The Perfect Storm review: following bliss
An intense and terrifying man-against-nature action movie, and also an unsentimental and unclichéd drama about following your bliss: doing what you’re made to do even to the point of risking your life.
drama
American Beauty (again) (review)
Was American Beauty the single best film of 1999? I can’t decide. The second time I watched the film, on a widescreen video screener after it won the Oscar for Best Picture, I thought with horror: I named this sitcom one of my best films of the year? On a third viewing, also on the small screen, I saw once again all the brilliance that I saw the first time around, and more.
Gladiator (review)
Is Gladiator an action movie? Is it an historical drama? Is it a sweeping epic? Yes. Like The 13th Warrior, this is a thinking person’s action movie. Like Braveheart, this is a story of a brutal era told with stunning realism. Like Terminator 2, this is a violent movie that indicts our appetite for violence. Like The Matrix, this thrills on both a visceral and cerebral level.
Croupier movie review: zen and the art of dealing
The 1998 British film Croupier, only now getting a limited American release, was made well before the recent Reindeer Games, but comparing them is too delicious an opportunity to bash Hollywood to let pass by. Both have the same conceit of their cores: a Christmas Eve casino heist. In Hollywood’s eyes, this is a chance to show us Santas with machine guns running amuck, and not much else. In the hands of legendary British director Mike Hodges, who made the 1971 classic Get Carter, and equally legendary screenwriter Paul Mayersberg, who wrote The Man Who Fell to Earth, it becomes a spare, seductive, almost novelistic suspense drama in which the biggest crime is its protagonist’s misunderstanding of himself.
Erin Brockovich (review)
If last Saturday night’s sneak-preview audience is any guide, this could be Julia Roberts’s biggest movie yet. Everything she did onscreen, everything she said either elicited ardent routs of laughter or sent what could only be called worshipful undulations rippling through the crowd. The thrall in which Roberts held these people frightened me. I’m sure execs at Universal Pictures are already peeing in their collective pants with anticipation over this weekend’s box office. Biggest opening ever for a March weekend — you read it here first.
Mission to Mars (review)
So how else can I react to Mission to Mars but with enthusiasm? Here is a mostly scientifically accurate movie about the planet that actually looks as if it were filmed there. No, it’s not a perfect film — but as one of the like-minded friends with whom I saw Mission to Mars pointed out, we’re so hungry for real science fiction on film that we can forgive its flaws.
Apollo 13 (review)
Despite the fact that we all know how the story ends, director Ron Howard manages to make Apollo 13 not only riveting but suspenseful as well. Howard’s attention to detail goes above and beyond the call of duty.
Boiler Room and Wall Street (review)
And that realistic attitude is a big part of what makes Boiler Room so refreshing: Younger doesn’t offer any pat, happy endings, doesn’t have all his characters wrap things up by kissing and making nice. The film ends on such an abrupt note — and such a perfect one — that I gasped with unexpected delight.
The Talented Mr. Ripley movie review: American psycho
Exquisitely understated, this is an instant classic, not in the sense that the word is typically applied to movies, but how we use the word to describe cars and clothes, embodying clean lines, subtle elegance, and a sense of timelessness.
A Christmas Carol (Patrick Stewart) and A Christmas Carol (aka Scrooge) (Alistair Sim) (review)
I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Patrick Stewart do his one-man reading/performance of A Christmas Carol several times. Nothing beats the impact of live theater, and so for years now Stewart has personified Ebenezer Scrooge for me. I was delighted to learn that Stewart would be playing Scrooge in a full-blown production of Charles Dickens’s classic novel — playing all this month on the cable network TNT — and fully expected that it would become a favorite Christmas movie of mine. And it has.
