Author Archive

Any Given Sunday, The Hurricane, Man on the Moon

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on December 28, 1999. Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Stone’s films are nothing if not visceral, pulsing with raw-nerved energy and muscular cunning, but Any Given Sunday takes his penchant for jolting sensory immediacy to new levels of panoramic intensity. The five football games the movie depicts often recall the battle scenes in Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, except that the
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The Talented Mr.Ripley

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on December 21, 1999. Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

The salient virtues of Anthony Minghella’s film are those of a Vogue layout. The people are pretty and the clothes even more so; it is a world of creamy linens, tight waists, billowing skirts and soft leathers. One of the movie’s best touches is that Ripley’s standard-issue corduroy jacket, the kind you still see at
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Waco: American Holocaust

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on December 14, 1999. Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

But I have to say, now, that the single most disturbing movie I’ve ever seen is the 1997 documentary Waco: The Rules of Engagement, in which families are burned alive not by Russian bombs or Nazi crematoria but as a result of actions instigated by U.S. law enforcement officials. Waco documents a homegrown holocaust, one
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Beyond Beyond The Clouds Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni …

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on December 7, 1999. Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Media reality being as daunting as it is at the moment, let us transfer a few of its perplexities to a science fiction story. The premise, scary but marvelous: The planet of cinema has exploded. Left behind are rock-like chunks of significance (films, filmmakers, etc.: each like a Web site) and a fleet of rusty,
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Ride with Ride with The Devil directed …

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on November 30, 1999. Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Something has to blow, and it does. Quantrill has assembled the men for a deadly purpose. After he gives them their orders, words that smolder with a kind of implacable, Old Testament rage, they ride their horses to a ridge overlooking a town. When they begin to descend, it’s like one of those moments in
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Film in Film in The Mirror The …

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on November 16, 1999. Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Meanwhile, Iranian cinema has become semi-big among the ever-fewer American cinephiles who still devote serious attention to subtitled films, yet this, too, has entailed simplifications. The greatest reduces an extraordinarily complex artistic and cultural phenomenon to a rudimentary impression based on a handful of films of fairly recent vintage. That’s understandable, perhaps, and forgivable until
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The Insider

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on November 9, 1999. Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Heroes, Victims, Heavies, Patsies From some standpoints, it’s astonishing that Hollywood has spent nearly 100 years telling stories to a large public and managed to miss, largely or entirely, so many of the great issues and movements that have occupied headlines and transformed public life during the past century. But then, just when you’re about
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Liberal/Miserable

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on November 2, 1999. Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Directed by I.B. Mizrable The most emblematic bit of action in Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Rosetta occurs twice, and both times it’s not of great thematic moment, just curious–oddly curious. The Belgian film concerns a teenage girl who’s obsessed with getting a job, and who occasionally fishes in a river near the trailer park where
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The City(La Ciudad)

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on October 26, 1999. Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

The City directed by David Riker For most of these Spanish-speaking new arrivals, we (virtually everyone reading this paper) are the omnipresent Other. For us, they are–if we deign to notice them. You can’t help thinking of this invisible divide as you watch Riker’s fascinating film, which estranges us from New York even as it
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Talking With David Lynch About the Year’s Best Film

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on October 19, 1999. Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

The Year’s Best Film David Lynch’s The Straight Story struck me as the best movie of 1999 when I first saw it at the Cannes Film Festival in May, and I have no doubt I’ll think the same thing at year’s end. How can I be so certain, when the good-movie season has just begun?
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