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Peter Rainer

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Affairs of the Tart

Lolita's classy, but where's the comedy and character?

By Peter Rainer
Oct 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 by Stephen Schiff and starring Jeremy Irons as the passionate pedophile Humbert Humbert, a man entranced by nymphets. Completed more than two years ago, the movie...
Family Foibles

Slums tries to please but plays it too safe

By Peter Rainer
Sep 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 that gets bonus points for being "personal" -- it bops along from episode to episode as if the filmmaker were discovering her subject as she...
Family-Style Friction

Strife stirs relatives in the sentimental One True Thing

By Peter Rainer
Sep 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 Quindlen novel of the same name, One True Thing pushes the same high-gloss homilies about making peace with your family, and it caps everything...
Dousing the Flames

Cerebral Firelight can't ignite sensual sparks

By Peter Rainer
Sep 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 directorial debut, isn't attempting to be ironic here. He wants to make a love story where the ardor pours through the confines of upper-class decorum in mid-1800s...
Brutality a LaBute

Director dissects depraved and depersonalized urbanites

By Peter Rainer
Aug 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, "That was a nasty movie." For LaBute -- whose divisive debut film, In the Company of Men, is probably the worst date-movie ever made --...

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Peter Rainer

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