movie reviews
Blaze
Paul Newman
Directed by: Ron Shelton
Writer-director Ron Shelton, who scored a major hit about minor-league baseball and sex in Bull Durham, now turns to Southern politics and sex. His film is based on a 1959 scandal involving Blaze Starr, a redheaded, twenty-eight-year-old stripper, and Earl K. Long, the sixty-five-year-old good ol' boy governor of Louisiana. Earl, brother of Huey Long, had already served three terms when he met Blaze. His itch for her helped cost him a fourth. It all sounds juicier than Shelton makes it.... | More »
Triumph of the Spirit
Willem Dafoe
Directed by: Robert M. Young
This earnest but woefully misguided film (the first major feature to be shot on location at Auschwitz) tells the real-life story of Salamo Arouch, the Greek Jewish middleweight boxing champ of the Balkans who survived his two-year internment in the camp by winning more than 200 bouts arranged by his Nazi captors. (Losers were sent to the gas chambers.) Willem Dafoe stars as Arouch and gives a disciplined performance. It's a shame his restraint wasn't catching. Director Robert Young... | More »
The War of the Roses
Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner
Directed by: Danny De Vito
"What fresh hell is this?" asks Kathleen Turner, her eyes bulging with trepidation. No, she's not a film critic still reeling from the claptrap released since Thanksgiving (Harlem Nights, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation and the soulless sequel to Back to the Future). Turner is playing Barbara Rose, a neglected wife who wants out of her seventeen-year marriage to her lawyer husband, Oliver (Michael Douglas). There's a catch: Both Roses want to keep the elegant Washington,... | More »
She-Devil
Meryl Streep, Roseanne Barr
Directed by: Susan Seidelman
Director Susan Seidelman takes aim at the box office with the team of movie queen Meryl Streep and TV slob queen Roseanne Barr. She misfires. Streep gets all the jokes, and Barr, looking stranded, plays it straight. Worse, nobody's bothered to write them a big scene together. But for a while you can see the possibilities. Streep, liberated from the constraints of high drama, has a ball playing romance novelist Mary Fisher, a delicate flower who lives in a lavish Long Island mansion where... | More »
Valmont
Annette Bening
Directed by: Milos Forman
Just to pique your interest: the plot concerns two former bed mates heavily into sex games. She's a widow; he's a playboy. He yearns to get her back in the sack for one night. Fine by her, but she wants two favors first: Seduce a fifteen-year-old virgin, and turn a goody-goody married woman into a slut. Sound familiar? It should. Think of eighteenth-century France with scads of elegant costumes, powdered wigs and heaving bosoms. Just last year, director Stephen Frears told the stor... | More »
Steel Magnolias
Sally Field, Julia Roberts, Dolly Parton, Olympia Dukakis, Shirley MacLaine
Directed by: Herbert Ross
No use fighting it. this laugh-getting, tear-jerking, part-affecting, part-appalling display of audience manipulation is practically critic-proof. Robert Harling's long-running off-Broadway play concerns six women who regularly congregate in a Louisiana beauty parlor. Now Harling, who based the story on his mother and sister and their gal pals, has gussied up his stage hit for the movies. And producer Ray Stark and director Herbert Ross have wisely hired the luminous likes of Sally Field... | More »
My Left Foot
Daniel Day-Lewis, Brenda Fricker, Alison Whelan
Directed by: Jim Sheridan
Christy Brown, Who Died at forty-nine in 1981 after choking on food, was a working-class Dubliner who relished family (he was the tenth of twenty-two children), pranks, girls, drinking, brawling, painting and writing. The last two brought him fame. Brown's autobiography, on which this extraordinary movie is based, details all of his enthusiasms plus one hell of a disability: Brown was born with cerebral palsy. His damaged brain allowed him control only over the movement in his left foot ... | More »
Henry V
Kenneth Branagh, Derek Jacobi, Simon Shepherd
Directed by: Kenneth Branagh
Make no mistake. Kenneth Branagh is a cocksure twenty-eight-year-old talent explosion from Belfast, Ireland. He's already debuted with London's prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company, starred in movies (High Season, A Month in the Country) and on British television (Fortunes of War), created his own Renaissance Theater Company and written his autobiography, Beginning. His next step is even more audacious. It's been only a few months since the death of the great Laurence Olivier... | More »
Mystery Train
Screamin' Jay Hawkins
Directed by: Jim Jarmusch
Granted, writer and director Jim Jarmusch isn't everybody's idea of independent-filmmaking energy unbound. His previous movies (Permanent Vacation, Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law) have been called minimalist, marginal and lulling. And that's by those who say they enjoy them. His detractors use words like dull, petty and numbing. The spare but richly funny Mystery Train (the final part of a trilogy begun with Stranger) ought to go a long way toward defusing the naysayers. I... | More »
Dad
Jack Lemmon, Ted Danson, Olympia Dukakis
Directed by: Gary David Goldberg
In his Debut as a Feature Director, Gary David Goldberg -- creator of NBC's Family Ties -- may have brought forth the ultimate tear-jerker. Dad, based on William Wharton's 1982 novel, grafts on elements from nearly every weepie made since sound arrived. It's Goldberg's Frankenstein. And he labors mightily to bring the dead thing to life. Jack Lemmon, wearing exaggerated old-age makeup to look seventy-eight, stars as Jake Tremont, a long-retired L.A. factory worker estrang... | More »
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