Reviews

A disappointment to see Paul Newman wasting his time on this feeble film, his penultimate appearance on the big screen. The plot is based on a ludicrous premise, and, despite Newman's best efforts, the unlikelihood of the situation demands a complete suspension of disbelief. The direction is sloppy, and Linda Fiorentino, interestingly also in her penultimate film appearance, is left high and dry so that the subtlety of performance she is capable of is reduced to hammy over-acting. There is no evidence from this production that Dermot Mulroney is capable of a subtle performance, but all three actors suffer from being saddled with leaden dialogue, and poor staging by the director.

The film runs to 1 hour 29 minutes and it feels as though the editor had to hold scenes longer than necessary to make up the length. Overall a thin little film with little to recommend it.

If you want to see Newman at his best there is a huge choice, which doesn't include Where the Money is. Linda Fiorentino for her performance in the 1994 film The Last Seduction, won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress, the London Film Critics' Circle Award for Actress of the Year, and she was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. For both leads one can only say, with regret, how the mighty are fallen.

When they are digging the hole in the street in the City of London, Harry Baird, playing Gill, calls Leo Farrel 'Neil', which is the actor's name (Neil McCarthy) instead of Leo, or Binky, the name of the character.

The missing Nausea sequence was included in the version shown on the British TV channel 'Taking Pictures'. It's an amusing interjection, with very little in common with the rest of the film. The film is a genuine period piece, and worth watching, despite Laurence Harvey's exuberant performance with its range of accents.

This film is a real stinker. In every department the lack of expertise is unmissable. From the meandering script to the static and dreary camera-work, the slack editing, and even the hideous typeface chosen for the tiles telling us which country we are now in, it is clear that this is a film made in a rush and on the cheap. As Producer, Pierce Brosnan's motives are clear – he wants a chance to give us an 'edgy' self deprecating performance to prove he can. Director and writer Richard Shephard admits on the DVD extras that this was his chance to work on something substantial, and my guess is that the attraction was that he had the script and was probably prepared to do it for a very reasonable rate. The problem is that the movie rambles from one dreary conversation to the next, interspersed with some gratuitous sex scenes, aimed, I imagine, at proving to the audience that Brosnan still has it, (if indeed he ever had it, his Bond films being distinguished by their lack of charisma).

The art direction is clumsy – note the scene where Brosnan in a very unlikeable yellow brown jacket is set amongst a lot of sunshades of a similar unlikeable yellowy brown.

The lighting cameraman does a professional job, but the film he shot has been hacked rather than edited with gimmicky and flashy tricks that come from pop promos and which were out of date minutes after they were invented. Huge close ups suddenly interrupt interminable scenes shot in dreary mid-shot recording performances that seem to have been largely untouched by advice from a director.

Believe it or not , seventeen (seventeen!!) producers were thought necessary to get this turkey made, supervising a team listed as over 330 strong(!), not including cast, for a film that feels like a two man conversation for large stretches. If Pierce is wondering where the money went, the answer is – not on the screen. Contrast and compare with "The African Queen" – 2 producers and a credited crew of 41, shooting a film in the wild, again mostly made up of conversations between two people. Which is better value for money? Which film would you rather see? I know what I think.

Though this film suffers from an obvious shortage of budget, it is worth seeing for the marvellous portrayal of the 'baddie' of the piece by Neil French. Like a latter day Sydney Greenstreet, he dominates the too few scenes in which he appears. Like Orson Welles in The Third Man he is a largely invisible, malignant, presence whose influence is felt throughout the drama. Unfortunately the script gives him no speeches of the weight of the 'Switzerland' speech in the Prater Amusement Park. Nevertheless he gives the lifeless scripted dialogue his all, and his eventual grisly end is as welcomed by the audience as it is by his adversaries within the film. It is a mystery that after this performance he disappeared from screens everywhere. One wonders what he would have made of the role of Hannibal Lecter for which he was, apparently an early nomination.

I got the DVD of this terrible film to see if it was in fact the worst film ever made. That honour still belongs to "Swept Away", because Madonna is so much less of an actress, and that film is even more of a self indulgent mess. However Gigli is a worthy runner up. What hold does director Martin Brest have over Al Pacino that persuaded him, after the ghastly "Scent of a Woman" to do an imitation Ben Kingsley (as in Sexy Beast) in this floperoo? And why was anyone persuaded that the script, by Brest, was worth making in the first place? Devoid of wit, characterisation, plot, or anything to look at, the film is a succession of telephone calls, entrances and exits, and shots of people thinking. the editor could have lost 40 minutes of the final running time, and only made the film ten times better.

Better yet would if it had never been made at all.

At an hour and forty minutes, but feeling like 3 hours, this film is at least an hour too long. The film is made up of wodges of interminable dialogue, with a largely static camera focused interminably on Clooney's vacant grin. The action is inter-cut with air to ground shots of the various cities featured in the Clooney characters never ending flights around the country. These shots do not illuminate either plot or location, and one suspects they are a handy way of stretching thin material.

Almost every character in the film appears to have been cast for, at best, plain looks, and at worst for ugly. Whether this is a sop to the vanity of the lead, or whether the director believes this lends some sort of realism to his film is unclear. Either way it is no incentive to like or care about anyone one sees on screen. I am not, by the way, referring to the hapless workers whose sackings are the background of the film. Anna Kendrick who plays the new girl at the company is ferret faced and unengaging, with a peculiar one dimensional performance. But then one cares not a jot about anyone in this cheerless, dreary, depressing film.

Why it should have been nominated for any award except Turkey of the Year is a great mystery.

A thin little film with appeal only to those who feel sentimental about dogs. I imagine the film was written down to a very small budget indeed, and good luck in that it garnered some praise. But the film has little going for it - Michelle Williams offers little in the way of performance, and is not over-burdened with charisma.

So - not much plot, very little dialogue, no insights into either Wendy or the human condition, a fairly dreary dog, and what have you got? Not a lot.

A review has to be ten lines long, and I am explaining that to use up the space - there really isn't much else to say about this tiny epic.

This film is flashy, shallow, and handicapped by Halle Berry's performance - she has the acting ability of a paper clip, and Bruce Willis living down to his reputation as America's Michael Caine - no film is too lousy to appear in. On the DVD check out his half hearted praise for the director to get an inkling of how much he cared about this production.

The script has a lot of swearing, which the writer probably imagined gave his work "street-cred" - he was wrong.

The camera-work is intrusively gimmicky, and Halle Berry's wardrobe dominates her scenes. the plot is full of holes, and no visual cliché is too over used for the director to ignore the chance to wheel it out again.

All in all, one to miss, and, if you do get the DVD steer clear of Miss Berry's self congratulatory interview.

A slight film spoilt by the 'busyness' of Hoffman's performance, and the reverence of the director for his star - the camera stays adoringly on Hoffman wherever possible the more to enjoy his endless repertoire of tiny tics, sighs and pauses, so that, for instance, whole conversations with Thompson feature only the back of her head.

Both Thompson and Atkins are also actresses who could do with slightly more control from the director. As always, less is more, though the temptation to try to keep up with Hoffman in making one's performance 'interesting' must be difficult to resist.

I imagine the director and cast all thought it was frightfully witty for Thompson's character to say to Patrick Baladi's character 'but I thought you worked in stationery' in an insider reference to his role as David Brent's boss in The Office.

It wasn't.

Poor casting, intermittent periods where the film treads water with overlong pictures of the scenery, and a lack of anyone in the cast to empathise with, render this a dreary experience. Edited with no sense of timing and with unmemorable music laid on with a trowel, the performances are unable to engage or sustain one's attention. The biggest drawback is that there is nobody one likes - the hero is the American equivalent of a shop dummy in a Cecil Gee window, the son is blank faced except when he is petulant. Custer is inscrutable and a boring character. The villains are cardboard cutouts, and the mad woman of the hills is alarming and repellent.

Custer's daughter is the only bright spark in the film, and acts everyone else off the screen, not that that was hard to do.

The Henson Creature Shop shut up shop in London shortly after this film was made; maybe they had lost heart when they saw it.

One to miss.

This is a brilliant film with perfection in every department. The cast are uniformly excellent,and so is the lighting, editing, costumes, and music. Depardieu has never been better than in his playing of the cop whose morals are sacrificed to his ambition. The film is taut, exciting, and never lets go as the plot untwists before us. It makes every Hollywood film that tries to inhabit the same territory look like the over manicured, star driven, bits of candy floss that they are. At the end one comes out feeling that one has seen the underbelly of the Parisian underworld that is known only to policemen, or ex policemen, like the director. A tour de force. Wonderful.

This film is an attempt by an American to make a European film, and should be applauded for that. Unfortunately what it lacks is anything much to get involved in. The actors appear unrestrained, the longueurs are endless, and in the end I just lost interest. The trouble about peopling a film with American grotesques is that it is impossible to relate to them. Mind you, I didn't like Royal Tannenbaums either, or almost anything with Bill Murray in it. (Maybe it's just me!) Talking of which, and I DID enjoy Groundhog Day, the comedy of repetition is a hard trick to pull off, and seeing April going up and down stairs soon lost its charm. Maybe if the director had spent less time pedantically moving her hither and thither, he might have had the time and or money to film the final Thanksgiving meal, rather than limply ending with a stills montage.

eddy_mercury in his comments misses the point. The film maker is regretting the standardisation of taste that has occurred because of the way in which the value of the American market in wine has led to a steady and stealthy narrowing of choice when it comes to the style of wine. Nobody would deny that the standard of wine has improved. Nobody would deny the French have been too arrogant for too long. However it is to be regretted that the American public as a whole is so sheep like in following the taste of Robert Parker. He know what he likes and the great American public, which doesn't, is happy to say "Yeah and I like it too". Unfortunately what you will end up with is less choice. Look at what passes for cheese in America, and compare it with the wealth of choice that is available still in the Old World. Do you really want wines that will be like Kraft slices compared with Brie? Trust me, not all wines have to be big tasting reds barrelled in new oak, and giving endless, unchallenging, "easy-drinking". What next - Château Yquem Lite?

I wonder whether this film in the future will be the one regarded as marking the end of Sydney Pollack's career as a serious director. The premise of the story is pathetically incredible, in the true sense of the word - it's unbelievable. Nicole Kidman, an interpreter, alone in the UN, which is shut for the night, overhears a conversation as two men (why are they in the building with all the lights off?) discuss a planned assassination, which happens to be picked up by an open mike (why is it still on?) and transmitted to the one person who can understand the African dialect used - Nicole. Along comes Penn as a secret agent with a recent tragedy to be her interrogator, protector, and, ultimately, saviour. Unfortunately Mystic River was his best performance yet, and, like a dog with a new trick, Penn can't bear to miss the chance to show off his new found skills. The camera lingers longingly on his face as he twitches eyes, lips, nostrils, in a gurnfest the like of which hasn't been seen since the Keystone Cops. Humiliatingly, for the last scene of the film the vertically challenged Penn is perched on a fence in order that he can look Kidman in the eye. Throughout the rest of the film most conversations take place on stairs in an attempt to hide the disparity in their sizes. Pollock awards himself a small part in the film, to save money, he claims, but maybe it's an indication of how much his mind was off the ball in this, his weakest film to date. Just as lunatics should never be put in charge of the asylum, so actors should never be put in charge of a film. Despite the presence of large numbers of producers, and a wealth of experience, Pollock never really manages to reign Penn in. Kidman looks good, but veers alarmingly near the ridiculous with a bizarre accent which ebbs and flows in intensity throughout the film. Most importantly, there is no magic between the two headliners. The photography is excellent, the editing is self indulgent, and arguably the whole thing should have been cut by a reel or two, however the fashion for overblown and overlong films is becoming a real Hollywood disease at present. The fact that the film is using the obtaining of permission to film in the UN as a selling point, betrays, perhaps, the makers lack of confidence in the finished article. Films haven't been trumpeted on the basis of location since the 50's, but then stars were stars, and locations were places where most people hadn't been, now the cinema audience has seen literally everything, but the stars have shrunk in stature, so we have (ex)Mr Madonna working with (ex)Mrs Tom Cruise, working their way through mundane dialogue, in the execution of a terrible story. An evening spent watching this is NOT a night to remember.

As demonstrated by the tedious "The Gangs of New York", Scorcese seems to be a spent force. Overwhelmed by large set pieces, we are left indifferent to Hughes' struggles. Scenes are left to play indulgently long, and, as well as endless captions telling us how much time has gone by, and where the scenes are taking place, characters are endlessly coming on and introducing themselves, and their relationships: "Yes, Howard, I am Ava Gardner, and if you want to know if I slept with Arty Shaw, and whether I am interested in Frank Sinatra - the answer is Yes" is a paraphrase of one of the more clunking bits of dialogue. Cate Blanchett merely mimics Katherine Hepburn's speech patterns and shouts a lot, while Jude Law wears a moustache, and keeps his eyes wide open, in an attempt to impersonate Clark Gable.

Hughes crashing an aircraft is an excuse for Scorcese to indulge his taste for making sure that any damage to a human body is as explicit and unpleasant to look at as ever.

Otherwise much effort has gone into recreating lavish evocations of period, and, interestingly, the overall effect is as unengaging as "The Cotton Club" was for Coppola. In the end if you don't have human interest in a script then you have nothing. Aviator is an expensive lesson for Scorcese, for Miramax, and, ultimately, for the audience that this remains a universal truth.

This was director David Atkins first film and is a demonstration of the benefits of using a director with more experience.

It is generally acknowledged that casting can make or break a film. Here Steve Martin has fallen for the the classic temptation to `broaden his range' by playing a successful dentist, but his comic gifts are underused as he grapples with a script that is clumsily inept.

Laura Dern, who plays his hygienist girlfriend, is strangely styled both in appearance and performance to be, one imagines, a Barbara Stanwyck pastiche. Helena Bonham Carter is all at sea as a drug addict/seductress/thief for whom Steve Martin falls, and her brother Duane is a ludicrously over the top thug. As is that weren't enough, one has Elias Koteas hamming it up as Steve Martin's disreputable brother. Finally one has Kevin Bacon demonstrating how much he owes the directors of other films in which he has delivered fine performances; here he runs amuck, Everywhere one sees the tell tale signs of thespians out of control, and a director who is unaware of when to rein them in for the good of the picture.

Much of the staging, likewise, is inept, with clumsily staged camera moves which any camera operator worth his salt should have nixed, and which any editor worth his salt should have chopped apart and reassembled to make them work.

Presumably it was in the final edit that an attempt was made to pull the film together. For instance, the X ray device, amusing when used sparingly, is repeated until one is sick to death of it, a `pop video' moving purple strip marks scene transitions, and a voice over by Steve Martin is also intermittently overlaid. However, like all band aids, these devices merely draw attention to the weaknesses beneath.

Try as hard as one can, and with fond memories of Steve Martin at the height of his comic powers in such films as The Jerk, it is difficult to be entertained by a film whose unlikely story line totters uncertainly between weak comedy and nasty violence,

This film is distinguished both in art direction and cinemaphotography.

Unfortunately the script is poorly structured and repetitive and overall the film fails to engage the viewer. Performances vary with, surprisingly, Tommy Steele finding a fairly confident middle ground between Stanley Baker's melodramatic approach and Fiona Lewis's ludicrous and unconvincing stab at Cockney. At a whisker under two hours long the film would have benefited from some cutting - Jack Shephard surrendering once to Jack Wild because he has captured Edgworth Bess seems possible, for him to do it again suggests the writers had seriously run out of ideas.

The most convincing performance in this film is that of George Kennedy's wig. Other than Kennedy the film has almost nobody one can recognise in it, nor would one wish to. The exceptions are Joe Don Baker, wildly flinging himself about the screen in an attempt to convey angst, and Fernando Rey who looks as surprised as we are that he should find himself in such a tired old potboiler. Clumsy scripting induces a state of near catalepsy in the viewer as the film drears through 106 minutes, and feels a lot