Heat Movie Review

It’s sort of improbable that Michael Mann was able to make Heat the way he wanted to at the length of nearly three hours. How did a studio greenlight that decision? Mann was not a known director like a Scorsese or a Spielberg. Crime drama was not exactly a genre that typically lent itself to epic scope and length. I can only surmise that it was on the strength of having Robert De Niro and Al Pacino as the two leads that made executives believe that people would come to this movie. It didn’t hurt, I’m sure, that the movie is exceptionally well-made.

Wag the Dog Movie Review

In 1997 there was no YouTube, no Facebook, no Twitter. There were message boards, email, websites, maybe some very early blogs, but the dissemination of information and access to reports, accounts, and testimonials, for all that we thought at the time was lightning fast, was nothing compared to today. This thought occurred to me while revisiting Wag the Dog, Barry Levinson’s seventeen-year old film about an invented war fed to the media to distract the public from a Presidential sex scandal two weeks before he hopes to be reelected. In it, Robert De Niro plays Conrad Brean, a kind of independently contracted fixer brought into the White House by Winifred Ames (Anne Heche) to help clean up the mess and potential fallout once the story breaks. So Conrad enlists the help of Stanly Motss (Dustin Hoffman), a big Hollywood producer, to put the pieces in place to sell not just a war, but a whole package and all the emotions and patriotic fervor that come with it, to the public.

From My Collection: Sleepers Movie Review

Back in 1996 I was truly taken in by Barry Levinson’s Sleepers, adapted from Lorenzo Carcaterra’s allegedly autobiographical novel relating his experiences as a boy growing up in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, becoming the victim of terrible physical and sexual abuse at a boys’ reform school, and the revenge he and his friends exacted upon their tormentors as adults years later. When the book was published and then later when the film was released, there were many who questioned the validity of the story. There is no independent record of any of the events described. Of course juvenile records are expunged and Carcaterra claims he changed locations, which offers reasonable explanations as to why journalists were unable to unearth any court records similar to what takes place in the second half of the story. Just looking at it in terms of sheer believability, the first half involving Carcaterra (his character goes by the nickname Shakes) and his three best friends as adolescents is selling something so much easier to swallow than the revenge-filled latter half.

Silver Linings Playbook Movie Review

Director David O. Russell has become something of a specialist in staging chaotic family scenarios with emotions running to a fever pitch and pushing the comedy of the moment nearly to the breaking point. He did it several times in his sophomore effort Flirting with Disaster, which had Ben Stiller on a cross-country search for his birth parents, and then most recently in The Fighter with boxer Mark Wahlberg and his girlfriend, played by a tough Amy Adams, squaring off against his seventeen or so sisters. In Silver Linings Playbook, his newest film that he both directed and wrote (adapted from the novel by Matthew Quick) brings together just about every character, lead and supporting, under one roof for a scene that would be greatly comedic if it weren’t also somewhat tragic at the same time. It’s a scene that I thought just about went over the edge of reason, but Russell brings it back to earth before things get out of hand.

The Untouchables Movie Review: 25 Years Ago This Month

In honor of this film's 25th Anniversary, here's a fresh look at a film I've seen several times before, but not in many years.

Kevin Costner was not yet a box office superstar when he landed his first big role in Brian De Palm’s The Untouchables, playing the Treasury Department golden boy Eliot Ness, the law man who got Al Capone. He was so much not yet a star that the first shot of him in the film he has his back to camera for the majority of the scene. It is his wife Catherine, played by Patricia Clarkson in her film debut, who gets all the face time in the scene. This is actually the second scene in the film following the bombing of a Chicago business establishment by one of Capone’s henchmen, the blast taking a 10-year-old girl as collateral damage.

Classic Movie Review: The Godfather Part II

At the time it was made, could anyone have imagined that a sequel to The Godfather would possibly be anything near to the quality and sophistication of the first film? And yet Francis Ford Coppola surpassed his own film in many ways with The Godfather Part II. It is wider and more epic in scope, covering both the rise of a young Vito Corleone in 1920s Little Italy and the decline of his youngest son Michael 30-odd years later. It covers the ground both before and after the time period in which the first film is set.

Classic Film Review: Roland Joffe's The Mission

As a staunch non-believer I’ve only ever encountered two films that gave me a sense of what religious fulfillment is. Not that I was spiritually awakened or felt a desire to convert – nothing of the kind – but that the film was so skilled at conveying the significance of faith in God’s love without being preachy, that I understood through character development and acting what it is to find redemption and peace. And isn’t that what the vast majority of narrative cinema is about? It’s meant to provide you a glimpse into other people’s lives for a couple of hours and make you believe in their beliefs.

The first of these was The Mission, directed by Roland Joffe, and winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival. I first watched it many years ago while I was in high school or college and I wasn’t sure if a second viewing so many years later would still produce the same effect in me. The difference this time was that I had greater appreciation for the craft of the film, which most likely subconsciously influenced my original belief that it was a great film.

Analyze This Movie Review: De Niro as The Godfather of Comedy

This review was first published in the Connecticut College Voice in March 1999.

Listening to a mobster unload his emotional stress to a psychotherapist is not a particularly new concept. Currently, there is an HBO series called “The Sopranos” in which a mobster occasionally visits an analyst, and two years ago, we watched as John Cusack, portraying a hitman, found himself by talking to a psychiatrist in Grosse Pointe Blank. So, it should come as no surprise that director Harold Ramis’s newest comedy, Analyze This, concerns a panicked Robert De Niro seeking help from psychiatrist Billy Crystal.

De Niro plays Paul Vitti, a John Gotti-like New York Mafia boss who finds himself overcome with anxiety attacks and unexpected floods of tears. This is an unacceptable state to be in for a man of his profession. His friends and enemies are like animals – they sense weakness and move in for the kill. By a stroke of fate, Ben Sobol (Crystal) is chosen as the man to help him. Needless to say he is reluctant at first.

The Score Movie Review: The Uniting of Three Legends of Their Time

This review was written in July 2001 and is presented here for the first time.

Who would have thought that one movie could assemble the three greatest method actors from three generations? Getting that perfect dream cast together to watch three men so skilled at their art working with, off and against each other? Director Frank Oz's new heist thriller The Score does just that with Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro and Edward Norton.

Classic Movie Review: Raging Bull

Raging Bull is the full realization of the promise Martin Scorsese demonstrated with Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. And to refer to those two seminal films as somehow less substantial than Raging Bull should automatically suggest its magnificent power.

This was the fourth of eight collaborations between Scorsese and Robert De Niro. I would say neither artist has topped himself since. It is Scorsese at his virtuoso best and for De Niro it is a complete performance, lacking nothing in terms of emotion and physicality. And I don’t say that simply because he first turned his body into that of a champion boxer and then gained 60 pounds to play the aging and overweight Jake La Motta, but because he leaves nothing on the table. This is full tilt De Niro. It’s the impulsiveness and rage of Johnny Boy and the fierce tenacity of the psychopathic Travis Bickle. Although we may occasionally get flashes of De Niro’s brilliance in some of his recent performances, nothing he’s done in at least twenty years has come close to what he brought to Raging Bull.