“Ed Koch is out of Dickens, and so is Giuliani, in his way,” said screenwriter and director Douglas McGrath. “Bloomberg isn’t, because he is far too colorless. In Dickens, only the heroes are colorless.” It seemed that Mr. McGrath did not consider Mr. Bloomberg a hero. “Joseph Papp would have been Crummles,” he said of Read More
A few years ago, some of us leaving a party were standing in the foyer when we got onto the subject of adultery. Maybe another couple had just gotten divorced-always a slightly terrifying occurrence-and we began to ask each other, “What would you do if you found out your spouse was cheating?” Most of us Read More
Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful , from the screenplay by Alvin Sargent and William Broyles Jr., loosely based on Claude Chabrol’s La Femme Infidèle , brings to mind Vittorio De Sica’s crypto-Marxist, anti-”white telephone,” pre-neorealist aphorism to the effect that adultery is the only drama of the middle class. Mr. Lyne is no stranger to adultery and Read More
I saw About a Boy and Unfaithful back to back with a 102-degree temperature, so my critical perception may, I admit, have been seriously altered. I liked them both. Like I said, I was probably delirious.
Hugh Grant’s well-bred, good-genes charms have been widely noted, but the depth and range of his acting abilities have Read More
When Adrian Lyne was shooting Lolita in North Carolina in 1995, he succumbed to the stray fear that “some redneck sheriff might cart us off.… After all, we were in Jesse Helms’ territory.” Given the hell he has been put through for daring to make this brilliant, politically incorrect movie (one that even Vladimir Nabokov Read More
