Martin Scorsese astounds me with the
energy he brings to filmmaking. There
is a life in his films that makes
other films seem sluggish and slow-
witted; a quick responsiveness of
dialogue and motive that matches our
own clock speed, so that we think with
his characters, instead of about them.
In "GoodFellas," a story of a man
growing up, growing old and growing
sad in the Mafia, he has made a study
of a corner of American life so
perceptive, so alert to the nuances of
character and dialect, that it is a
sociological document. But it's more: A tragedy, about men
and women trapped in a value system
that denies the basic impulse toward
good in most of us. One of the most
telling lines in the film comes from
Lorraine Bracco, as the wife of a
Mafioso. As an outsider, she comes to
realize one day that her life is now
contained entirely within the Mafia
community. Their values have become
her values, and she has started to
think that men who work steady jobs
for a living are suckers. "GoodFellas" is an epic on the scale
of "The Godfather," and it uses its
expansive running time to develop a
real feeling for the way a lifetime
develops almost by chance at first,
and then sets its fateful course.
Because we see mostly through the eyes
of Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), characters
swim in and out of focus; the
character of Jimmy Conway (Robert De
Niro), for example, is shadowy in the
earlier passages of the film, and then
takes on a central importance. And
then there's Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci),
always on the outside looking in,
glorying in his fleeting moments of
power, laughing too loudly, slapping
backs with too much familiarity,
pursued by the demon of a raging anger
that can flash out of control in a
second. His final scene in this movie is one
of the greatest moments of sudden
realization I have ever seen; the
development, the build-up and the
payoff are handled by Scorsese with
the skill of a great tragedian.
Here is the portrait of a man living a
precise and shy life in a tiny corner
of the world, while tides of passion
break all around him. Monsieur Hire
is a small, neat, bald little man who
works alone in an office and then
comes home to his rented room where
all is order and precision. He boils
an egg. He listens to classical
music. He looks out of his window -
at the window across the courtyard,
where a young woman undresses, night
after night, in full view. She knows he is looking. They do not
acknowledge one another. He worships
her. She senses this. One day a
murder is committed in the
neighbourhood, and suspicion of course
falls on this strange little man. But
is he capable of murder? Does the
woman know someone who is? Will she
save Monsieur Hire from being charged
withthe crime? Can he withstand this
sudden glare of attention into his
dark little corner? "Monsieur Hire,"
directed by Patrice Leconte and
starring Michel Blanc and Sandrine
Bonnaire, is based on one of the
greatest novels of Georges Simenon,
that poet of the sins that take place
in secret. It is a mesmerizing
experience.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, an
infantry officer is posted all by
himself at a remote outpost in the
Dakotas, where he is eventually driven
by loneliness and curiosity into
responding when the local Sioux
Indians make an overture. Slowly,
cautiously, tentatively, the man opens
himself to Indian culture, and the
film follows him as he is adopted into
the tribe. Then the fragile structure
is broken when more U.S. Cavalry
arrive, and we are reminded of the
tragic and short-sighted racism that
let to the genocidal destruction of
Native Americans. The movie stars Kevin Costner, and is
his directing debut. He shows a sure
feeling for the land, for gesture, for
language and silence. And the movie
expands in its epic form, freeing us
from the notion that a plot must be
hurried along, freeing us to grow and
explore as the protagonist does, as we
gradually learn about another culture.
One of the key decisions is to allow
the Sioux to speak in their own
language, instead of in the demeaning
pidgin-English so common in films
about Indians. The film is filled
with strong, effective performances by
actors by Mary McDonnell as the woman
Costner falls in love with, and Graham
Greene and Rodney A. Grant as two of
the Sioux leaders.
What a clockwork mechanism of betrayal
and greed this is! Based on a hard-
boiled novel by the legendary Jim
Thompson and a screenplay by mystery
craftsman Donald Westlake, the movie
weaves a tangled web of deceit
involving three con artists: A callow
young man (John Cusack), his mother
(Anjelica Huston), and his girlfriend
(Annette Bening). He's into small-
time cons, like cheating bartenders
out of $20. His mother works for a
big-time horse-betting operation,
travelling to major tracks to place
money, and skimming off some of the
action for herself. The girlfriend is
a freelance con artist whose true
motives are a deep secret. The director, Stephen Frears, begins
with a character who thinks he is
cynical, and mercilessly shows him
what true cynicism is. The movie's
ending is like a slap in the face,
Based on the convoluted trials of
Klaus von Bulow, the aristocrat
accused of attempting to murder his
socialite wife, Sonny, this is a dark
comedy about twisted motives. Jeremy
Irons stars, in one of the very best
performances of the year, as Klaus -
mannered, affected, odd, with a
teasing sense of humour that seems to
exploit the possibility that he might
be wicked. Ron Silver is Alan J.
Dershowitz, the celebrated Harvard Law
professor who won for Klaus on appeal,
and then wrote the book that inspired
this movie. And Glenn Close is Sonny,
who is in a coma as the movie begins,
but is glimpsed in flashbacks and also
narrates the action, observing at one
point that a lot of people would love
to know what happened on that disputed
night, but even she isn't sure: "You
tell me." With this film and "Barfly"
(1987), director Barbet Schroeder is
on a roll.
This film is a throwback to the days
when filmmakers had bold individual
visions and were not timidly trying to
duplicate the latest mass-market
formulas. This is a movie like none I
have seen before, a wild kaleidoscope
of images and outrages, a collision
between Freud and Fellini. It
contains blood and glory, saints and
circuses, and unspeakable secrets of
the night. And it is all wrapped up
in a flamboyant parade of bold, odd,
striking imagery, with Alejandro
Jodorowsky as the ringmaster. If you
were going to the movies in the early
1970's you will remember the name.
Jodorowsky is the perennial artist in
exile who made "El Topo," that gory
cult classic that has since
disappeared from view, trapped in a
legal battle. Now he is back with a
film that grabs you with its opening
frames and shakes you for two hours
with the outrageous excesses of his
imagination. Strange images here: An elephant
funeral, murder under the big top, a
hero whose hands and arms fall under
the control of his mother.
Love stories are about people who find
love in happy times. Tragedies are
about people who seek love in unhappy
times. "Last Exit to Brooklyn" makes
a point of taking place in the early
1950s, when all of the escape routes
had been cut off for its major
characters. The union official cannot
admit to being left wing. The strike
leader cannot reveal he is homosexual.
The father cannot express his love for
his child, the prostitute cannot
accept her love for the sailor, and
the drag queen is not able to love
himself. There isn't even any music to release
these characters - rock and roll is
still in the future, and the pop
ballads of the era mock the passions
of everyday life. The characters
drink and some of them do drugs, but
they don't get high - they simply find
the occasional release of oblivion.
The movie takes place in one of the
gloomiest and most depressing urban
settings I've seen in a movie. These
streets aren't mean, they're
unforgiving. Vast blank warehouse walls loom over
the barren pavements, and vacant lots
are filled with abandoned cars where
mockeries of love take place. The
director, Uli Edel, somehow finds
humanity in this despair, especially
in the story of the prostitute (a
brave performance by Jennifer Leigh),
somehow insisting on her right to find
love, no matter how many cards are
stacked against her.
In 1969 in a hospital in the Bronx, a group of patients sit and wait, year after year. They are victims of the later stages of sleeping sickness, and seem frozen inside their own bodies, unable to move, to speak, to will a single one of their muscles. Some of them have been frozen in this trance state for 30 years when a doctor decides to treat them with an experimental dose of a new drug named L-dopa. Miraculously, they awaken. They look about with wonder and joy at their freedom to choose what they will do and say. But the awakening is not all that simple, and the movie is a reminder of how precious, and fragile, life can be.
The movie is based on a book by Oliver Sacks, M.D., who is portrayed in the movie by Robin Williams as a quiet, shy, inward man who in certain ways is as closed-off as his patients. Robert De Niro plays Leonard, one of the patients, who awakens after three decades and insists on living as fully as he can. With this film and "Big," onetime sitcom star Penny Marshall establishes herself as an admirable director.
One of the year's most audacious and
controversial films, it was also one
of the most provoking - challenging
audiences to see through the shocking
imagery to the parable beneath.
Director Peter Greenaway set his story
inside a restaurant version of hell,
where a piggish gangster terrorizes
the cook, browbeats his mistress, and
lords over a motley collection of
thugs and hangers-on. The mistress
and another customer in the restaurant
- a mild man who likes to read while
he eats - commence a passionate love
affair, only to suffer the most
disturbing consequences. But the revenge of the mistress on the
thief is even more shocking. What did
the movie mean? Greenaway provided no
clues, but some critics read it as an
attack on Thatcherism in Great Britain
One of the most unjustly neglected
films of the year, this told the story
of the great explorer of the Victorian
era, Sir Richard Burton, and his
attempts to find the sources of the
Nile. Explorers were the astronauts
and sports heroes of the 19th century,
and the stakes were high. The first
man back to London with news of a
sensational new discovery could reap
fame and fortune, and Burton's great
rival was a man named John Hanning
Speke, whose fatal flaws of character
were eventually his undoing. This is
a grand, intelligent epic of
adventure, directed by Bob Rafelson,
whose earlier credits include the
unforgettable "Five Easy Pieces." Why
was the movie so widely overlooked? The ads and some of the reviews made
it seem the tale of dusty old
historical figures, and missed the
vision, and the passion.
Set on the mean Cockney streets of
London's East End, Peter Medak's movie
tells the story of the criminals who
invented modern violent crime in
England - the Krays, Ronnie and
Reggie, whose methods were so ruthless
that rival gangs caved in rather than
face them. The Krays are played in
the movie by real-life brothers, ex-
Spandau Ballet rock stars Gary and
Martin Kemp, and they provide a case
study in criminal pathology, but the
key figure in the movie is their
mother Violet (Billie Whitelaw), who
is proud of her lads no matter what.
Is this film as good as the first two
Godfather sagas? No. It lacks the
storytelling sureness and the clarity
of the minor characters. But is it
better than most other movies? Yes.
Francis Ford Coppola has made us so
familiar with the Corleones and their
family destiny that this third film
reverberates with the almost mystic
echoes of the first two. All the
Godfather films have made new stars,
and the new faces this time are Andy
Garcia, as Sonny's son a the cold-
blooded, hot-headed killer; and Joe
Mantegna, as Joey Zasa, a Mafioso who
thinks he has the Corleones figured
out, and is wrong.
Warren Beatty's movie is above all a
triumph of vision, a masterpiece of
art direction and special effects that
make it look unlike any other movie -
that make it, indeed, look amazingly
like a real-life version of the
classic Chester Gould comic strip.
The streets, the rooms, the clothes,
the faces of the characters, all
conspire to create an eerie world of
the good, the evil, and the grotesque.
A subtle and delicately-shared
examination of the emptiness,
loneliness, desperation and fear just
beneath the surface of a well-to-do
Kansas City family in the 1940's.
Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward star
as the central characters from the
Evan S. Connell novels, which show
people whose respectable, conformist
behaviour has cut them off from their
feelings and made it all but
impossible for them to talk honestly
with one another. From the team of
producer Ismail Merchant, James Ivory
and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who made "A
Room with a View" and so many other
intelligent studies of manners.
Jim Jarmusch's film traces three
stories through the seamier streets of
Memphis. Two young Japanese tourists
arrive by train to visit the shrines
of rock and roll, two women meet in a
hotel lobby, some criminals get
involved in a stick-up. The night
clerk and his assistant have seen it
all, but on this side of the tracks
everything is not modern and
sanitized, and the old city of
passenger trains and saloons and
fleabag hotels exerts a doomed
romantic charm, even before the ghost
of Elvis makes its appearance.
Two movies with the same title, both
with Japanese themes, came out at
about the same time, but had nothing
else in common. One was the big-
budget Michael Douglas thriller, which
all but wiped consciousness of the
other one out of people's minds. But
it is much the greater film, the story
of the aftermath of the bombing of
Hiroshima, as people who were beneath
the "black rain" of nuclear fallout
live with the threat of radiation
sickness. Directed by a condemnation
of the American bomb but also a
commentary on the Japanese tendency to
apologize for things that are not
their fault.
The story of a woman who was Rodin's
mistress, for which she is remembered,
and one of the great sculptors of 19th
century France, for which she has
largely been forgotten. Isabelle
Adjani stars as a woman determined to
make her own way as an independent
artist, in a world which saw such
desires as peculiar, if not dangerous.
Gerald Depardieu co-stars as Rodin,
who uses her and abandons her to her
eventual destruction. One of the
great film biographies of an artist.
The cast of a Montreal passion play
becomes embroiled in an argument about
the rewriting of the play, and soon
there is a controversy between those
who see the life of Jesus as a call to
revolution, and those who prefer
religion to act like oil on troubled
waters. Denys Arcand's movie is not
"religious" in a conventional sense,
and spends much time on backstage
theatrical details, but by the end the
story of Christ has once again served
as a powerful metaphor, and a rebuke
to the weakness of man.
This was one of the few comedies of
the year to break the mould, to go for
an original visual style and an
audacious comic payoff. Written and
directed by John Patrick Shanley (who
wrote "Moonstruck"), it was a brave
filmmaking debut, showing an original
vision. Tom Hanks starred, as a
hapless bureaucrat who strikes out
boldly one day to live before he dies.
Meg Ryan played all three of the women
in the movie - each one funny in a
different way. A sleeper worth
looking for.
One of the year's biggest hits was
also an enormously entertaining
romance, a story that took seamy
materials (cynical investor hires no-
nonsense hooker) and turned it into an
improbably romantic story. Richard
Gere played the businessman as if born
to the role, and Julia Roberts became
Hollywood's favourite new actress on
the basis of her quality of - what
would you call it? Innocentcarnality?
Other movies that made 1990 a year
when it was often very good indeed to
be a movie critic: Woody Allen's "Alice" sent Mia Farrow
through a magical tour of a rich
trophy wife's life and values; Barry Levinson's "Avalon" found that
the American dream does not always end
in rainbows; Rob Lowe was a "Bad Influence" on James Spader; "Berkeley in the 1960s" was a
documentary filled with echoes of a
special time and place; James Toback's "The Big Bang" asked
people what they thought about the
really important things;
"Cinema Paradiso" turned into a long-running art house favourite; Alan Parker's "Come See the Paradise"
set it's love story against the
background of the internment of
Japanese-Americans during World War
II; Gerard Depardieu was a magnificently brave and tender "Cyrano de Bergerac." "Flashback" had Dennis Hopper as an
old FBI agent with the soul of a
hippie; Depardieu was back again in "Green
Card," a Meet Cute comedy with Andie
MacDowell;
Mel Gibson was a powerful "Hamlet" for Franco Zeffirelli; Phil Kaufman's "Henry and June" would
have made old Henry Miller proud with
the way it overturned the MPAA's movie
rating system; Dennis Hopper's "The Hot Spot" was a
steamy small-town crime melodrama
where the hero drove a 1957 Studebaker
Golden Hawk, the most beautiful
American production sports car of all
time; "House Party" was a light-spirited
movie about rap music and some more
important things; Theresa Russell was a vice cop who got seduced by her job in "Impulse;" Richard Gere was good again in
"Internal Affairs," as a braggart cop
whose cockiness catches up with him; "Jacob's Ladder" created a tragic
puzzle out of a man trying to make
sense of a nightmare; Quincy Jones was unusually revealing and honest in the biodoc "Listen Up!"; Bruce Davison gave a performance of
Oscar calibre in "Longtime Companion,"
about a group of friends in the age of
AIDS. Whit Stillman's "Metropolitan" was a
smart, pointed comedy about preppies; "Miller's Crossing" had Albert Finney
as a powerful, flawed rackets boss; Spike Lee's "Mo' Better Blues" starred
Denzel Washington as a jazz musician
who finally stops trying to self-
destruct; "Presumed Innocent" was an effective
retelling of the Scott Turow best-
seller; Sidney Lumet's "Q & A" used the form
of a cop movie to ask pointed
questions about race relations;
"The Hunt for Red October" was a superior techno-thriller;
Michael Caine was superb in "Shock to the System," a sharp-edged satire about big business;
Charles Lane's "Sidewalk Stories" was a virtuoso silent comedy about life among the homeless;
Martin Ritt, who died in December, left "Stanley and Iris" as a last reminder of his committed, humanist vision;
Bette Midler won my heart with "Stella," even if most other critics scorned her;
John Frankenheimer's "The Fourth War" was a study of the last gasp of the cold war;
"The Freshman" contained a magnificent self-parody by Marlon Brando;
Gerald Depardieu, who does not appear in every movie but only seems to, was brilliant as a car salesman who drops his elegant wife for his dumpy
secretary in "Too Beautiful for You";Schwarzenegger and special effects triumphed in "Total Recall@5";
Jack Nicholson brooding, thoughtful "Two Jakes";Robert Altman's "Vincent and Theo" was a fascinating study of the life of both Van Goghs.