Email Author Joe Leydon

1996 Stories by Joe Leydon

• An Off Night

  published November 14, 1996

  After the rowdy cacophony of Baz Luhrmann's turbo-charged Romeo & Juliet, the prospect of a more traditional Shakespearean adaptation is more than... More >>

• Partners in Crime

  published November 14, 1996

  Palookaville is an engaging trifle about three unemployed buddies who are just desperate enough to consider larceny as a means of temporary... More >>

• Mel as Mogul

  published November 7, 1996

  Fresh from his epic adventures in the Oscar-winning Braveheart, Mel Gibson returns to the 20th century as a somewhat less heroic figure in Ransom.... More >>

• More Panting than Painting

  published November 7, 1996

  Whenever someone makes a film about a great artist, it is much easier, and a great deal more cinematic, to show him hopping into bed instead of... More >>

• Irish Republican Angst

  published October 31, 1996

  To his credit, Neil Jordan never attempts to disguise his sympathies in Michael Collins, his forlorn epic of blood and thunder. This sweeping... More >>

• Larding the Bard

  published October 31, 1996

  The movie is respectfully titled William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet, but don't expect anything like a traditional interpretation of the Bard. In... More >>

• Revenge Is... Adequate

  published October 24, 1996

  Writer Lorenzo Carcaterra claims that it's all true, that he only changed a few names -- and altered a few identifying details -- to protect the... More >>

• Brothers on the Bus

  published October 24, 1996

  Spike Lee bounces back from the aimless doodling of Girl 6 with Get on the Bus, a labor of love that has the vigor and urgency of something made... More >>

• Blasts from the Past

  published October 17, 1996

  Screenwriter Shane Black may have received the record sum of $4 million for writing The Long Kiss Goodnight, but the movie itself is a fairly... More >>

• Life, and How We Live it

  published October 10, 1996

  British filmmaker Mike Leigh often evidences genuine sympathy, if not boundless affection, for the characters who populate his bleakly comical,... More >>

• Girl on Film

  published October 3, 1996

  It isn't often that a filmmaker can take credit for single-handedly creating a brand-new genre. But that is just what writer/director Michael... More >>

• Pop Sensation

  published October 3, 1996

  Given the number of one-hit wonders on the golden-oldie radio stations, it's surprising that no one came up with the idea for a movie like That... More >>

• Intensive Care

  published September 26, 1996

  During the opening minutes of Extreme Measures, we find Hugh Grant cast as Dr. Guy Luthan, a British-born doctor hard at work in the emergency... More >>

• Delizioso

  published September 26, 1996

  If you are dieting, you might do well to avoid Big Night, a rhapsodic ode in the delicious tradition of Babette's Feast and Eat Drink Man Woman.... More >>

• Hard to Believe

  published September 12, 1996

  In synopsis, Bogus sounds like something too precious for words and too cute by half. A seven-year-old boy, devastated by the loss of his mother,... More >>

• The Power of Pop

  published September 12, 1996

  Illeana Douglas made an unforgettable impression in her first movie role, but it wasn't her fault. She played the unfortunate young woman in... More >>

• The Lawman & the Weasel

  published September 5, 1996

  Rude and crude with apologies to no one, Bulletproof is the sort of guilty pleasure that should be savored in a crowded theater on a Saturday... More >>

• Good-bye to Summer

  published September 5, 1996

  It was the summer when audiences cheered while the White House burned. When a singing hunchback was more popular than a frisky dolphin. When Kevin... More >>

• Darkness

  published August 29, 1996

  On the day I saw The Trigger Effect, David Koepp's disquieting thriller about survival and suspicion in the wake of a massive power blackout, I... More >>

• Field of Nightmares

  published August 22, 1996

  Tony Scott, the auteur of such blunt-instrument entertainments as Top Gun and True Romance, is not a director for whom subtlety is a way of life.... More >>

• Brotherly Love

  published August 22, 1996

  Talk about beating the sophomore jinx: Ed Burns, the multihyphenate fi filmmaker who burst onto the scene last year with The Brothers McMullen, is... More >>

• All That Jazz

  published August 15, 1996

  At once brutally cynical and romantically nostalgic, Robert Altman's Kansas City is a moody and bluesy pipe dream of a movie. Altman describes it... More >>

• The Games Men Play

  published August 15, 1996

  Now that Kevin Costner has gotten Wyatt Earp and Waterworld out of his system, and Ron Shelton has gotten Cobb out of his, it's good to see both... More >>

• Sweet Jane

  published August 15, 1996

  And the hits just keep on coming from Jane Austen, the early 19th-century novelist who's become a late 20th-century hot property. In the past two... More >>

• No Escape

  published August 8, 1996

  Snake Plissken is back, and he's still pissed. This singularly surly antihero first appeared in Escape from New York, John Carpenter's 1981... More >>