It’s a pity the garbage dump is missing from the Roundabout Theatre’s revival of Joe Orton’s vintage 1964 black comedy, Entertaining Mr. Sloane. After all, the English master of amoral anarchy set the genteel drawing room of his play on a garbage dump, and we assume that the great Orton knew what he was doing. Read More
It’s a pity the garbage dump is missing from the Roundabout Theatre’s revival of Joe Orton’s vintage 1964 black comedy, Entertaining Mr. Sloane. After all, the English master of amoral anarchy set the genteel drawing room of his play on a garbage dump, and we assume that the great Orton knew what he was doing. Read More
Jim Sheridan’s In America , from a screenplay by Mr. Sheridan and his daughters, Naomi and Kirsten Sheridan, manages to be artfully deceptive in its distribution of autobiographical fact and seemingly wild-eyed fiction. For starters, Mr. Sheridan, his wife Fran, and his two little girls did enter the United States illegally in 1982 by crossing Read More
From all indications, there is life after Jack Valenti. As president of the Motion Picture Association of America (whatever that is), his moronic ban on VHS and DVD “screeners” for critics this voting season will, I predict, backfire on the industry as a whole, resulting in disaster for a number of big releases from Hollywood Read More
It’s all over but the Band-Aids. In this final column of the year, here’s a roundup of the movies competing for box-office glory during the remaining days of 2001.
For beautifully made literature on film, you can’t beat the careful, page-turning skill with which the fine director Lasse ( The Cider House Rules ) Hallström Read More
Billy Bob’s Mom Has E.S.P.
The Gift , superbly directed by Sam Raimi, with a dark and brooding script by veteran screenwriters Tom Epperson and Billy Bob Thornton, is a chilling, suspenseful thriller with supernatural overtones that features a smashing performance by Cate Blanchett as a character with psychic powers, loosely based on Mr. Thornton’s Read More
Early on in his May 3 piece about how The Hollywood Reporter is gaining on Variety in terms of movieland clout, New York Times reporter Bernard Weinraub quotes a talent agent saying, “You don’t read the trades for information as much as the spin.”
It was an interesting thing to say, considering that Mr. Weinraub Read More
Gillian Armstrong’s Oscar and Lucinda , from a screenplay by Laura Jones and a novel by Peter Carey, turns out to be, to borrow a pungent phrase from Woody Allen, an Australian film with a vengeance. I had heard mostly negative reactions to it before I saw it, and so I was somewhat startled by Read More
