Star Wars (review)
What can I possibly say about *Star Wars* that hasn’t already been said a hundred times? George Lucas’s modern fairy tale must be one of the most discussed, most analyzed films of the century…
on the road
Rain Man (review)
Barry Levinson’s Rain Man was so seminal a film that its title character’s nickname and dialogue have entered the vernacular — we’ve all said ‘Kmart sucks’ and ‘I’m an excellent driver’ once or twice, right? Beneath the film’s gentle odd-couple comedy and astonishingly affecting performance by Dustin Hoffman as the autistic savant Raymond Babbitt, however, is a sharp drama about emotionality, frustration, and the capacity we all have for surprising ourselves by changing.
Around the World in 80 Days (review)
Around the World in 80 Days is a huge, leisurely production, chock full of starry cameos and astounding scenery. There’s not really much of a plot, and the characters are little more than cardboard, but the whole point of this movie is to linger with Fogg and Passepartout as they drink in the beautiful countryside and exotic cities as they float languorously by. This is what Technicolor and 70mm prints were invented for.
It Happened One Night (review)
The ultimate dizzy, romantic, screwball comedy, It Happened One Night is not to be missed.
Paulie (review)
I was not looking forward to watching Paulie, expecting the usual sitcomish antics that seem to pass for family viewing these days, so I was delighted to find an old-fashioned — in the best way — kind of movie. Disney used to make movies like this: uncynical but with a bit of an edge, wholesome without making you want to gag, sweet without sending you into a diabetic coma. Before Disney’s live action movies sunk to the level of a UPN sitcom, you could count on family films like Paulie (a Dreamworks release) to allow the bad guy (here, the lab director played by Bruce Davison) to be redeemed simply by witnessing an unselfish act, and to let you bawl your eyes out without feeling silly as only sentiment animal stories can.
