Year: 1999

The Animaniacs are usually the stuff that inspires adult cult fandom and enthralls kids, even if they don’t understand it. Animaniacs: Wakko’s Wish may charm very young children with its simple tunes and fast-moving animation, but older kids and adult fans of the Warners et al will be sorely disappointed.

Needless to say, as a child I loved E.B. White’s book Stuart Little, about a mouse who lives with a human family, and so I was pretty eagerly looking forward to the movie adaptation. And while it’s not the kind of movie that I’m likely to return to again and again — it doesn’t have the kind of subtext that allows adults to appreciate it on multiple levels, as some movies aimed toward kids do — it certainly offers a sweet, amiable moviegoing experience, and parents who treat their children to it are unlikely to find themselves bored with it.

The filmed version of The Green Mile — adapted and directed by Frank Darabont, who turned another piece of King’s fiction into the modern classic The Shawshank Redemption — is three hours long, and worth every minute of its running time. In King’s best work — like The Green Mile and The Stand — the characters are people to fall in love with, whose stories we want to go on and on forever. At the end of The Green Mile, the film, I felt, well, like a character out of Dickens: Please, sir, may I have some more?

Oh, Tim Robbins is gonna be one of the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes, there’s no doubt about that. In Cradle Will Rock, which he wrote and directed, he has had the audacity to create a spirited and surprisingly funny film that aims well-deserved slaps to both big business and unions, to the U.S. government, and to those with big wallets and small minds. And even worse — or so it will seem in the eyes of the cultural dictatorship looming on the horizon — Cradle Will Rock celebrates the vital role that independent, iconoclastic artists play in our society.

‘If that was in a movie, I wouldn’t believe it.’ So says a character in Magnolia after an astounding occurrence, and that warped self-reference just about sums up how daring this film is. Writer/director P.T. Anderson (boognight) pushes the boundaries of film convention here with a three-hour exploration of chance and coincidence, the banalities of love and death, and the ‘strange things [that] happen all the time.’

I get the idea of relocating the action of a Shakespearean play temporally and physically: it can highlight the timelessness of the Bard’s work. (Baz Lurman’s Romeo + Juliet is a prime example of how excitingly contemporary Shakespeare can be.) Sometimes, though, it just sits a little oddly. For all that screenwriter/director Michael Hoffman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is playfully sexy fun, all those references to Athens and Athenians is a tad bizarre when the story has been transported to the Italian countryside of a century ago.

Adult relationships come with trade-offs — this chilly fact is at the core of The End of the Affair. Directed by Neil Jordan (butchboy, mcollins), who also adapted Graham Greene’s novel for the screen, this simultaneously polite and strikingly erotic film gives us three people who’ve come to this realization.