Search for 1995

Most films focusing on the racial division of South Africa are framed around a mood of seething anger and tension. The inequities of the recently-abolished apartheid system have provided fuel for a series of motion pictures steeped in bitterness a...

Renny Harlin, whose previous directorial efforts include Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger, seems fond of big, explosive action pictures. Unfortunately, excepting his debut (the middle film in the Die Hard trilogy), plot coherency hasn't been a particula...

In the movies, like in real life, it isn't enough just to have a heart in the right place. Good intentions are nice, but they need to be backed up by an intelligent script telling an involving story. In the case of Dangerous Minds, we get an idea...

Not since Krzysztof Kieslowski's A Short Film About Killing has a motion picture about capital punishment been so disturbing and compelling. Dead Man Walking has appropriated a controversial subject by giving pain and personality to both sides of t...

It seems that in a period detective story, it's a prerequisite for the main character to narrate the proceedings. In Devil in a Blue Dress, writer/director Carl Franklin apparently intended this conceit as a tribute to the Dashiell Hammett/Raymond...

Perhaps the best way to describe the third segment in the popular Die Hard series is by comparing it to the previous two. That should give an adequate assessment of how far the adventures of John McClane (Bruce Willis) have fallen. The original D...

When it comes to spoofs of horror films, one of the greatest of all time is surely Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein, a movie that's as clever as it is funny. Now, more than two decades later, Brooks has attempted to re-create the magic by doing to B...

Feast of July, which arrives under the Merchant/Ivory umbrella (Ismail Merchant having served as executive producer), is much like a big screen version of a double-length Masterpiece Theater episode. By turns tragic and beautiful, but always atmos...

With some "mockumentaries" (or "meta-documentaries", "pseudo-documentaries", or whatever else you want to call them), it's best not to know beforehand that they're fakes. The opposite is true of Forgotten Silver, an inventive and wily project ma...

Four Rooms, a four-segment anthology directed by independent film darlings Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez, and Quentin Tarantino, has to be one of 1995's major disappointments. Perhaps it's the format itself -- twenty minutes...