If nothing else, Jonathan Demme’s new movie, The Truth About Charlie, demonstrates a familiar and sometimes entertaining combination of the courageous and the foolhardy — topped off, unfortunately, with the worst sort of Hollywoodthink. Both the courage and the foolishness derive from the fact that the picture is a remake of Stanley Donen’s 1963 comedy […]
George Grella
Posted inMovies
Killed by television
The hardiest of all the cinema perennials, as its history through the 20th century demonstrates, the horror film thrives in just about any climate or conditions. From its beginnings in the days of the silents through the present time, it has survived even the shocking, very real horrors of a turbulent history: world wars, genocide, […]
Posted inMovies
All mobbed up all over
Despite the reiterated assertions from policemen, prosecutors, and the media that the Mafia no longer exercises enormous power, or even exists in any recognizable incarnation, the gangster movie, bless its tough little heart, maintains its devotion to the Mob. That organization provides the model for the history, the myth, the ethos of the form, suggesting […]
Posted inMovies
‘Red Dragon’ awakes
The appearance of the new film adaptation of Thomas Harris’ novel, Red Dragon, suggests some odd and complicated ideas about literature, cinema, and maybe ourselves. For one thing, as that rara avis — a prequel which is also a remake (in this case, of a 1986 movie entitled Manhunter, much of which it duplicates) […]
Posted inMovies
Another degree of Kevin Bacon
As so often happens in the American cinema, the new movie Trapped, no doubt purely accidentally, strikes a chord that chimes with current events and contemporary media hysteria. In a time when so-called journalists, especially on the 24-hour news channels, positively drool, in their usual manner, over sensational reports of the disappearance, abduction, sexual assault, […]
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The empire strikes first, again
Although it originates in a novel published a hundred years ago and has been translated to the cinema several times, most memorably in Zoltan Korda’s brilliant 1939 adaptation, the new version of The Four Feathers seems surprisingly — and, no doubt, accidentally — apposite at this moment in the 21st century. A motion picture in […]
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Not your mother’s Mork
The small, unusual new movie One Hour Photo provides its star, Robin Williams, who’s awfully busy these days, with yet another opportunity to play against type, personality, and history. At virtually the same time that his one-man Broadway show, which consists of his patented brand of wildly improvisational stand-up comedy, plays on HBO; and very […]
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A Greek tragedy of a cop flick
As the new Robert De Niro film demonstrates, even so ostensibly simple and relatively ancient a form (at least for the cinema) as the cop flick, even in the blockbuster blossom time, possesses the potential to be more than mysteries, manhunts, and shootouts. Based on a true story, City by the Sea examines not only […]
Posted inSpecial Sections
Movies: A harvest of remakes, sequels, and series
As all students of the contemporary cinema know, and most reviewers tediously reiterate, the change of seasons from summer to fall should also signal a transformation in the variety of entertainment flickering in the multiple tense darknesses of the megaplexes. Accepted wisdom preaches that with the kids back in school and the weather turning […]
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When art is more real than life
That flashy, fabulous, and complicated entity familiarly known as Hollywood occupies so large and so important an area of the American cultural landscape that it provides a readily recognizable source of satire — it’s easy to make fun of the absurdity and exaggeration of the film industry, and nobody ever misses the joke. In addition, […]
Posted inMovies
Southern comfort for film lovers
If the cinema, especially in the form of the summer spectacular, can transport us to the farthest boundaries of the universe and across the seas of time, it can also now and then traverse the shorter but more perilous expanses of the mind, explore the darker and more complicated territory of the human heart. […]
Posted inMovies
The Superman that we deserve
It surely suggests something about the state of the culture
when two of the biggest hits of the summer, accompanied by enormous quantities
of the usual hoopla and hype, playing practically around the clock in a theater
near everyone, descend in some twisted way from the James Bond novels and
films.
