For 59 pages, Chris Cleave’s Incendiary is a tour de force. As the narrator, an unnamed woman—wife, mother, sexpot London trash—throws up on the polished shoes of Prince William, who’s come to visit her in the hospital, I took what felt like my first breath since beginning the novel and marveled at the soaring arc Read More
For 59 pages, Chris Cleave’s Incendiary is a tour de force. As the narrator, an unnamed woman—wife, mother, sexpot London trash—throws up on the polished shoes of Prince William, who’s come to visit her in the hospital, I took what felt like my first breath since beginning the novel and marveled at the soaring arc Read More
Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers, from a screenplay by Mr. Zhang, Li Feng and Wang Bin, turns out to be a four-character epic set in A.D. 859-a time when the Tang Dynasty, one of the most enlightened in Chinese history, had gone into decline. With official corruption and popular unrest spreading throughout the land, Read More
Spies, Lies, and Paranoid Wives
Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) made watchable and rewatchable movies in a career that spanned over 50 years (1925-1976) and 53 feature films. The Alfred Hitchcock Signature Collection (Warner Home Video) contains nine anomalous samples of his oeuvre . These are neither the best nor the worst, but somewhere still entertainingly in Read More
Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol. 2 , from his own screenplay, based on the character of “The Bride” created by Mr. Tarantino and Uma Thurman, can be enjoyed both on its own and as a continuation of Vol. 1 . At the very least, it hangs together better than the three parts of the simultaneously Read More
Jean-Claude Brisseau’s Secret Things , which opens at the Quad Cinema on Feb. 20, is the director’s first film to get any kind of American theatrical distribution. Despite his poorly received debut feature, Les Croisées de Chemins (1975), Mr. Brisseau has managed to make nine films and for Secret Things , the director was honored Read More
Andrei Zvyagintsev’s The Return has been likened to the obsessive cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) by the Russian film critic and historian Oleg Sulkin. Mr. Zvyagintsev himself described his intentions in The Return in the following cryptic press statement: ” … I did not see the story as an every-day tale or a social one. Read More
Mike Newell’s Mona Lisa Smile , from a screenplay by Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal, reportedly had as its genesis a magazine article about Hillary Rodham Clinton’s years at Wellesley College in the 1960′s. The screenwriters decided to go back a decade and set the film during the much-maligned 1950′s, the Eisenhower era-a time when Read More
Wednesday 8th
Cannes on Canal? Or voyage to hell ? You make the call! Stuyvesant kids fire up their light sabers ( bzzzz! ) as the Tribeca Film Festival -Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal’s Valentine to terrorist-ravaged downtown-begins today with far too many screenings, panels and parties for one lone columnist to get Read More
Sally Potter’s The Man Who Cried, from her own screenplay, turns out to be a more effective musical than Moulin Rouge, though its subject is much darker and deadlier, dealing as it does with pre-Holocaust and early-Holocaust persecution of Jews and Gypsies in 1927 Russia and 1940 Paris. Fortunately, the grim background is adorned with Read More
