Alan Stone on Film

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.