Oliver! (review)
Charles Dickens’s mostly gloomy Oliver Twist set to music is no sillier than the French tragedy Les Miserables recast as an English-language opera, and it works just as well — that is to say, very well indeed.
Month: February 1999
In the Heat of the Night (review)
Maybe it’s an indication of some slight social progress, or just a marker of how fine a film this is, that In the Heat of the Night also works as a crime-fighting story in a tradition as old as the Sherlock Holmes tales and as new as The X-Files.
A Man for All Seasons (review)
A Man for All Seasons is a handsome production. In other words, it is staid, stern, plodding, and precise, with about as much passion as your 11th-grade history textbook.
The Sound of Music (review)
How can you tell The Sound of Music is a fantasy? Forget that it’s based on a true story. The fantasy tip-off is this: Julie Andrews plays a nun. The radiant and sweetly sexy Andrews, not that she isn’t delightful in the role, is about as believable as a nun as, say, Mel Gibson would be as the Pope.
My Fair Lady (review)
My Fair Lady — another musical from Gigi creators Lerner and Loewe — is a charming and amusing satire on the absurdity of rigid class distinctions such as were to be found in turn-of-the-century London.
There’s Something About Mary (review)
I was dreading seeing There’s Something About Mary. The last movie from Bobby and Peter Farrelly, Dumb and Dumber, was the first and so far only movie I have ever seriously considered walking out of (I like to give a movie a chance, though, and so I persevered, to my detriment). I could tell from the previews that Mary was just not to my taste. And finally, a dear friend of mine and survivor of a screening of Mary pleaded with me to just put down the video and step away.
My Favorite Martian (review)
My Favorite Martian is the ultimate in movie fluff — while the credits are rolling you’ll forget what you just watched. It’s inoffensive and innocuous and… What was I saying?
Tom Jones (review)
Tom Jones is one of those movies I appreciate more than I enjoy. Though based on Henry Fielding’s classic 18th-century novel, it seems at times little more than an excuse to revel in the licentiousness of the burgeoning free-love atmosphere of the 1960s.
Lawrence of Arabia movie review: gone native
T.E. Lawrence was what a friend of mine calls a “transethnic,” like the couple of Italian guys you always see playing bagpipes in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. David Lean’s gorgeous film captures this enigmatic man beautifully.
West Side Story (review)
West Side Story is a brilliant updating of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the two warring families of Verona now two streets gangs of kids from two different immigrant cultures coexisting in one New York City neighborhood.
