho because they rough up their wives and the gals are hot because they totter on spike heels like hookers. And this from British writer-director-composer Mike Figgis, whose 1988 Stormy Monday was a steamily atmospheric film noir. Now working out of his element in Los Angeles, director Figgis left the writing to newcomer Henry Bean, a Yale and Stanford grad with an overdeveloped ear for sleazy dialogue.... | More »
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