The producing/directing team of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory has been mocked for being exponents of "the Laura Ashley school of film-making", which is apt in some ways but also rather unfair. They have a meticulous eye for period detail and a beautifully understated way with a story, though there is the danger of blandless in that very reticence.
It’s not often you get animated movies with as much appeal for adults as they have for children. It must be a difficult tightrope to walk, especially given Hollywood’s extremely restricted, even distorted, sense of what children want or need.
The Mummy was one of the most enjoyable pieces of hokum of the mid-1999 season, and a huge hit. Now writer-director Stephen Sommers has followed it up with <b>The Mummy Returns</b>.
<i>Sweet November</i>, the biggest release of the week, is so bad that there is very little to be said about it. It’s not even worth pulling apart, since it falls apart anyway as you watch it, if it was ever together in the first place.
You gotta laugh. In the press release for Pearl Harbor, the new mega-budget flick about the surprise Japanese attack that destroyed the United States Pacific Fleet in 1941 and brought the US into World War II, there is a profile of producer Jerry Bruckheimer.
Movies about movie-making are always interesting for the sidelight they throw on the process, though they do run the risk of self-indulgence. Federico Fellini’s classic 8 1/2 is in part about such self-indulgence, showing us a confused filmmaker swamped by fantasy as much as by the travails of getting a movie together, and works flamboyantly well.
Crime is one of the major streams of film narrative. Some movies – such as <i>Pulp Fiction</i> or this week’s release <b>The Mexican</b> – even exist in a criminal world apparently altogether free of police personnel. <i>The Mexican</i> must have put tears of joy into the eyes of its Hollywood producers.
Julian Schnabel made his name as a ”neo-expressionist” painter during the Eighties, when that form of highly charged canvas experienced a brief revival. His most memorable works were images splashed over huge areas covered with shattered crockery – a rather original way of providing the work with some extra texture.
The bestselling success of Cormac McCarthy’s 1992 novel <b>All the Pretty Horses</b> was somewhat surprising – his work is bleak and bloody and his writing has the kind of knotty grandiosity not often smiled upon in the videogame-Internet age.
Two things emerge from seeing <b>Hannibal</b>, the sequel to <i>The Silence of the Lambs</i>: one is that Hannibal Lecter – "Hannibal the Cannibal" – is not as interesting a character as he used to be, and the other is that Ridley Scott is a very uneven director