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Alan Stone on Film
2007
Living Together
Spike Lee’s
Do the Right Thing.
Any
Human Heart
Alejandro González
Iñárritu’s
Babel.
Good Will
Marc Forster's
Stranger Than Fiction.
2006
Enduring
Love
André Téchiné’s
Changing Times.
A
Forbidden Hope
Deepa Mehta’s
Water.
Unknowable
Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne's
L'Enfant.
Judgment Day
Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain.
Happy Endings
Joe Wright’s
Pride and Prejudice.
Trapped
Rodrigo García's
Nine Lives.
2005
Choosing
Love
Jacques Audiard’s
The Beat That My Heart Skipped.
Explaining
Love Away
Arnaud Desplechin's Kings
and Queens.
Mercy
Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby.
Redeeming Shylock
Michael Radford’s
The Merchant of Venice.
For God and Country
Henry V and nationalism.
2004
See
No Evil
Zhang Yimou’s
Hero.
Lawless
Pedro Almodóvar's
Bad
Education.
The End of Remorse?
Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ.
Last Battle
Gillo Pontecorvo’s
Burn!.
A Good Look
Thomas McCarthy's The Station Agent.
2003
The
Lost Girls
Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen.
Realism’s Redemption
Sweet Sixteen and Raising Victor Vargas.
Cheap
Shots
Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine.
Twenty-first Century Woolf
Scott Rudin’s The Hours.
Reel Terrorism
Reconsidering The Battle of Algiers.
2002
Dreams
and Deceptions
Zhang Yimou loses his muse with Happy Times.
Contingency
and Grace
Thirteen Conversations About One Thing offers
characters worth believing in.
Innocents
Abroad
Randall Wallace's We Were Soldiers makes a virtue out
of political naïveté.
Desperately
Seeking Sex
Intimacy Patrice Chereau's controversial film of obsession
and sex.
A
Beautiful Illusion
A Beautiful Mind and Hollywood's romance with mental illness.
2001
Credit
the Director
Dancer in the Dark is an all-out assault on the values
of commericial film.
Political
Football
Thirteen Days is a moving recreation of the Cuban Missile
Crisis, especially when you knew the principals.
No
Defense
The Luzhin Defence ruins a clever Nabokov novel.
Zhang
Yimou's Long Road Home
The personal and aesthetic odyssey of China's premiere director.
Absurd
Humanism
A Czech film explores human cruely and the possibility of forgiveness.
2000
Beauty
and Redemption
American Beauty and Elaine Scarry look for aesthetic experience
in unexpected places.
Shakespeare's
Tarantino Play
Julie Taymor resurrects the despised Titus Andronicus.
Split
Personality
Girl, Interrupted is a banal representation of Susanna
Kaysen's ironic memoir.
The
Fresh Prince
Michael Almereyda's Hamlet is--surprise!--serious Shakespeare.
My
Brother's Keeper
Shower allows you to understand, for a moment, what it
feels like to be a saint.
1999
Oprah's
Nightmare
Beloved suffers from its own artistic pretensions.
Escape
From Auschwitz
Life is Beautiful turned the Holocaust into a sentimental
fable.
Eric
Rohmer's Canvas
The Autumn Tale finds a world of beauty in the lives of
women.
A
New Hope
The Phantom Menace betrays one generation, enchants another.
The
Artist as Survivor
King of Masks as an allegory about the possibility of human
connection.
1998
Henry
James at the Movies
With a decadent sensuality, The Wings of the Dovereaches
for the galleries.
The
Toad and the Butterfly
Mike van Diem's Character.
Selling
(Out) Nabokov
A humorless new Lolita mistakes satire for tragedy.
Governing
Passion
Filled with echoes of Bill and Monica, The Governess takes
the law and politics out of sex.
1997
Herodotus
Goes to Hollywood
Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient,a postmodern meditation
on identity and history, has become a visually stunning romantic
saga.
Branagh's
Triumph
A brilliant new Hamlet celebrates the awesome joy of Shakespeare's
poetry, and its moral depth.
Innocence
(on Shine)
A high-culture docudrama presents a profoundly misleading portrait
of mental disorder.
Sifting
Waco's Ashes
Waco: The Rules of Engagement raises disturbing questions
about the government's conduct both during the stand-off and after
its fiery end.
Seeing
Pink
Ma Vie en Rose-- a film with no romance, no aliens, and
no famous stars -- provides a new understanding of human sexuality.
1996
Sense
and Sensibility
Jane Austen's funniest book; Emma Thompson's greatest triumph.
On
Othello
Oliver Parker's sexual thriller suffers from the presence of Shakespeare's
racial sensibilities and the absence of his poetry.
A
Second Nature
Antonia's Line reimagines life after patriarchy.
The
Prophet of Hope
With Lone Star, John Sayles has given compelling artistic
life to his moral sensibility.
This
is the Life? (on Mike Leigh)
In Secrets & Lies, a master of British working-class
psychodrama reveals a sentimental faith in healing.
1995
Where's
Woody?
With his personal antics intruding on his comic identity, Woody
Allen may be losing his touch.
Pulp
Fiction
Sure, Tarantino gleefully throws around the blood and the brains,
but his brilliant dialogue deflates the violent clichés
of most Hollywood movies.
Fellini's
Moment of Truth
Fellini's last great film has baffled a generation of critics.
Alan Stone explains why.
No
Soul
Burnt by the Sun is a remarkable film with one large flaw
-- it sentimentalizes Stalinism.
Persuasion
The film redeems modern sensibilities -- and trashes Jane Austen's
book.
1994
The
Piano
Jane Campion has turned her hand from interpreting fables to making
them. A review of her latest film.
Spielberg's
Success
A review of Schindler's List.
Spike
Lee: Looking Back
Crooklyn was a disaster. What has happened to the Spike
Lee who made She's Gotta Have It and Do the Right Thing?
1993
The
Crying Game
Neil Jordan's The Crying Game.
Comedy
and Culture
Zhang Yimou's The Story of Qiu Ju.
A
Post-Modern Romance?
A review of Claude Sautet's Un Coeur en Hiver.
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