Search for 1998

My concept of a "family film" is a movie that can be enjoyed by viewers of all ages: undiscriminating young children, teenagers with short attention spans, and adults with somewhat more refined standards. Unfortunately, too often Hollywood eq...

Movie-goers attend Ken Loach movies for a variety of reasons, but one of them is not to have a "feel good" experience. The reason? Loach consistently looks at believable characters in realistic situations. His pictures are not escapist; they're ...

When I first saw Next Stop, Wonderland at a packed screening in the Egyptian Theater during this year's Sundance Film Festival, I was not impressed, and couldn't understand why Miramax Films would ante up $6 million for what is fundamentally a re-t...

The Object of My Affection, based on the novel of the same name by Stephen McCauley, is a pleasant romantic comedy that asks (and tries to answer) questions about the nature of love, sex, family, and friendship. And, while some of the solutions ar...

The turning point in Christina Ricci's career came when she chose to appear in Ang Lee's The Ice Storm. Since then, nothing has been the same for the up-and-coming performer. Before the 1997 feature, Ricci had turned up in host of bland, family-o...

In the middle of the summer movie season, when most films are designed with the intelligence of a seven year-old for viewers with the attention span of someone even younger, it's refreshing to find a picture like Out of Sight, which is not only...

It never fails to amaze me that something as essentially light and pointless as Disney's remake of The Parent Trap can clock in at over two hours in length. This is one of those movies that has difficulty sustaining any kind of comic or dramatic m...

What is the difference between a bad melodrama and a good one? The key lies in the emotional response. If the viewer feels that he or she is being forced into reacting in a particular way because of "button pushing," the film makers have erred. ...

Pi, the letter, is a character in the Greek alphabet roughly equivalent to the English "p." Pi, the mathematical notation, is commonly used to represent the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Pi, the movie, is Darren Aronofsky'...

Playing by Heart is an ensemble dramatic comedy about the many faces of love: romance, longing, loss, sex, and lust. Set in modern-day L.A., the film tells six seemingly-unrelated tales about men and women finding each other, losing each other, u...