25 Years Ago This Month: April 1989

We begin with what I've seen...

The biggest release of the month was Field of Dreams, still considered a sports movie classic starring Kevin Costner as a man compelled by voices to build a baseball diamond in his mid-west cornfield. He believes he was being guided in order to bring back the disgraced Chicago Black Sox - the eight players banned for life after taking money to throw the World Series in 1919. But the end has quite a different surprise in store. Ray Liotta plays "Shoeless" Joe Jackson and James Earl Jones has some wonderfully well-spoken lines and one classic speech about the timelessness of baseball.

Moulin Rouge! Movie Review: Ten Years Later, It Still Does It

“Love Is Like Oxygen.” “Love is a Many-Splendored Thing.” Love Lifts Us Up Where We Belong.” “All You Need Is Love.” At least that’s what pop music tells us as well as Christian, the young penniless Bohemian writer looking for truth, beauty, freedom and love in turn of the twentieth century Paris in Baz Luhrmann’s kinetic marvel Moulin Rouge! It’s ten years ago this month I first saw this movie on DVD and shortly thereafter I sought it out in the one Manhattan theater that was still showing it. It simply astounded me even though I fully expected to be repelled by it. I’m not a fan of musicals in general, but it quickly became, along with West Side Story, one of only two examples of the genre I truly adore and landed on my list of favorite films of the first decade of the 21st century.

Rabbit Hole Movie Review: The Reverberations of Unbearable Loss

When a neighbor greets Becca (Nicole Kidman) in her garden and invites her to dinner, there’s something noticeably strained in the conversation. Likewise when her husband, Howie (Aaron Eckhart), arrives home from work, there is something not altogether right in their interactions. When Becca learns, after bailing her out of jail for a barfight, that her little sister is pregnant, she is uncomfortably happy. When she asks Izzy (Tammy Blanchard) why she told their mother first, she responds, “Why do you think?” Something seems dreadfully wrong in the opening moments of Rabbit Hole, so wrong that the crisp and clean suburban Long Island surfaces can’t cover it up, no matter how hard everyone seems to be trying. Becca and Howie are grieving over the death of their four year old son, killed eight months earlier chasing their dog into the road.