![]() A Beautiful Mind manages to twist enough pathos out of John Nash's incredible life story to redeem an at-times goofy portrayal of schizophrenia. Russell Crowe tackles the role with characteristic fervor, playing the Nobel prize-winning mathematician from his days at Princeton, where he developed a groundbreaking economic theory, to his meteoric rise to the cover of Forbes magazine and an MIT professorship, and on through to his eventual dismissal due to schizophrenic delusions. Of course, it is the delusions that fascinate director Ron Howard and, predictably, go astray. Nash's other world, populated as it is by a maniacal Department of Defense agent (Ed Harris), an imagined college roommate who seems straight out of Dead Poets Society, and an orphaned girl, is so fluid and scriptlike as to make the viewer wonder if schizophrenia is really as slick as depicted. Crowe's physical intensity drags us along as he works admirably to carry the film on his considerable shoulders. No doubt the story of Nash's amazing will to recover his life without the aid of medication is a worthy one, his eventual triumph heartening. Unfortunately, Howard's flashy style is unable to convey much of it. —Fionn Meade ![]() While too many films suffer the fate of creative bankruptcy, Being John Malkovich is a refreshing study in contrast, so bracingly original that you'll want to send director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman a thank-you note for restoring your faith in the enchantment of film. Even if it ultimately serves little purpose beyond the thrill of comedic invention, this demented romance is gloriously entertaining, spilling over with ideas that tickle the brain and even touch the heart. That's to be expected in a movie that dares to ponder the existential dilemma of a forlorn puppeteer (John Cusack) who discovers a metaphysical portal into the brain of actor John Malkovich. ![]() Deservedly acclaimed as one of 1998's best films, this sequel to the beloved 1995 live-action fantasy proved a commercial catastrophe and a source of dismay to parents expecting another bucolic, sweet-natured fable. Every bit as sly and visually stunning as its predecessor, Babe: Pig in the City is otherwise a jolting ride beyond the Hoggetts' farm into a no less vivid but far darker world—the allegorical city of the title, which for the diminutive "sheep pig" proves truly nightmarish. Australian filmmaker George Miller (Mad Max, The Road Warrior), who produced and cowrote the first film, this time takes the director's reins, and he ratchets up the pace and the peril as effectively as he did on his influential trilogy of apocalyptic, outback sci-fi thrillers. ![]() The surprise hit of 1995, this splendidly entertaining family film was nominated for six Academy Awards, including best picture, director, and screenplay, and deservedly won the Oscar for its subtly ingenious visual effects. Babe is all about the title character, a heroic little pig who's been taken in by the friendly farmer Hoggett (Oscar nominee James Cromwell), who senses that he and the pig share "a common destiny." Babe, a popular mischief-maker the Australian farm, is adopted by the resident border collie and raised as a puppy, befriended by Ferdinand the duck (who thinks he's a cockerel), and saves the day as a champion "sheep-pig." Filled with a supporting cast of talking barnyard animals and a chorus of singing mice (courtesy of computer enhancements and clever animatronics), this frequently hilarious, visually imaginative movie has already taken its place as a family classic with timeless appeal. —Jeff Shannon ![]() Among the bounteous literary and cinematic legacy of Marcel Pagnol, poet laureate of Provence, is a two-volume memoir, My Father's Glory and My Mother's Castle. The enormous success of Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring (Claude Berri's 1986 remakes of two Pagnol films from the '50s) encouraged Yves Robert to shoot another Pagnol diptych. Like Garlaban, the great bluff overhanging Pagnol's childhood home, the result is "less than a mountain, much more than a hill." The first part, My Father's Glory, spans Marcel's early years from infancy to preteen. The film keeps faith with its juvenile subject, leaping from one quirky detail of landscape, character, or biography to the next—whatever has caught the child's fancy and lingered in the adult narrator's memory. This makes for episodic storytelling, but it's an appropriate way to reflect childhood experience, and it doesn't prevent Robert from developing loving portraits of Pagnol's nearest and dearest, or paying luminous tribute to the Provençal countryside Pagnol loved. You can almost feel the sunshine, smell the wild thyme. —Richard T. Jameson | ![]() Par Toutatis ! Potion magique ou pas, Alain Chabat signe là une version plus enlevée, plus allumée et plus tonique que le premier Astérix réalisé par Claude Zidi. Après Didier, l'ex-Nul s'impose comme un réalisateur malin et efficace. Pour réussir son pari de 55 millions d'euros – plus gros budget du cinéma français, et deuxième place au box-office des films français, avec 14,5 millions d'entrées – il est revenu aux sources des albums de Goscinny et Uderzo, en y greffant son univers décalé et loufoque. Anachronismes, jeux de mots, clins d'il fleurissent à gogo : de Matrix au Grand Pardon, en passant par Cyrano ou Claude François, un festival...Ju-bi-la-toire ! ! À quoi s'ajoute une avalanche de gags irrésistibles, des dialogues épicés qui jouent avec saveur sur le décalage passé-présent – "Itineris a raison : faut pas se l'SFR" –, des décors et des costumes somptueux dessinés par le créateur de Ranxerox, Tanino Liberatore. Bref, la greffe réussie de l'humour Canal sur le comique traditionnel français, dans un esprit potache qui n'est pas sans rappeler celui qui irrigue les désopilants Y a-t-il un pilote dans l'avion ?. Autour de Clavier et Depardieu – uniques rescapés du premier opus – une légion romaine de comédiens, plus délectables les uns que les autres : Monica Belluci, Gérard Darmon en méchant d'anthologie, Dieudonné, Claude Rich, Isabelle Nanty, Alain Chabat, Mathieu Kassovitz, et même Pierre Tchernia ! ! Et puis, il y a les cas Jamel et Édouard Baer : absolument déjantés, ils dominent l'interprétation par leur tchatche et leur abattage. À revoir plusieurs fois, comme on relit sans cesse les BD originales. —Sylvain Lefort ![]() Non loin du petit village des irréductibles Gaulois, leur druide Panoramix est enlevé par Détritus qui souhaite, grâce à la potion magique, détrôner César. Astérix et Obélix viendront bien sûr à bout de toutes les centuries romaines. Claude Zidi, réalisateur, et Claude Berri, producteur, ont disposé d'un budget pharaonique et d'une pléiade d'acteurs confirmés pour présenter les aventures de nos ancêtres préférés, génialement fomentées par le très regretté Goscinny et son complice Albert Uderzo. On retrouve avec grand plaisir la subtilité et la drôlerie des albums, bourrés de clins d'oeil à l'histoire, l'art ou l'actualité, servis par une distribution réjouissante, dont un magistral Roberto Benigni en fourbe Détritus, et de la belle Laetitia Casta qui s'est glissée dans la robe de la Falbala. Quel spectacle réjouissant, par Toutatis ! —Louis Roux ![]() From its first gliding aerial shot of a generic suburban street, American Beauty moves with a mesmerizing confidence and acuity epitomized by Kevin Spacey's calm narration. Spacey is Lester Burnham, a harried Everyman whose midlife awakening is the spine of the story, and his very first lines hook us with their teasing fatalism—like Sunset Boulevard's Joe Gillis, Burnham tells us his story from beyond the grave. ![]() Considered by many to represent a low point in Steven Spielberg's career, 1990's Always did suggest something of a temporary drift in the director's sensibility. A remake of the classic Spencer Tracy film A Guy Named Joe, Always stars Richard Dreyfuss as a Forest Service pilot who takes great risks with his own life to douse wildfires from a plane. After promising his frightened fiancée (Holly Hunter) to keep his feet on the ground and go into teaching, Dreyfuss's character is killed during one last flight. But his spirit wanders restlessly, hopelessly attached to and possessive of Hunter, who can't see or hear him. Then the real conflict begins: a trainee pilot (Brad Johnson), a likable doofus, begins wooing a not-unappreciative Hunter—and it becomes Dreyfuss's heavenly mandate to accept, and even assist in, their budding romance. The trouble with the film is a certain airlessness, a hyper-inventiveness in every scene and sequence that screams of Spielberg's self-education in Hollywood classicism. Unlike the masters he is constantly quoting and emulating in Always, he forgets to back off and let the movie breathe on its own sometimes, which would better serve his clockwork orchestration of suspense and comedy elsewhere. Still, there are lovely passages in this film, such as the unforgettable look on Dreyfuss's face a half-second before fate claims him. John Goodman contributes good supporting work, and Audrey Hepburn makes her final screen appearance as an angel. —Tom Keogh ![]() The quintessential movie spoof that spawned an entire genre of parody films, the original Airplane! still holds up as one of the brightest comedic gems of the '80s, not to mention of cinema itself (it ranked in the top 5 of Entertainment Weekly's list of the 100 funniest movies ever made). The humor may be low and obvious at times, but the jokes keep coming at a rapid-fire clip and its targets—primarily the lesser lights of '70s cinema, from disco films to star-studded disaster epics—are more than worthy for send-up. If you've seen even one of the overblown Airport movies then you know the plot: the crew of a filled-to-capacity jetliner is wiped out and it's up to a plucky stewardess and a shell-shocked fighter pilot to land the plane. Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty are the heroes who have a history that includes a meet-cute à la Saturday Night Fever, a surf scene right out of From Here to Eternity, a Peace Corps trip to Africa to teach the natives the benefits of Tupperware and basketball, a war-ravaged recovery room with a G.I. who thinks he's Ethel Merman (a hilarious cameo)—and those are just the flashbacks! The jokes gleefully skirt the boundaries of bad taste (pilot Peter Graves to a juvenile cockpit visitor: "Joey, have you ever seen a grown man naked?"), with the high (low?) point being Hagerty's intimate involvement with the blow-up automatic pilot doll, but they'll have you rolling on the floor. The film launched the careers of collaborators Jim Abrahams (Big Business), David Zucker (Ruthless People), and Jerry Zucker (Ghost), as well as revitalized such B-movie actors as Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, Robert Stack, and Leslie Nielsen, who built a second career on films like this. A vital part of any video collection. —Mark Englehart ![]() The 1982 sequel to Airplane! is basically more of the same class-clown ironies but with a more forced feeling to the jokes. In the first film, veterans such as Peter Graves, Robert Stack, and Lloyd Bridges were feeling their way through self-parody, and the air of experimentation was part of the fun. By this film, however, everybody knows what's up, and the assuredness of new cast members Raymond Burr, William Shatner, and Chuck Connors is almost counterproductive. Still, there's lots to laugh about. —Tom Keogh |