Close My Eyes
Close My Eyes 1991, R, 107 min. Directed by Stephen Poliakoff, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Clive Owen, Saskia Reeves, Alan Rickman. Hmmmm. It’s just the teensiest bit difficult to view incest sympathetically, yet that’s what British playwright/director Poliakoff asks us to do. Reeves and Owen play a brother and sister who were…
Europa Europa
In this award-winning foreign film, a Jewish boy during World War II adopts various non-Jewish identities in order to save his hide, but his uncircumcised penis becomes a dead giveaway.
Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary 1991, PG-13, 140 min. Directed by Claude Chabrol, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Francois Balmer, Christophe Malavoy, Jean Yanne. This ever-faithful adaptation of Gustave Flaubert’s classic French novel is often as compelling as its source, no mean feat considering the power of Flaubert’s tragic tale of Emma Bovary, a…
Bugsy
Bugsy 1991. Directed by Barry Levinson, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Warren Beatty, Annette Bening, Harvey Keitel, Ben Kingsley, Elliott Gould, Joe Mantegna. The tragedy of Levinson’s career is that he wants to make epics, but the source of his success is in strong characters and close-in work as we saw in Diner,…
JFK
Oliver Stone gives the “lone gunman” assassination theory a run for its money.
The Prince of Tides
The Prince of Tides 1991. Directed by Barbra Streisand, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Nick Nolte, Melinda Dillon, George Carlin, Blythe Danner. Streisand and her collaborators, including author Pat Conroy, did a good job of turning his unwieldy book into an interesting movie. In this version, Melinda Dillon has a small role as…
