Editorial Product Review: :This lovely, 1991 adaptation of Elizabeth Von Arnim's novel has a superb cast and a tone so mellow you can feel your pulse get slower. Josie Lawrence and Miranda Richardson play a pair of unhappily married women who rent an Italian villa for a month, sharing the rent with a crusty Englishwoman (Joan Plowright) and a lonely aristocrat (Polly Walker). Sun, rest, sinking into the green grass for long naps--they all have a soulful effect on the quartet, and ...
Editorial Product Review: :Sophie Marceau plays the title character in this 1997 version of Tolstoy's classic, set in Imperial Russia. Bernard Rose (Paperhouse) directs, but his accent is on sumptuousness instead of performance, and the result is that much of what happens--especially Anna's affair with Vronsky (Sean Bean)--is opaque and unbelievable. (Bean in particular is badly suited to his part.) A redeeming feature is Alfred Molina's role as the narrator, but he alone can't prop up Rose's façade of grand passion. --Tom ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:Steven Spielberg and George Lucas's 1981 resurrection of the Saturday-matinee adventure genre was deservedly popular, and kicked off a successful trilogy. Set in 1936, this first feature introduces Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, an archaeologist and adventurer whose quests for rare antiquities frequently find him running from one menace or another. Raiders finds Dr. Jones in the middle of a Nazi plot to use the mysterious powers of the Ark of the Covenant to win the war. ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:Even if the notorious 1970s porn-filmmaking milieu doesn't exactly turn you on, don't let it turn you off to this movie's extraordinary virtues, either. Boogie Nights is one of the key movies of the 1990s, and among the most ambitious and exuberantly alive American movies in years. It's also the breakthrough for an amazing new director, whose dazzling kaleidoscopic style here recalls the Robert Altman of Nashville and the Martin Scorsese of GoodFellas. Although loosely based on ...
Editorial Product Review: :With movies like Chocolat, it's always best to relax your intellectual faculties and absorb the abundant sensual pleasures, be it the heart-stopping smile of chocolatier Juliette Binoche as she greets a new customer, an intoxicating cup of spiced hot cocoa, or the soothing guitar of an Irish gypsy played by Johnny Depp. Adapted by Robert Nelson Jacobs from Joanne Harris's popular novel and lovingly directed by Lasse Hallström, the film covers familiar territory and deals in broad metaphors that ...
Editorial Product Review: :Salma Hayek makes up for many bad movies with her fierce performance in this sumptuous film. Hayek plays the Mexican surrealist painter Frida Kahlo, whose tempestuous life with her unfaithful husband, muralist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina), drives the story of Frida. Maverick director Julie Taymor (Titus, the Broadway stage production of The Lion King) pulls out a wealth of gorgeous visuals to capture everything from the horrific bus accident that damaged Kahlo's spine to her and Rivera's trip to ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:The joined-at-the-hip team of director Richard Donner and star Mel Gibson (all the Lethal Weapon movies and Conspiracy Theory) had obvious fun resurrecting the Wild Western comedy television series about a roguish rambler-gambler. Gibson assumes the role of cardsharp Bret Maverick, equally quick with a pair of aces and a pair of guns. Good sport James Garner (who played Maverick on TV) takes another role, as a lawman who travels alongside the hero to a big-money poker ...
Editorial Product Review: :The Arab anti-defamation leagues understandably had a field day with this one. Sally Field plays Betty Mahmoody, an American who marries an Iranian (Alfred Molina) and has a child. They go back to Iran for a visit and, to her horror, he tells her he's decided to stay there. If she wants to leave, she must leave her daughter behind. If she stays, Betty must live in a culture vastly different and, she believes, very dangerous. Part thriller, part ...
Editorial Product Review: :Only die-hard Bill Murray fans will likely consider this movie for their home-video library, but it's not without its rewards. You can see why someone as comically astute as Murray would agree to play a dimwitted American who can't tell the difference between improvised theater and a real-life espionage plot. There's certainly plenty of potential for belly laughs, and Murray milks the opportunities like the old pro that he is. Here he plays an American tourist in London who ...
Editorial Product Review: :Joe Orton was briefly the embodiment of a certain kind of '60s rebel, and Stephen Frears's film adaptation of the British playwright's biography successfully conjures up that outrageous spirit. The hostile, fussy codependency between Orton (Gary Oldman) and his brooding lover Kenneth Halliwell (Alfred Molina) forms the centerpiece of a story that features not only Orton's success and his brutal demise at Halliwell's hand, but also a vivid depiction of what gay sexuality meant in a repressive era. What ...
