The Last Days of Disco Movie Review

For his third feature film The Last Days of Disco, Whit Stillman graduated to better financing and a bigger budget, but maintained his unique writing style and characterization depicting the “Urban haute bourgeoisie” of his first film Metropolitan. Again the characters are well-educated Ivy Leaguers and New England liberal arts college graduates who spend a lot of time talking. Stillman’s Barcelona brought these characters to another country, but this time he brought them back to New York City, where the well-to-do of that first film paraded around in tuxedos and ball gowns discussing philosophy, literature and social mores. The setting has changed slightly with the characters frequenting the dying disco scene of the early 80s, but the conversations are similar.

Palmetto Movie Review:

First published in The Connecticut College Voice on 27 February 1998.

Republished here with minor editorial adjustments that do not affect content.

Take two Academy Award nominated actors (Woody Harrelson, Elisabeth Shue) and Volker Schlöndorff, the critically acclaimed director of The Tin Drum and a comedic film noir script and you get the workings of what might be the first really good movie of 1998. Right? Wrong! What we end up with instead is a contrived, poorly scripted, badly conceived attempt at film noir. Not that it is a result of the people involved, but given the talent coming together on this project, Palmetto should have been much better.

Mr. Nice Movie Review

Bernard Rose was present at the Seville European Film Festival earlier this month presenting his film, Mr. Nice. He comes across like Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty in Stnaley Kubrick’s Lolita, not only by his physical appearance with thick black hair and slight stature, but also in his speaking style and mannerisms, including his frequent adjustment of his horn rimmed glasses.


He introduced his film by prefacing it with his view that drugs should be legal and that people shouldn’t have to languish in prison for years because they take drugs recreationally. He also made sure to draw a distinction between what he considers to be two separate issues: the question of legality on the one hand and of addiction on the other. Any reasonable person should have no trouble agreeing to that, but Rose’s film fails to adequately address the second.