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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 at feature length the
brain-dead duo's antics are only 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
****½
A
paralyzed man urges his wife to have sex with other
men.
Merciless, harrowing: exactly what you would expect from von Trier in
retrospect, though at the time it felt like a new cinematic language.
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
****
USA
A deformed pilot recalls a tragic romance, under the care of a sensitive
nurse.
A passionate, sweeping, impeccably crafted romance.
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.
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 villified,
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
****½
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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