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Jun 7, 1999 — “Off there to the right—somewhere—is a large island,” said Whitney. “It’s rather a mystery—” “What island is it?” Rainsford asked. “The old charts called it Ship-Trap Island,” Whitney replied. “A suggestive name, isn’t it?” Sailors have a curious dread of...

May 31, 1999 — In Abbas Kiarostami’s universe, it might be said, there are no things, only relations between things. Likewise, in his cinema: no films, only relations between films—and within them. And between them and us.Three and one. The most celebrated of Iran’s...

Apr 26, 1999 — At some point in their lives, probably every sleepless person has switched on the TV in the wee hours of a weekend morning and chanced upon a fishing show. Invariably, a beefy, half-forgotten retired athlete shares a boat with some...

Mar 29, 1999 — Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits was the most critically well-received children’s film in nearly two decades—and also the most challenging and rewarding fantasy-adventure movie since Alexander Korda’s The Thief of Bagdad, released forty-one years earlier. At the dawn of the 1980s,...

Feb 1, 1999 — Rob Reiner’s directorial debut documents a recent moment in the band’s checkered history—one that only coincidentally represents a brief decline in the sine wave of their careers.

Feb 1, 1999 — After finishing Diabolique, heralded French director-screenwriter Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907–1977) confessed that all he had intended was to make a picture that would “amuse myself” and please a young girl who hid under the covers and asked her father to frighten...

Jan 11, 1999 — David Lean followed his prodigious adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations with this brilliant crystallization of Dickens’ Oliver Twist; or, the Parish Boy’s Progress. It deploys the cinema’s special powers of dash and immediacy to convey all the venturesomeness and...

Nov 23, 1998 — Harold Shand, the London crime boss at the center of The Long Good Friday, is more than an antihero. He’s the Antichrist, uniting bourgeoisie and barbarians in a simultaneous Pax and Pox Brittanica. With the “legitimate” help of cops and...

Oct 19, 1998 — Jean-Luc Godard’s stripped-down science-fiction drama depicts a computer-controlled society at war with artists, thinkers, and lovers.

Oct 18, 1998 — 1986 was not a good time to make a film which attempted to capture the Punk spirit. Deep into second-term Reagan/Thatcher, American and British pop culture were infected with cynicism, hopelessness, immobility. So when Alex Cox came over with his...