Formerly an enterprising producer (Point Blank, Raging Bull) but nowadays a not very good director (The Net), Irwin Winkler has the annoying habit of taking on potent materialsuch as the Hollywood blacklist in Guilty by Suspicion and Jules Dassin’s Night and the City in a remake of the same nameand draining it of practically everything that makes it matter. Here he comes dangerously close to doing the same with Oliver Sacks’s nonfiction story To See and Not See, about a blind man whose sight was restored. He glamorizes, romanticizes, and simplifies the material to an insulting degree, but despite his worst efforts fragments of what made the original story arresting manage to leak through. Val Kilmer, clearly pleased to be entering the Oscar disability sweepstakes, does what he can as the hunk who learns how to see, and Mira Sorvino plays the architect who falls for him; with Kelly McGillis, Bruce Davison, and Nathan Lane. (JR) Read more
A multifaceted misfire from writer-director Steven Zaillian that is especially disappointing as a follow-up to his first feature, Searching for Bobby Fischer, made with many members of that film’s production team. In retrospect, the conceptual coherence of the underrated earlier feature may have been protected by the relative absence of big-name stars. Here one has to contend with both the miscasting of John Travolta as a determined personal-injury attorney and an uneven script that appears to have been mangled by the sort of studio interference that superstars often impose or provoke. This project, based on a best-selling nonfiction book by Jonathan Harr about an attorney locking horns with two corporations over the contaminated water supply of a New England town where several children have died, demands the focus of something like Anatomy of a Murder or The Rainmaker. Instead it suffers from a scattershot approach. An excellent secondary castincluding Robert Duvall, Stephen Fry, Dan Hedaya, and Sydney Pollackisn’t allowed to build momentum, and Travolta’s character is established so poorly that he never functions properly as a through line. The theme remains strong, but the storytelling doesn’t do it justice. With Tony Shalhoub, William H. Macy, and Kathleen Quinlan. (JR) Read more
Four essential documentaries: Ivens’s Rain (1929) and New Earth (1934), Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), and Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955), with a text by Jean Cayrolstill possibly the best film ever made about the Holocaust, and the essential forerunner of Shoah. (JR) Read more
John Boorman’s 1998 docudrama about the contemporary Irish gangster Martin Cahill was critically acclaimed at Cannes as a return to form, though it flopped in London, allegedly because English teenagers couldn’t countenance a black-and-white film. It’s extremely competent, shot in ‘Scope (Boorman’s best screen format), and though it kept me absorbed it failed to win me over. I can no longer stomach the premise in so many Anglo-American crime pictures that mavericks are admirable simply because they’re mavericks. Cahill’s proud defiance of any authority, the basis of his legendary reputation, is proffered like an axiom for our uneasy awe. Boorman fills out this design with wit and polish, grandly assisted by Brendan Gleeson as Cahill, Jon Voight as his favorite adversary, and Maria Doyle Kennedy and Angeline Ball as his wife and sister-in-law (whom Cahill managed to romance simultaneously), but I still felt I was buying a very old suit of clothes. I’m told that Boorman objected to the jokey violence of GoodFellas; perhaps he undertook this project to express greater moral ambiguity about the underworld. But the same lesson is delivered far more effectively in pictures like The Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932)not to mention Boorman’s own Point Blank (1967), which gives a surreal spin to the ambivalence. Read more
This is a video premiere of Alex Cox’s latest featurewhich was made on filmabout an innocent gambler (Vincent D’Onofrio) with a winning streak; others in the cast include Rebecca De Mornay, Michael Madsen, and Billy Bob Thornton. Assuming that Cox has approved this unorthodox premiere, it seems a fitting gesture of defiance from a talented anarchist filmmaker who is unjustly marginalized. (JR) Read more
