[9] This delicate fantasy about regret and second chances casts a powerful spell that brings many grown men to tears before the credits roll. To that effect, Field of Dreams is a beautiful indictment of the unspoken, unrequited nature of father-son relationships — the main ingredient in any male weepy. It helps that Kevin Costner is the lead. He has an ‘everyman’ quality that allows …
[8] Mike Nichols (The Graduate) directs Kevin Wade’s tale of a stalwart secretary trying to climb the corporate ladder in New York. Working Girl is a highly enjoyable comedy-drama with a screwball slant. Melanie Griffith has never been better than she is here, and she’s surrounded by spectacular supporting players. Sigourney Weaver is terrific as the boss from hell and Harrison Ford is his usual, …
[10] Director Sydney Lumet sets the gritty streets of New York aside temporarily and gives us an emotionally stirring family drama about two parents who have to uproot their family every time the feds catch scent of their trail. If they ever get too comfortable, they run the risk of being locked away for an act of protest that accidentally ended in a fatality during …
[8] Spielberg explores World War II through the eyes of a young British boy (Christian Bale) separated from his parents in Shanghai and forced to live in a Japanese internment camp. For a director who often celebrates innocence (and sometimes wallows in it), it’s nice to see a darker examination of the subject. In Empire of the Sun, innocence isn’t just lost. It’s almost shattered.
[10] Harrison Ford gives one of his best performances as Allie Fox, an obsessed inventor who moves his family to a Central American jungle to escape what he perceives to be the end of American civilization. Peter Weir (Witness, Dead Poets Society) directs from a screenplay by Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull), based on the novel by Paul Theroux. We experience the story through …
[10] Rob Reiner (This Is Spinal Tap, The Princess Bride) adapts this dark coming-of-age tale from Stephen King, about a band of four boys who embark on a weekend journey to find the body of a missing teenager. Stand By Me is the best film of Reiner’s career, and the best film adaptation of King’s work. It’s a moving, hauntingly nostalgic piece, bolstered with healthy …
[10] Writer/director John Hughes had more box office hits than you can shake a stick at, and while many of them were fun and irreverent fare (like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or Weird Science), one sticks out above the crowd — his crowning achievement: The Breakfast Club. It’s a low-concept, small-scale production — practically a filmed stage play — about five disparate teenagers who suffer …
[9] There’s this thing called the “elasticity of human emotion”, where the harder down you throw people, the higher up they’ll rise. I haven’t seen many movies demonstrate this principle better than The Color Purple. Whoopi Goldberg plays Celie, who we see having two children by her own father before being married off to Mister (Danny Glover), who beats her and convinces her she is …
[10] Straight biographies rarely make great film, but by filtering the subject through another man’s envy, director Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) delivers one of the best bio-films I’ve ever seen. This isn’t a film about a composer and his music (how boring would that be?) — it’s a film about an insanely jealous contemporary named Salieri. Salieri, played brilliantly by F. …
[9] “As boys, they said they would die for each other. As men, they did.” Once Upon a Time in America is an epic, gorgeous, emotionally moving gangster flick from spaghetti western maestro Sergio Leone (The Good the Bad and the Ugly). Robert DeNiro stars as ‘Noodles’, a former Prohibition-era gangster returning to Lower-East Manhattan after thirty-five years in self-imposed exile over the deaths of …
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