Inspired by real-world figure of Master Chief Petty Officer Carl Brashear, this is a mostly well-made film. There are some dramatic sequences showing the dangers of the divers' underwater assignments. At times it seems a little sappy, perhaps because of the choice of music, but the storytelling and acting lift it above average status. The two male leads are both excellent, and they make their characters suitably convincing to bring this true story to life.
Two eastern European criminals arrive in New York City. (They are portrayed in a crassly simplistic, racist manner.) The pair want to be famous, and will commit murder to achieve that. Meanwhile, a detective (De Niro) and a fire investigator (Edward Burns) team up to catch them.
There are lots of unexpected twists – not because the film is well-plotted, but because it’s a sprawling mess. Certain threads are never resolved, such as the fate of Vera Farmiga’s character. She’s meant to be the love interest, but she’s quietly sent away rather than being allowed to develop her relationship with Burns’ character.
The biggest flaw of all is the two criminals, who are woefully one-dimensional and presumably intended to be semi-comedic (the tone of the film is especially uneven). One of them video-tapes everything they do, thereby incriminating them. Maddeningly, the film presents some of the action through their camera footage – a gimmick that very quickly wears thin. This camcorder view of the violence also seems like exactly the sort of sensationalist rubbish the film claims to be satirising. It’s way dumber than it thinks it is.
There’s also a silly plot about a true-crime TV show presented by Kelsey Grammer (of Frasier) that feels like a different film entirely.
It’s frustrating because De Niro, Burns and Farmiga are all on good form, and some of their scenes are highly watchable. It’s as if director John Herzfeld sub-contracted some of the work, so jarring and uneven are the various different kinds of film clumsily cobbled together for the final edit.
New York psychologist Dr. David Callaway (Robert De Niro) finds his wife dead in the bathtub, after what seems like a suicide. David takes his nine-year-old daughter Emily (Dakota Fanning) to upstate New York, where they can live in a big spooky house miles from anywhere. But when Emily makes friends with “Charlie”, who may or may not be imaginary, events quickly take a sinister turn...
While De Niro is somewhat wasted in the role, it’s a tense drama with horror tropes and it keeps you guessing until the big reveal towards the end.
Three Slavic-American friends (Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and John Savage) find their simple, low-key lives are shattered after they are shipped off to fight in Vietnam.
Brilliantly, the film establishes a long set-up in their hometown. You get to know the characters and their context. The war segment is merely the second part of the film. The third part then deals with what happens after they come home – the emotional fall-out of everything they've experienced.
Meryl Streep is excellent as a companion from their pre-war existence. De Niro and Walken are at their very best: highly convincing as young men under unbearable pressures. There's a strong anti-war message, handled with subtlety, but it seems to be primarily a story about friendship and the strength of the human soul.
The Russian roulette sequences won't be quickly forgotten.
Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons star.
The jungle setting is visually stunning.
It's powerful and moving, especially given that it's based on true events.
The stirring music is by Ennio Morricone.
Robert De Niro stars as one of a team of special operatives working in France, hoping to seize a special suitcase from a super-criminal. But, inevitably, there are double-crossings and other complications...
It’s deeply odd. The directing is off, somehow, with strangely framed shots and stilted camerawork lingering on the wrong details. Whenever someone is portrayed as waiting, they are forced to sit and sip coffee. That soon stands out as a conspicuous, awkward directorial tic. People just can’t stop drinking coffee in this film. There’s a kind of flatness that comes from a below-average script and actors who don’t believe in the lines they’re speaking. Jean Reno and Sean Bean have a degree of presence, but unfortunately they don’t have fleshed-out characters. Even De Niro is clearly struggling to rise above the shoddy material.
The “Ronin” concept falls flat, with forced references to Japanese warrior culture not really working at all. It looks cheap, and it’s amazingly dull for a film with so many high-speed car chases. Parts of it are so ridiculous that it becomes laugh-out-loud funny.
The music is intrusive and ill-judged – for example, when a “romantic” theme is matched to a dramatic scene.
All in all, a total mess that should be regarded as a set text for film students wanting to learn how not to make a thriller.
Robert De Niro is Ben, a 70-year-old retired widow who goes to work for an internet fashion business run by the brilliant young entrepreneur Jules (Anne Hathaway). He’s smart, wise and generous, and as her unlikely intern he eases her stress – helping her become more efficient in the office. Ultimately, he helps her with every aspect of her life – from childcare to marriage guidance.
As always with Meyers, it’s an aspirational film obsessively focused on wealthy people and how they live. There are lovingly presented interiors of huge homes and office spaces where everything is new and expensive. The sun-dappled streets of New York also look immaculate (Meyers has a distinctive lighting style). There’s not a hint of true urban living, just as there’s virtually no one who isn’t white, rich and successful. This was made for people of a certain age and with a certain value system.
It's slightly better than those two previous films, however, because the parts played by De Niro and Hathaway are well written, nicely observed and persuasively performed. But Rene Russo is oddly underused as the masseuse that Ben falls for. And a plot thread about Jules’ mother fizzles out completely after a silly interlude in which Ben and his colleagues break into her mother’s house to delete an e-mail sent to her in error. The other male characters are all awkward and self-consciously drawn. It’s as if an old person wanted to describe what young people are like. The strangest section comes in a hotel room scene (that seems to recall Lost in Translation) when Jules cries because she doesn’t want to be buried alone and the saintly Ben says she can be buried next to him and his former wife. It’s unclear whether this is meant to be touching or funny. I found it a little creepy.
Despite and because of all of its jarring superficiality, The Intern is fascinating. Nancy Meyers is a highly skilled filmmaker, so it’s a shame she gets distracted by fancy kitchens.
The biggest difference is that the Bodens’ daughter, Danielle (a particularly superb Juliette Lewis), is a 15-year-old who is drawn into an ambiguous understanding with Cady. He exploits her dawning sexuality as well as her feelings of being misunderstood by her parents.
In many ways it’s a film about family and – like Cady himself – it cleverly explores the threads that tie them together as well as probing into the cracks that pull them apart.
The music, based on Bernard Herrmann’s score for the original, has a high drama, helping to drive the dynamism and the tension on screen.
There’s also the slight novelty of cameos from three of the original cast – Robert Mitchum, Gregory Peck and Martin Balsam all appear in minor roles.
If there’s a criticism it’s that it’s a little overwrought at times, but I like that quality: Scorsese turns up the drama and makes it almost unbearable. Then he turns it up some more.
The first half is compelling. Director Barry Levinson brilliantly sets the scene and evokes both time and place perfectly. But in the second half, the film seems to lose its way. A lengthy courtroom segment takes the focus away from the themes of friendship and community that initially made the film so watchable. And something about that plot – the convoluted account of a faked legal hearing – just doesn’t ring true.
The cast is excellent, with memorable performances by Robert De Niro (reliably brilliant as a priest who befriends the boys), Minnie Driver (who falls in love with three of them), Dustin Hoffman (an alcoholic lawyer) and Kevin Bacon (one of the abusive staff at the Wilkinson Home for Boys). Brad Pitt is less convincing as the grown-up version of Michael Sullivan.
There’s overbearing music by John Williams.
The film is often disturbing, as you’d imagine from the subject matter – and all the more so because the 1995 novel it’s drawn from (by Lorenzo Carcaterra) is semi-autobiographical. It makes some profound points about how cruelty shapes and damages us, but somehow it still misses the mark.
Heat is a complex film that introduces multiple threads. At its worst it’s in danger of becoming an episode of Miami Vice or even The A-Team. At its best, it’s like a cut-price Scorsese imitation, albeit without the elegance and sophistication. The script is reasonable enough, but there are casting problems. Val Kilmer is jarringly woeful as one of the gang members. Furthermore, the gang guys have no chemistry whatsoever. Even De Niro seems to be struggling a little with the material. Plus, some of the music is intrusive. And the threads about the stand-in getaway driver and Natalie Portman as a troubled teen could both have been removed in the interests of tightening up the narrative.
On the plus side – and it's a big plus – Pacino rises to the challenge of his role and is every bit as cool as usual. The scenes featuring him and his wife (Diane Venora) are convincing, and there’s a depth to him that the other characters lack.
It’s beautifully shot in black and white.
Joe Pesci is superb as LaMotta’s brother and trainer. Brilliantly, we never find out whether he’s having an affair with the boxer’s wife (Cathy Moriarty) or whether this is merely LaMotta’s jealousy and paranoia.
It’s brutally violent and every one of those punches looks like it really hurts. It’s excellently shot, in that sense. Being totally “method” about it, De Niro famously gained weight to depict LaMotta in his later years.
Cybil Shepherd and Jodie Foster are excellent as Betsy (the campaign volunteer for a presidential candidate) and Iris (a child prostitute), while Harvey Keitel is suitably creepy as Iris’s long-haired pimp.
It’s beautifully filmed: you could freeze almost any frame and make a poster of it. And Martin Scorsese’s subtle handling of tension was never better judged.
The original score by Bernard Herrmann makes a compelling, noirish film even more so.
You can interpret it as a film about PTSD or a story about isolation and loneliness.
Disturbingly, this classic was an influence on John Hinckley Jr., who in 1981 attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan in order to impress Jodie Foster.
De Niro is fantastic: genuinely unpredictable and hugely watchable. Keitel is sympathetic: you can relate to him because he seems to want to do the right thing, but he’s out of his depth. His epileptic girlfriend Teresa (Amy Robinson) is also likeable and convincing.
While it’s a lower-budget, earlier film than most of the classics in his catalogue, Scorsese’s usual tricks and tics are all in place: the wall-to-wall use of music (including Phil Spector hits and the Rolling Stones), the distinctive dialogue and framing of shots, and the expert ramping up of dramatic tension.
It’s about many things; the mafia, obviously, but also family, marriage and changing times in the USA.
Scorsese manages to pull off certain effects (freeze frames, a tiny bit of fourth-wall speaking to camera at the end) without it ever seeming tricksy. The characters seem entirely real. It’s also improbably funny – see Joe Pesci’s character's relationship with his mother (played by Scorsese’s own mother), or the obsession with food (Henry asking his brother to keep stirring the sauce as his life’s falling apart). And Robert De Niro is at his very best.
Although it’s multilayered, it’s also superbly lucid storytelling. You know what’s going on and why, even as the film constantly surprises you. Fantastic music choices too.
Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci play mafia men sent from Chicago to Las Vegas, scamming money off a casino’s profits for the bosses back home. They become rivals and enemies, which is a problem because Pesci’s character is essentially a psychopath. Meanwhile, Sharon Stone is an ex-prostitute who marries De Niro but is still attached to her pimp boyfriend played by James Woods.
It’s similar to Goodfellas in terms of subject matter and tone, but that film is far more appealing because it has a character you can relate to. There’s no one in Casino that you can identify with at all. Also, the violence is really disturbing – especially the head-in-a-vice and buried-alive scenes. I’m not sure I will ever get those images out of my mind.
The use of music was a little excessive. Countless great songs are jammed in, which is fun, but sometimes it's at the expense of light and shade. I craved a little more space.
De Niro is as good as ever, but it remains a flawed film that seems like it could have been a masterpiece and somehow didn’t turn out that way.
Robert De Niro plays the Inspector of Fire Investigation. Donald Sutherland is a serial arsonist who wants to burn down the entire world. Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Brian’s former girlfriend (it seems inappropriate to write “old flame”). And Rebecca De Mornay is Stephen’s estranged wife.
Ron Howard’s film has plenty of drama, and the fire scenes are scary. It’s a tale of two brothers that sometimes suffers from the fact that neither is especially likeable. In fact – with the possible exception of De Niro – that goes for everyone in it.
It’s an engaging story, but a few flaws stop it being remarkable:
1. The very “1980s” music by Ennio Morricone is impressive in places, but is sometimes used jarringly. For example, a crucial encounter at the Canadian border is accompanied by “adventure” music that completely undercuts any dramatic tension that has been built up. I think of this as “Steven Spielberg syndrome” – see Jaws.
2. There are points at which it seems like an episode of The A-Team in the slightly sentimental way it assembles a gang of diverse “good guys against the world” – even though this apparently really did happen, albeit with a slightly larger gang. The fact that one of them is a nerdy accountant who conveniently happens to be handy with a shotgun makes it a little harder to take seriously.
3. There’s something awkward and not-quite-right about Patricia Clarkson as Kevin Costner’s wife. Or maybe her role is just underwritten. Plus, the way the script (by David Mamet) focuses on Eliot’s loyalty to his wife and daughter leads you to think they will end up playing a greater part in the story (kidnapped or murdered) than they ever do.
4. The motivation of Jimmy Malone (Connery) is unclear. Why does he risk everything to help Costner? Why is he so morally upstanding when all the other policemen are crooked? And what’s going on with his Irish-Scottish-American accent?
These points aside, it’s highly enjoyable. De Niro is reassuringly nasty as Capone, gaining weight especially for the role, and Kevin Costner surprises by being highly watchable. Plus, there’s a particularly dynamic scene set in Union Station that involves a mother with a pram being caught in a crossfire.
