Bovie Movie

This delightfully soft-centred rumination on the excesses of television has suffered in the wake of The Truman Show, but comparisons with the Jim Carrey blockbuster are misplaced. Ron Howard’s comedy drama is more concerned with feel-good laughs and formulaic romantic complications than hard-edged satire, and it doesn’t disappoint in delivering sheer enjoyment. Matthew McConaughey gives a winning performance as the small-town video-store assistant who agrees to be filmed 24 hours a day for a cable network. However, when his regular-guy persona makes him nationally famous, the novelty wears off. McConaughey delivers the script’s homespun messages with aplomb, while Ellen DeGeneres steals every scene as a ratings-hungry producer. Also rising to the occasion is Elizabeth Hurley, who makes sure her supporting role as the wannabe “It Girl” hitching her career wagon to Ed’s new-found fame pays maximum dividends. Hardly subtle yet highly entertaining, despite its deliberately unchallenging fuzziness. 

In this romantic drama, Kevin Costner stars as a strong, silent and sensitive boat builder living in North Carolina, who’s tracked down by newspaper researcher Robin Wright Penn after she finds a heart-rending love letter to his late wife in a bottle on the seashore. Her hard-nosed reporter’s edge soon softens as she decides to learn more about the man and his solitary life. Although the inevitable happens — with a twist! — the beauty of director Luis Mandoki’s intelligent tear-jerker (adapted by Gerald DiPego from Nicholas Sparks’s bestseller) is how all the emotions ring true. A richly rewarding tribute to the human spirit, this is irresistibly warm-hearted stuff, with an absolutely brilliant scene-stealing performance from Paul Newman as Costner’s grizzled father. 

Robert De Niro gives one of his best comedy performances to date in this feel-good Mafia tale from Groundhog Day director Harold Ramis. De Niro stars as a Manhattan Mob boss whose stressful lifestyle causes him to seek undercover therapy from psychiatrist Billy Crystal. De Niro’s deadpan responses to the Freudian dissections, together with soon-to-be-married Crystal’s increasing entanglement with the “family” business, bring on the laughs thick and fast. There’s a clever script packed with fresh repartee, digs at GoodFellas and hilarious moments of joyous farce, and Ramis’s skilled timing allows the two dynamic leads to show their full comic potential. 

This overplayed romance-meets-revenge picture is so weak it’s hard to believe it was scripted and directed by the writer of such greats as Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. A soapy melodrama in the style of Danielle Steel, it’s by-the-numbers film-making, more suited to a TV mini-series. Sporting ineffective scar make-up, Joseph Fiennes stars as an international financier, whose affair with married Gretchen Moll when he was a young cabana boy sparks a 16-year vendetta against her husband Ray Liotta. With his dodgy accent and clumsy dialogue, Fiennes is as unconvincing as the film, while Moll is merely window dressing. Fortunately Schrader returned to form with his next project, the biopic Auto Focus. 

This supernatural gothic whodunnit is another beautifully crafted offering from eccentric maestro Tim Burton. With a perfect cast milking every sinister nuance, Burton’s clever take on Washington Irving’s timeless tale of terror uses the classic look of Hammer’s golden horror era to stunning effect. Johnny Depp, sporting a clipped English accent, is brilliant as maverick policeman Ichabod Crane, sent to the small New England community of Sleepy Hollow to investigate three mysterious beheadings, which the locals are blaming on the ghost of the legendary Headless Horseman. Cruel shocks and subversive thrills combine with sly humour in a stunning movie that’s steeped in Burton’s Grimm fairy-tale sensibilities and unrestrained love of the fantasy genre. 

A comedic biopic focused on the life of fictional jazz guitarist Emmett Ray. Ray was an irresponsible, free-spending, arrogant, obnoxious, alcohol-abusing, miserable human being, who was also arguably the best guitarist in the world. We follow Ray’s life: bouts of getting drunk, his bizzare hobbies of shooting rats and watching passing trains, his dreams of fame and fortune, his strange obsession with the better-known guitarist Django Reinhardt, and of course, playing his beautiful music.

Robert Carlyle and Jonny Lee Miller star as the infamous highwaymen who terrorised high society in 18th-century London in this misfiring period action adventure, which marked the debut feature of Jake (son of Ridley) Scott. Music and design are both deliberately anachronistic in an attempt to make the larcenous odd couple (Carlyle’s vengeful, rough Plunkett, and Miller’s educated wastrel, Macleane) a hip, English Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for the 1990s. Liv Tyler, as Macleane’s aristocratic groupie, adds a touch of romance, and there are some spirited moments, but this is mostly a chaotic jumble of style over substance. 

A Sunday in the life of Derrick King, an Irish kid raised in South Central L.A. by a Black family. He talks Black, dresses Black, and thinks of himself as Black. It’s a day of disasters: his mom kicks him out of the house, his uncle fires him, the woman he loves dismisses him as childish, the LAPD (wearing Confederate-flag shoulder patches) impounds his car and tosses him in the drunk tank, a mean dude is after him for money, he’s imprisoned in a store basement by gay sadists, and he’s shot at. Along the way, however, he shows kindness to a near-sighted kid, and those random acts may prove to be his salvation.

British theatre director Sam Mendes made an astonishing film debut with this sublime black comedy about midlife crises, starring Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening as a bored couple in suburban America. The sexually frustrated Bening begins an affair with estate agent Peter Gallagher; Spacey, meanwhile, fantasises about Mena Suvari, a teenage friend of his daughter’s. Their disparate needs make for a comic tragedy of misunderstanding that combines acute observations with side-splitting scenarios. This truly outstanding film (on which Steven Spielberg acted as an uncredited producer) deservedly picked up a clutch of Oscars, including best picture, best director and best actor for Spacey. 

Director Anthony Minghella followed his award-winning The English Patient with this absorbing thriller, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith. Matt Damon plays Ripley, a young opportunist who seeks out Dickie Greenleaf (Oscar-nominated Jude Law), an American playboy living it up in Europe. Ripley becomes friends with Dickie, but gradually comes to covet the carefree lifestyle he shares with his glamorous girlfriend (Gwyneth Paltrow). Minghella’s classy direction and the superior cast make this never less than compelling.