Email Author Peter Rainer

1998 Stories by Peter Rainer

• Affairs of the Tart

  published October 8, 1998

  Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita still has the power to scare off people. Proof is the book's new movie adaptation, directed by Adrian Lyne and scripted... More >>

• Family Foibles

  published September 17, 1998

  Slums of Beverly Hills is the first feature by the young writer/director Tamara Jenkins, and it has its mild amusements. It's one of those movies... More >>

• Family-Style Friction

  published September 17, 1998

  One True Thing, directed by Carl Franklin, is trying to be the Terms of Endearment of the '90s. Scripted by Karen Croner from the 1995 Anna... More >>

• Dousing the Flames

  published September 10, 1998

  Who would have guessed that a movie called Firelight could give off so little glow? William Nicholson, the screenwriter of Shadowlands, making his... More >>

• Brutality a LaBute

  published August 20, 1998

  As the lights came up after a screening of the new Neil LaBute movie Your Friends and Neighbors, a colleague next to me growled disapprovingly,... More >>

• Snakes Alive

  published August 6, 1998

  Nicolas Cage has never seemed more dazzling than he does in the new Brian De Palma thriller Snake Eyes. Playing Rick Santoro, a corrupt Atlantic... More >>

• Non-Negotiable

  published July 30, 1998

  Do we really need to see the great Kevin Spacey fuming and fussing in one of those we-do-things-my-way-or-we-don't-do-them-at-all roles? In The... More >>

• Combat Reality

  published July 23, 1998

  The first shot in Steven Spielberg's remarkable World War II epic Saving Private Ryan is an American flag with the sun behind it. It's a delicate,... More >>

• Mark of the Zzzzs

  published July 16, 1998

  In The Mask of Zorro, Anthony Hopkins plays the eponymous masked hero as if he were doing Shakespeare. He's trying to turn a kitsch hero into a... More >>

• Career High

  published July 2, 1998

  High Art is a low-budget American independent movie about a junkie lesbian photographer, Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy), who spends most of her time... More >>

• All Climax

  published July 2, 1998

  Michael Bay is the director of Bad Boys and The Rock and the new asteroid-attack movie Armageddon -- which should be called The Very Big Rock. He... More >>

• Tube Message

  published June 4, 1998

  The Truman Show, starring Jim Carrey, is the zeitgeist movie of the hour. How could it not be? It's all about the omnipotence of television and... More >>

• Monster Mash

  published May 28, 1998

  The "Size Matters" marketing campaign for Godzilla is far more ingenious than the movie. It's also highly annoying -- and somewhat misleading.... More >>

• Out of Time

  published May 14, 1998

  It's the tail end of the 1996 California primary election, and incumbent Democratic Senator Jay Bulworth (Warren Beatty) is having a nervous... More >>

• Hit-and-Mis

  published April 30, 1998

  Victor Hugo's 1862 novel Les Miserables, which he began in 1845, runs in most editions to around 1,500 pages. The latest film version -- there... More >>

• Everyday Ravishments

  published April 30, 1998

  From its very first frame, Neil Jordan's The Butcher Boy whooshes us inside the rollicking, deranged world of 12-year-old Francie Brady (Eamonn... More >>

• Shtick Figure

  published April 30, 1998

  In Barbara Kopple's new documentary, Wild Man Blues, we follow Woody Allen around Europe on a whirlwind concert tour with his New Orleans jazz... More >>

• Promiscuous Prudes

  published April 23, 1998

  In writer/director James Toback's quicksilver sex comedy Two Girls and a Guy, Robert Downey, Jr., plays Blake Allen, a struggling New York actor... More >>

• Phony Folksy

  published March 26, 1998

  Probably every film director itches to make a western, so let's be thankful that, with The Newton Boys, Austin's Richard Linklater has scratched... More >>

• Clinton Without Contrasts

  published March 19, 1998

  If ever there was an op-ed movie -- a movie destined to be written about in an "elevated" realm beyond just the movie pages -- it's Primary... More >>

• Too Late

  published March 5, 1998

  A movie starring Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon, Gene Hackman, James Garner and Stockard Channing ought to be a whole lot better than Robert Benton's... More >>

• Twice Removed

  published February 19, 1998

  Palmetto is a film noir set in a torpid seaside Florida town. It's based on the James Hadley Chase novel Just Another Sucker, and when we first... More >>

• Porcelain Pop

  published January 29, 1998

  In the new Great Expectations, directed by Alfonso Cuaron and scripted by Mitch Glazer, the teeming world of Charles Dickens's 1861 novel is very... More >>

• Hello, Dalai

  published January 15, 1998

  Martin Scorsese's Kundun is a deeply ceremonial experience. It's like watching a serene pageant of colors, rituals, costumes. It's about the Dalai... More >>

• More Troubles

  published January 8, 1998

  Where would Irish filmmakers these days be without The Troubles? In just the past couple of years we've seen The Crying Game, In the Name of the... More >>