L'APPARTEMENT
***½
France
A soon to be married businessman is thrown by the sight of a woman who may or may not be his
ex-lover.
A stylish, twist-laden neo-noir.
dir: Gilles Mimouni
cast: Vincent Cassel, Romane Bohringer, Monica Belluci,
Jean-Philippe Écoffey
BEAUTIFUL THING
***½
UK
Two boys from working-class homes fall in love.
A warm British kitchen-sink feel-good offering that really does feel good,
regardless of your budding preferences.
dir: Hettie MacDonald
cast: Linda Henry, Glen Berry, Scott Neal, Tameka Empson, Garry
Cooper
BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD DO AMERICA
**
USA
Beavis & Butt-Head go in
search of their stolen TV.
Fans of the TV show will likely be overjoyed, though the feature format
makes the brain-dead duo's antics all the less endurable.
dir: Mike Judge, Yvette Kaplan
voices of: Mike Judge, Demi Moore, Bruce Willis, Cloris
Leachman
BOTTLE ROCKET
***½
USA
Two friends have ambitions of a
life of crime.
An offbeat, quirky, inventive, low-key comedy. The debut feature that set
the pattern for a couple of then-promising talents.
dir: Wes Anderson
wr: Wes Anderson, Owen Wilson
cast: Luke Wilson, Owen Wilson, James Caan
BOUND
***½
USA
An ex con and her lesbian lover
concoct a scheme to steal millions of mafia money through the latter's
boyfriend.
A tense neo-noir with uneven but welcome outbursts of style.
wr/dir: Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski
cast: Jennifer Tilly, Gina Gershon, Joe Pantoliano
BREAKING THE WAVES
****
A paralyzed man urges his wife
to have sex with other men.
Merciless, sadistic and harrowing: exactly what you would expect from von
Trier in retrospect.
wr/dir: Lars von Trier
cast: Emily Watson, Stellan Skarsgård, Katrin
Cartlidge
CITIZEN RUTH
***½
USA
A pregnant drug-addict is
pursued as a symbol for both the pro- and anti-abortion movements.
A biting, savage and often very funny satire. Payne's direction isn't
quite as assured as it would later become, but he is served well
by a game cast, particularly a gifted leading lady, recalling the great
Hollywood comediennes of the 30s and 40s.
dir: Alexander Payne
wr: Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor
cast: Laura Dern, Swoosie Kurtz, Kurtwood Smith, Mary
Kay Place, Kelly Preston, M.C. Gainey, Burt Reynolds, Kenneth Mars, Tippi
Hedren, Alicia Witt
THE CRUCIBLE
***
In 17th century Salem, a young
woman accuses her ex-lover's wife of witchery.
A polished but rather unimaginative treatment of a great play. It's
absorbing but more for what Miller brings to it rather than his adaptors.
dir: Nicholas Hytner
cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder, Paul Scofield, Joan
Allen
THE DAYTRIPPERS
***½
USA
After stumbling upon a
mysterious love note addressed to her husband, a housewife goes in search of him,
accompanied by her eccentric family.
A warm, funny and offbeat road movie, with not very deep but entertaining commentary on
family and relationships.
dir: Greg Mottola
cast: Hope Davis, Parker Posey, Pat McNamara, Liev
Schreiber, Campbell Scott, Stanley Tucci
DRIFTING CLOUDS
***½
Finland
A middle-aged Helsinki tram
driver loses his job, as does his wife, a head waitress.
Steep spirals into squalor are greeted with dark humour, deadpan
humanism and gorgeous compositions in Kaurismäki's warm, idiosyncratic style.
wr/dir/ed: Aki Kaurismäki
ph: Timo Salminen
cast: Kati Outinen, Kari Väänänen, Elina Salo,
Sakari Kuosmanen, Markku Peltola
EMMA
***
UK/USA
A relatively enjoyable but
ultimately redundant Austen adaptation.
Amy Heckerling covered this material with a great lot more wit and style just
one year earlier.
dir: Douglas McGrath
cast: Gwyneth Paltrow, Toni Collette, Jeremy Northam, Alan
Cumming, Ewan McGregor, Greta Scacchi, Juliet Stevenson, Polly Walker,
Sophie Thompson
THE ENGLISH PATIENT
****½
USA
A deformed pilot recalls a
tragic romance, under the care of a sensitive nurse.
A passionate, sweeping, impeccably crafted romance. An exemplary
adaptation of a bestseller.
wr/dir: Anthony Minghella
ph: John Seale
m: Gabriel Yared
cast: Ralph Fiennes, Kristin Scott Thomas, Juliette Binoche,
Willem Dafoe
EVERYONE SAYS I LOVE YOU
***½
USA
The romantic woes of a New York
family of intellectuals of all ages.
Woody does Woody with a tone-deaf musical spin. Entertaining and easy-going
though hardly an event.
dir: Woody Allen
cast: Natasha Lyonne, Edward Norton, Woody Allen, Goldie
Hawn, Alan Alda, Drew Barrymore, Julia Roberts, Gaby Hoffman, Natalie
Portman, Lukas Haas, Tim Roth
FARGO
*****
USA
A desperate car salesman hires
an inept duo to kidnap his wife and blackmail his father-in-law for money.
A pregnant cop is assigned the case.
In 1996, the Coen Brothers finally delivered the masterpiece they had
begun to hint at some twelve years earlier. A dark, darkly witty, haunting thriller,
with unorthodox yet very evocative showcasing of Minnesota locations.
dir: Joel Coen
wr/ed: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
ph: Roger Deakins
cast: Frances McDormand, William H. Macy, Steve Buscemi,
Peter Stormare
FLIRTING WITH DISASTER
****
USA
A young New Yorker, his wife
and his seductive but neurotic case worker travel cross-country in search
of his biological parents.
A wild, raucous and hilarious slapstick farce, done in the spirit of
Preston Sturges' classic early 40s output.
dir: David O. Russell
cast: Ben Stiller, Patricia Arquette, Téa Leoni, Alan Alda,
Mary Tyler Moore, George Segal, Lily Tomlin, Josh Brolin, Richard Jenkins
FREEWAY
****
USA
A Little Red Riding Hood for
the 90s, as embodied by 15-year-old Vanessa Lutz, who decides to go live
at her grandmother's trailer park after her abusive step-dad and
prostitute mother are arrested.
The gruesome, graphic violence is a matter of acquired taste, but it is
serving a purpose (even if its a purely stylistic, Tarantino-derived one).
It's an original, self-consciously subversive and very often outrageous pitch-black
comedy.
wr/dir: Matthew Bright
cast: Reese Witherspoon, Kiefer Sutherland, Wolfgang
Bodison, Dan Hedaya, Amanda Plummer, Brooke Shields, Michael T. Weiss
HARD EIGHT
****
USA
An experienced gambler teaches a troubled young man the tricks of the
trade.
A and thoroughly satisfying character study delivered in a moody,
hard-edged neo-noir fashion.
wr/dir: Paul Thomas Anderson
cast: Philip Baker Hall, John C. Reilly, Gwyneth Paltrow,
Samuel L. Jackson
JERRY MAGUIRE
**½
USA
A sports agent goes through a process of self-discovery after he is fired
for being moral.
A candy-coated star vehicle, collectively and bafflingly embraced upon
release. Undeniably, there are skilful bits in it, but all the
sitcom-style cutesiness renders those irrelevant.
wr/dir: Cameron Crowe
cast: Tom Cruise, Renée Zellweger, Cuba Gooding Jr,
Jonathan Lipnicki, Bonnie Hunt, Kelly Preston
JUDE
***½
UK
A married stonemason falls in
love with his cousin.
A bleak and thoroughly depressing (is there any other kind?) Thomas Hardy
adaptation. It takes its time to punch you in your figurative guts and the
punch gains a greater power from the build-up.
dir: Michael Winterbottom
cast: Christopher Eccleston, Kate Winslet, Liam Cunningham,
Rachel Griffiths
LONE STAR
***½
USA
Skeletons of all kinds are
unveiled in a small Texas border town.
A thoughtful, kaleidoscopic, restrained multi-character study. Shifting between past and present,
it's hugely ambitious but less resonant
because of it.
dir: John Sayles
cast: Chris Cooper, Matthew McConaughey, Kris
Kristofferson, Elizabeth Peña
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MY SEX LIFE… OR HOW I GOT INTO AN ARGUMENT
****½
France
Perhaps no other filmmaker - not even Eric Rohmer – has managed to write
dialogue as dense, layered and absorbing as Arnaud Desplechin.
And
few could rival his skill at eliciting sensitive, complex, transfixing
performances from strikingly attractive women.
His film is essentially three hours of a bunch of scholarly
late-twenty-somethings talking to and about and over each other. And it’s
suffused in a melancholy romanticism that makes you wish it went on for
that much longer.
dir:
Arnaud Desplechin
wr: Emmanuel Bourdieu, Arnaud Desplechin
cast: Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Devos, Emmanuel
Salinger, Marianne Denicourt, Thibault de Montalbert, Jeanne
Balibar, Chiara Mastroianni, Denis Podalydès
THE
PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT
***½
USA
The life of 'Hustler Magazine's
Editor in Chief.
A bold, controversial, well crafted and superbly acted biopic.
dir: Milos Forman
cast: Woody Harrelson, Courtney Love, Edward
Norton, Miles Chapin, Vincent Schiavelli
THE PILLOW BOOK
*½
UK
Stirred on by childhood
memories, calligraphy becomes a Japanese model's erotic obsession.
A banal, self-serving, pretentious exercise in cinematic masturbation,
with flashy, distracting directorial touches excising every drop of
feeling from the striking
imagery and genuine poetry.
dir: Peter Greenaway
cast: Vivian Wu, Yoshi Oida, Ewan McGregor
THE
PORTRAIT OF A LADY
**½
UK/USA
Jane Campion tries to make showily uber-feminist what was already a
perfectly - and far more effectively - feminist story. The introductory
credit sequence involving contemporary teenage girls speaking about their
first kiss is not only badly written and delivered, it's also just generally
misguided as an idea. It's fortunate that Campion doesn't really follow up
on it thematically or stylistically (even if it does reek of
incompetence).
The picture has the standard problem of a Hollywood adaptation of a great
novel (and few novels are greater than Henry James'): it sticks relatively
faithfully to the story, yet somehow completely misses out on what was the
best thing about it (the social and psychological insight, which in the
movie is generally reduced and simplified). The sets and the costumes are
terrifically detailed but they only serve as backdrops on a pragmatic,
rudimentary level. The detail is technically correct but it isn't at all
evocative of 19th century Florence and London. The expensively decorated
rooms have no flaws. They don't give off the impression that any oxygen has
ever passed through them (not even the stale kind you tend to associate with
costume dramas).
There are a couple of self-consciously showy sequences, such as
the heroine's trip to Egypt which is presented in a newsreel style and
does give you a jolt, but these aren't shaped to fit within the overall
stateliness.
The lead role is far beyond Nicole Kidman's range, but she's vacant enough
to be tolerable (if you've read the book, you could take the gaps left over
by her woodenness and fill them in with James' little character
insights from memory). The rest of the cast however, is uniformly solid.
It's still relatively easy to be entertained by the picture. James' story is
so strong and fascinating, it would require more than a Jane Campion to ruin
it completely. What isn't so easy though is to tolerate a Jane Campion
striving to do exactly that.
dir: Jane Campion
cast: Nicole Kidman, John Malkovich, Barbara Hershey,
Mary-Louise Parker, Martin Donovan, Shelley Winters, Richard E. Grant,
Shelley Duvall, Christian Bale, Viggo Mortensen, Valentina Cervi, John
Gielgud
PRETTY VILLAGE, PRETTY FLAME
****½
Yugoslavia
Serbian hospital casualties
remember their youth and their war, specifically a Bosnian and a Serb boy
that grew up together but ended up on opposing sides during the war.
A brutal, searing and devastating account of the Balkan
conflict. It's particularly honest and incisive in that it refuses to take
sides: neither the Serbs nor the Bosnians are explicitly villainised, only
their shared mentality. Director Srdjan Dragojevic handles the
time-shifting masterfully. The script may be the best-ever of those
written by four people. The acting is uniformly, remarkably natural and
unshowy.
dir: Srdjan Dragojevic
wr: Srdjan Dragojevic, Vanja Bulic, Biljana Maksic, Nikola
Pejakovic
ph: Dusan Joksimovic
ed: Petar Markovic
cast: Dragan Bjelogrlic, Nikola Kojo, Dragan
Maksimovic,
Zoran Cvijanovic, Milorad Mandic, Dragan Petrovic, Lisa Moncure, Nikola
Pejakovic, Velimir 'Bata' Zivojnovic
RIDICULE
***½
France
An impoverished French lord
engages in battles of wit at Loius XVI's court at Versailles in order to
get royal backing to protect his peasants from disease.
A sophisticated cast is given little to do in a production that far too
closely resembles the technically impeccable but airless detail of a BBC mini-series.
As an exposé of
bureaucratic corruption and superficiality though, it's interesting and
relatively rewarding.
wr/dir: Patrice Leconte
cast: Charles Berling, Jean Rochefort, Fanny Ardant,
Judith Godrèche
SCREAM
****
USA
A psychopathic serial killer,
fond of teen slasher references, is stalking a group of teens.
Although quite effective as a teen horror flick, it is particularly clever and
brilliant as a teen slasher parody played straight. Sadly it proved
terribly influential on a few people who missed the joke entirely.
dir: Wes Craven
cast: Neve Campbell, Skeet Ulrich, Courtney Cox, David
Arquette, Rose McGowan, Matthew Lillard, Jamie Kennedy
SECRETS AND LIES
****
UK
A successful black woman traces
her birth mother to a lower-class white woman.
Leigh's most moving and accessible account of working class
relationships, with a lead performance that occasionally blurs the line between
overpowering emotion and uncontrollable hysteria but is too arresting to
be questioned.
wr/dir: Mike Leigh
cast: Brenda Blethyn, Timothy Spall, Marianne Jean-Baptiste,
Phyllis Logan, Claire Rushbrook
A SELF-MADE HERO
***½
France
Towards the end of WWII in
France, a cowardly peasant abandons his wife and home and invents the
identity of a war hero.
An elegant political satire that would have benefited from a tighter
pace.
dir: Jacqued Audiard
cast: Mathieu Kassovitz, Anouk Grinberg, Sandrine
Kiberlain, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Albert Dupontel, Nadia Barentin,
Bernard Bloch
SHINE
***½
Australia
The life of talented and
afflicted pianist David Helfgott.
A stately biopic, principally notable for some striking performances.
dir: Tony Scott
cast: Geoffrey Rush, Armin Mueller Stahl, Noah
Taylor, Lynn Redgrave
SLING BLADE
***½
USA
A mentally immature man,
hospitalised since his childhood murder of his parents, is released and
decides to start a new life in a small town.
A gripping if not always subtle study of a fascinating
character.
dir: Billy Bob Thornton
cast: Billy Bob Thornton, Dwight Yoakam, J.T. Walsh,
Lucas Black, Natalie Canerday, John Ritter
SUBURBIA
*
USA
Richard Linklater's deeply misguided insight into how hard life becomes
when you're in your late twenties and still carrying the frustrations and
alienations of an angsty teen. Trite, tedious navel-gazing with racist
pretensions.
wr/dir: Richard Linklater
cast: Giovanni Ribisi, Parker Posey, Steve Zahn, Amie Carey, Nicky
Katt, Jayce Bartok, Dina Spybey, Ajay Naidu, Samia Shoaib
THREE
LIVES AND ONLY ONE DEATH
***½
France/Portugal
An absurdist-surrealist black comedy that tracks the multiple lives led by
a roguish Marcello Mastroianni in one of his last screen performances. The
majority of events depicted - ranging from a conpiracy by fairies to a
corporate businesswoman's extravagant fetishism - seem at first too
inconsequential to support a two-hour-plus running time. But teh picture
builds a resonance. The cast proves itself of enormous aid.
dir: Raoul Ruiz
cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Anna Galiena, Marisa Paredes, Melvil
Poupaud, Chiara Mastroianni, Arielle Dombasle, Féodor Atkine, Jean-Yves
Gautier
TRAINSPOTTING
***½
UK
Young drug-addicts struggle to
deal with their habit in Edinburgh.
A flashy story about a heroin addict with a bit of wit and a bit of
offbeat humour to counteract the grimness.
dir: Danny Boyle
cast: Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Johnny Lee Miller, Kevin
McKidd, Robert Carlyle, Kelly MacDonald
WAITING FOR GUFFMAN
***½
USA
The residents of a small town
decide to put on a show.
A mockumentary satire of small-time mentality that is orced at times, broad at others, but generally outrageous and
consistently entertaining. The cast is peerless.
dir: Christopher Guest
cast: Christopher Guest, Eugene Levy, Parker Posey, Catherine
O'Hara, Bob Balaban, Fred Willard, Paul Dooley
WILL IT SNOW FOR CHRISTMAS?
***½
France
A woman struggles to raise her
seven children on a farm in Southern France.
An austere family drama handled with attention to detail in that squalid
verité fashion that regularly brings an impressive sense of honesty and
authenticity to this kind of material.
wr/dir: Sandrine Veysset
cast: Dominique Reymond, Daniel Duval
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S ROMEO AND JULIET
***½
USA
A breathless, stylized and stylish
modernization of Shakespeare's
play. The leads are weak, but the
vision is remarkable.
dir: Baz Luhrmann
cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes
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