reviews

Analyze This and Donnie Brasco (review)

Just the concept alone is almost too delicious to bear: the mobster and the therapist. After years of achingly earnest, however fabulous, movies about the mafia — The Godfather, Goodfellas — that treated them with passion and seriousness, here finally is a film that acknowledges that the mob is the most dysfunctional family of them all. Analyze This slams the all-action, guns-ablazing mob smack up against our touchy-feely, therapy-mad era and serves it up with 90s-style irony and enough hearty, tears-rolling-down-your-face laughs that you’ll miss half the dialogue.

Terms of Endearment (review)

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It’s a complicated love/hate relationship that mothers and daughters share. They can be each other’s best friend and worst enemy, often at the same time. Terms of Endearment perfectly captures that morass of conflicting emotions — at least from the daughter’s point of view, as I can testify from personal experience.

Gandhi (review)

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Director Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi is one of the most ambitious biographical films ever made, encompassing not just more than half a century of one man’s life but also one country’s struggle for independence. Ben Kingsley is a marvel as Mohandas K. — later called Mahatma — Gandhi, doing a remarkable job of conveying the soft-spoken determination of a man who would come to inspire a messianic fervor among his people and convincingly aging himself 55 years with little more than alterations in his posture and way of carrying himself.

Ordinary People (review)

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Ordinary People, Robert Redford’s directorial debut, is a talky drama about people who can’t talk to one another. Conrad, a high-school student recovering from a suicide attempt after his brother’s boating accident, is all but ignored by his parents. Too-cheerful Calvin pretends that things are just hunky-dory, and when Conrad tries to talk to Beth, she changes the subject or pushes him away.

Kramer vs. Kramer (review)

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I wonder where Billy Kramer would be today. Six years old when his self-indulgent, self-involved yuppie parents split, in Kramer vs. Kramer, the poor tyke is traumatized by his mother’s abandonment of him and his father’s halfhearted (at first) attempts at parenting, and even the very last scene of the movie, which is supposed to make us cheer for his mother’s last-minute change of heart, is just another example of the constant jerking around the little guy receives from his parents.

The Deer Hunter (review)

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The Deer Hunter is a lyrical, slow-to-unfold story of the devastating effects of a tour in Vietnam on three close friends. Mike (Robert DeNiro), Nick (Christopher Walken), and Steve (John Savage), steelworkers in a gray, run-down Pennsylvania town, are ordinary, blue-collar guys who’s chief amusements run to drinking and pool. Apparently much alike on the surface, each will be affected in different ways by the war.

Annie Hall (review)

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Annie Hall is kinda Seinfeld: The Motion Picture. Of course, Woody Allen’s self-deprecating, nebbishy stand-up comedian was around long before Jerry Seinfeld’s show about nothing, but it’s really amazing how much they have in common.

Vampires (review)

Jack Crow (James Woods, apparently attempting to channel Arnold Schwarzenegger) is a bad-ass vampire exterminator who works for the Catholic Church, rooting out “masters” and “goons” in the American southwest. He’s got a major chip on his shoulder when it comes to vampires, ’cause the bloodsuckers got his parents when he was just a kid.

Gods and Monsters (review)

In Gods and Monsters, movie director James Whale (Sir Ian McKellan, in a brilliant performance) talks about how the movies he was best known for — Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein — were comedies about death in which the humor was subtle enough so as not to ruin it for people not in on the joke. Much the same could be said for Gods and Monsters.