The great improvisational comedy team of Mike Nichols and Elaine May reunited to (respectively) direct and write this update of the French comedy La Cage Aux Folles. Robin Williams stars as a gay Miami nightclub owner who is forced to play it straight and ask his drag-queen partner (Nathan Lane) to hide out when Williams's son invites his prospective--and highly conservative--in-laws and ...
Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe star in Mississippi Burning, a well-intentioned and largely successful civil-rights-era thriller. Using the real-life 1964 disappearance of three civil rights workers as its inspiration, the film tells the story of two FBI men (Hackman and Dafoe, entertainingly called "Hoover Boys" by the locals) who come in to try to solve the crime. Hackman is a former ...
1977's A Bridge Too Far by director Richard Attenborough features an all-star cast in an epic rendering of a daring but ultimately disastrous raid behind enemy lines in Holland during the Second World War. A lengthy and exhaustive look at the mechanics of warfare and the price and futility of war, the film is almost too large for its aims but manages to be both picaresque and affecting, ...
Winner of four Academy Awards, including best picture, director, supporting actor and best editing, Clint Eastwood's 1992 masterpiece stands as one of the greatest and most thematically compelling Westerns ever made. "The movie summarised everything I feel about the Western," said Eastwood at the time of the film's release. "The moral is the concern with gunplay." To illustrate that theme, ...
This first film adaptation of a John Grisham novel is a crackerjack popcorn movie that satisfies even though it radically changes the last half of the book. The novel's dynamic setup is intact: Mitch McDeere, a hot law graduate (a well-suited Tom Cruise), finds a dream job in a luxurious Memphis law firm. His superiors (Gene Hackman, Hal Holbrook) provide Mitch and his young wife, Abby (Jeanne ...
Winner of four Academy Awards, including best picture, director, supporting actor and best editing, Clint Eastwood's 1992 masterpiece stands as one of the greatest and most thematically compelling Westerns ever made. "The movie summarised everything I feel about the Western," said Eastwood at the time of the film's release. "The moral is the concern with gunplay." To illustrate that theme, ...
Wes Anderson's satirical yet tender tragicomedy The Royal Tenenbaums is a defiantly offbeat movie, but its sheer originality makes it a winner. As Philip Larkin famously said, "They fuck you up, your mum and dad". Well, it's Dad, the opulently named Royal Tenenbaum himself (Gene Hackman in twinkly mode), who gets all the blame here. The precocious achievements of the Tenenbaum offspring are ...
The opening scenes of The Replacements see American football team, the Washington Sentinels, in dire straits. The players have walked out in a protest over pay at a vital point in the season, forcing the Sentinels' owner to bring veteran coach Jimmy McGinty (Gene Hackman) out of retirement to put together a replacement team. He assembles a group of oddballs and misfits including failed ...