There’s a lot of dialogue, which gives the film extra richness, and it skilfully explores the relationships between the key characters. It’s not surprising to learn that it was adapted from Joe Klein’s loosely fictionalised account of the 1992 Bill Clinton presidential campaign. Emma Thompson even looks a little like Hilary Clinton at times.
Billy Bob Thornton, Kathy Bates and Larry Hagman all co-star, and all are at their best.
It’s tonally all over the place – a sort of fairytale crossed with Thelma and Louise, Harry Potter and various horror/supernatural elements. Stockard Channing and Diane Wiest are miscast or misused as two eccentric aunts, and it wasn’t really clear why they were in the film at all.
The film tries to address the topic of domestic abuse, but it’s a topic that requires a much more sensitive approach than this. The attempts to address it with comedy are inconsistent and grating.
Bullock and Kidman do their best with the material, but cannot salvage an awkward mess of a film.
Jim Carrey stars as Truman Burbank, a man who doesn’t realise that his whole life has been filmed for a reality TV show broadcast to millions. This show is masterminded by Christof (Ed Harris), portrayed as an almost godlike figure.
It's a fascinating idea, but the execution seems fatally flawed. In places the storytelling isn't strong enough – mainly because you can’t easily tell what’s meant to be TV footage and what is us seeing what’s really going on.
The plot only works at all if you don't ask any questions of it. For example, why does Carrey’s character perform as though he’s in a TV show when he doesn’t know he is? And how does the acting role actually work for his wife (Laura Linney), who is on duty 24 hours a day, 365 days per year?
Drama starring Jane Horrocks as “Little Voice”, a talented singer who – following the death of her father – hides away in her room owing to her intimidating mother Mari (Brenda Blethyn). But when Mari takes up with shifty promoter Ray Say (Michael Caine), the latter sees a fortune to be made by exploiting the reclusive young vocalist.
Horrocks and Blethyn are both excellent. Jim Broadbent is suitably seedy as club owner Mr. Boo. And Ewan McGregor is more likeable than usual as the telephone engineer Billy. It's appealing and gritty, like Brassed Off, but I found the styling of LV's father (a sort of ghost or imagined visitor) oddly naff. I can see why he was portrayed in black and white – it was how he was shown in LV's treasured photo – but as a visual treatment it looked silly.
That point aside, it's engrossing and Horrocks' vocal impersonations of Marilyn Monroe, Shirley Bassey, and so on are compelling. Likewise, it's fascinating to hear Michael Caine's desperate, deranged version of "It's Over" by Roy Orbison when he realises that his various problems have all caught up with him.
Ray Liotta plays Harry Collins, an Arizona detective whose gambling addiction is getting him into trouble. His three colleagues in the same department also have their own problems and their needs don’t always coincide.
I like the way that Harry is portrayed as a deeply moral character, despite the mess he’s in. This nuanced script allows him to add real depth to the performance.
Angelica Huston is excellent as Leila, the mother of a girl he nearly dated and someone he becomes quickly attached to.
You guess fairly on that there’s not going to be a happy ending, but it is at least a satisfying ending.
The oddly named Birdee Pruitt (Sandra Bullock) is humiliated on national TV when her husband reveals he’s having an affair with her best friend (an uncredited Rosanna Arquette). Birdee takes her young daughter Bernice (Mae Whitman) and goes to live with her mother Ramona (Gena Rowland) in her hometown of Smithville, Texas. While trying to come to terms with the changes in her life, she falls for former classmate Justin Matisse (Harry Connick Jr).
It’s extremely uneven. The script is poor and the characters aren’t developed much. That said, there are a couple of good moments – Sandra Bullock does the “throwing up and feeling ill on the bathroom floor” scene fairly well, and the daughter being abandoned by her shallow father felt all too upsettingly plausible.
There are various oddities in the film:
1. Ramona is a taxidermist, so her large house is full of creepy stuffed animals – a quirk that's apparently unrelated to everything else in the story.
2. Ramona is bringing up another abandoned grandson, Travis, who spends all his time dressing up in silly costumes. Why? It's unclear how we're meant to feel about that.
3. Harry Connick Jr seems sweaty in every scene, even when he's not doing anything.
4. Some of the shots are out of focus – even basic technical stuff seems to have been problematic for the filmmakers.
5. Birdee works in a shop developing photos, but messes up most of them. Meanwhile, her boss says that he likes looking at the dodgier images they are given, which he makes copies of and keeps in a special drawer. That makes him seem pervy and weird, but this thread is never followed up.
Brothers Hank (Bill Paxton) and Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton), plus Jacob’s friend Lou (Brent Briscoe), find a crashed aircraft buried in snow in remote, rural Wright County, Minnesota. There’s $4 million inside it, which – after some debate – they decide to keep. That decision changes everything in their lives.
This is a devastating story. It works as an edge-of-your-seat thriller, but really it’s a profound morality tale.
Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton are excellent as the conflicted brothers with little in common. Bridget Fonda is great, too, as Hank’s wife who becomes increasingly pulled into the drama of their own making. The escalating situation is perfectly handled by director Sam Raimi.
The novel, by Scott Smith, is even better.
It’s 1973. The five-year-old Danny (Cory Buck) is with his father, visiting family friend Grace (Brenda Blethyn). Grace is about to give birth and – bizarrely – Danny helps save the baby by freeing the umbilical cord round its neck. When the baby, Anna, is born he announces that one day he will marry her. Twenty-five years later, Danny (now played by Jude Law) is back in the USA and has a chance meeting with the Swan family. (He would have just decided to visit them, but the writers clearly preferred a far more unlikely scenario.) He sees Anna (Gretchen Mol) and falls in love. But Anna is part of a big, complicated family and about to get engaged to a man she doesn’t really love.
The film is strange in many ways. The plot doesn’t really ring true, but the members of the family are quirky, well-drawn characters and you are quickly drawn into their world. There’s a blind sister, a suicidal sister and a slightly odd sister.
There’s a thread about Anna Karenina running through it, and the sisters are named Anna, Karen and Nina accordingly. Some of their stories don’t quite work (the suicidal sister actually shoots her husband and nothing more is said about it). A writer such as Nora Ephron or Woody Allen would have done a better job of neatly tying those threads together. But the film exudes charm and all of the performances are hugely likeable. There are genuinely touching parts and a few laughs too.
Emilio Estevez is convincingly unpredictable as William H. Bonney a.k.a. Billy the Kid, although he just made me yearn to re-watch Sam Peckinpah's superior Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.
It’s a reasonable premise and the three leads are all charismatic and watchable. What slightly ruins the film is the presence of two child actors (Jena Malone and Liam Aiken) who seem a little too self-conscious and self-aware. I never really believed they were real people with real feelings – perhaps because they speak lines that were clearly written for them by adults.
The emotional draw is watching the two women come to terms with their situations and with each other, which of course they eventually do. No one seems to mind that Ed Harris isn’t around much. Also, as in so many films, the characters’ wealth and upward mobility is never in question. Jackie lives in a mansion that seems to get bigger every time we see it. That’s not really a flaw of the film – rich people have problems, too – but it does seem to lessen any drama that the script attempts to build up.
Nicolas Cage stars as a crooked detective at an Atlantic City boxing match when an assassination of the Defence Secretary takes place. He’s there with his best friend – a U.S. Navy Commander (played by Gary Sinise), who knows more about the killing than he initially lets on. Carla Gugino plays an analyst who gets mixed up in the drama.
It’s brilliantly and flamboyantly directed, from the long, uninterrupted opening shot to the overhead views looking down into the hotel rooms. It’s flashily done, but never at the expense of lucid storytelling. The multiple viewpoint shots used to revisit the crime scene and reveal what really happened were also a nice touch.
Cage is incredibly magnetic and hugely watchable. There’s so much going on in every moment of his performance that it's really quite remarkable.
