Roger Ebert's Four-Star Reviews 1967–2007

By Roger Ebert

Pick your next movie to watch with this collection of four decades of 4-star reviews from the Pulitzer Prize–winning film critic.

Spanning the length of Roger Ebert’s career as the leading American movie critic, this book contains all of his four-star reviews written during that time from About Last Night . . . to You Can Count on Me. A great guide for movie watching.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9780740792175

Book preview

Four-Star Reviews 1967–2007

A

About Last Night …

R, 116 m., 1986

Rob Lowe (Danny), Demi Moore (Debbie), James Belushi (Bernie), Elizabeth Perkins (Joan), George DiCenzo (Mr. Favio), Michael Alldredge (Mother Malone), Robin Thomas (Steve), Joe Greco (Gus). Directed by Edward Zwick and produced by Jason Brett and Stuart Oken. Screenplay by Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue, based on the play Sexual Perversity in Chicago by David Mamet.

If one of the pleasures of moviegoing is seeing strange new things on the screen, another pleasure, and probably a deeper one, is experiencing moments of recognition–-times when we can say, yes, that’s exactly right, that’s exactly the way it would have happened. About Last Night… is a movie filled with moments like that. It has an eye and an ear for the way we live now, and it has a heart, too, and a sense of humor.

It is a love story. A young man and a young woman meet, and fall in love, and over the course of a year they try to work out what that means to them. It sounds like a simple story, and yet About Last Night… is one of the rarest of recent American movies, because it deals fearlessly with real people, instead of with special effects.

If there’s anyone more afraid of a serious relationship than your average customer in a singles bar, it’s a Hollywood producer. American movies will cheerfully spend millions of dollars on explosions and chases to avoid those moments when people are talking seriously and honestly to one another. After all, writing good dialogue takes some intelligence.

And intelligence is what sparkles all through About Last Night …—intelligence and a good, bawdy comic sensibility. The movie stars Rob Lowe as a salesman for a Chicago grocery wholesaler, and Demi Moore as an art director for a Michigan Avenue advertising agency. They meet at a softball game in Grant Park. Their romance blossoms in the singles bars of Rush Street, with a kindly bartender as father figure. At first they are attracted mostly by biological reasons (they belong to a generation that believes it’s kind of embarrassing to sleep with someone for the first time after you know them too well). Then they get to like each other. Then it is maybe even love, although everyone tap-dances around that word. Commitment, in their world, is the moment when Lowe offers Moore the use of a drawer in his apartment. Her response to that offer is one of the movie’s high points.

Meanwhile, there is counterpoint, too. Lowe’s best friend is his partner at work, played by James Belushi. Moore’s best friend is Elizabeth Perkins, her roommate and fellow warrior on the singles scene. While Lowe and Moore start getting really serious about each other, Belushi and Perkins grow possessive—and also develop a spontaneous dislike for one another.

The story is kind of predictable in About Last Night…, if you have ever been young and kept your eyes open. There are only a limited number of basic romantic scenarios for young people in the city, and this movie sees through all of them. What’s important is the way the characters look and sound, the way they talk, the way they reveal themselves, the way they grow by taking chances. Time after time, there are shocks of recognition, as the movie shows how well it understands what’s going on.

Lowe and Moore, members of Hollywood’s Brat Pack, are survivors of 1985’s awful movie about yuppie singles, St. Elmo’s Fire. This is the movie St. Elmo’s Fire should have been. The 1985 movie made them look stupid and shallow. About Last Night… gives them the best acting opportunities either one has ever had, and they make the most of them. Moore is especially impressive. There isn’t a romantic note she isn’t required to play in this movie, and she plays them all flawlessly.

Belushi and Perkins are good, too, making us realize how often the movies pretend that lovers live in a vacuum. When a big new relationship comes into your life, it requires an adjustment of all the other relationships, and a certain amount of discomfort and pain. Belushi and Perkins provide those levels for the story, and a lot of its loudest laughs, too.

The movie is based on Sexual Perversity in Chicago, a play by David Mamet. The screenplay by Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue smooths out Mamet’s more episodic structure, and adds three-dimensional realism. It’s a wonderful writing job, and Edward Zwick, directing a feature for the first time, shows a sure touch. His narrative spans an entire year, and the interest never lags.

Why is it that love stories are so rare from Hollywood these days? Have we lost faith in romance? Is love possible only with robots and cute little furry things from the special-effects department? Have people stopped talking? About Last Night … is a warmhearted and intelligent love story, and one of 1986’s best movies.

The Accidental Tourist

PG, 121 m., 1988

William Hurt (Macon Leary), Kathleen Turner (Sarah, His Wife), Geena Davis (Muriel Pritchett), Amy Wright (Rose Leary), David Ogden Stiers (Porter Leary), Ed Begley, Jr. (Charles Leary), Bill Pullman (Julian), Robert Gorman (Alexander), Bradley Mott (Mr. Loomis). Directed by Lawrence Kasdan and produced by Kasdan, Charles Okun, and Michael Grillo. Screenplay by Frank Galati and Kasdan, based on the book by Anne Tyler.

Yes, that is my son, the man says, identifying the body in the intensive care unit. Grief threatens to break his face into pieces, and then something closes shut inside of him. He has always had a very controlled nature, fearful of emotion and revelation, but now a true ice age begins, and after a year, his wife tells him she wants a divorce. It is because he can not seem to feel anything.

The Accidental Tourist begins on that note of emotional sterility, and the whole movie is a journey toward a smile at the end. The man’s name is Macon Leary (William Hurt), and he writes travel books for people who detest traveling. He advises his readers on how to avoid human contact, where to find American food abroad, and how to convince themselves they haven’t left home. His own life is the same sort of journey, and maybe it began in childhood; his sister and two brothers still live together in the house where they were born, and any life outside of their routine would be unthinkable.

Macon’s wife (Kathleen Turner) moves out, leaving him with the dog, Edward, who does like to travel, and is deeply disturbed by the curious life his masters have provided for him. He barks at ghosts and snaps at strangers. It is time for Macon to make another one of his overseas research trips, so he takes the dog to be boarded at a kennel, and that’s where he meets Muriel Pritchett (Geena Davis). Muriel has Macon’s number from the moment he walks in through the door. She can see he’s a basket case, but she thinks she can help. She also thinks her young son needs a father.

Macon isn’t so sure. He doesn’t use the number she gives him. But later, when the dog trips him and he breaks his leg, he takes Edward back to the kennel, and this time Macon submits to a little obedience training of his own. He agrees to acknowledge that Muriel exists, and before long they are sort of living together (lust still exists in his body, but it lurks so far from the center of his feelings that sex hardly seems to cheer him up).

The peculiarity about these central passages in the film is that they are quite cheerful and sometimes even very funny, even though Macon himself is mired in a deep depression. Geena Davis, as Muriel, brings an unforced wackiness to her role in scenes like the one where she belts out a song while she’s doing the dishes. But she is not as simple as she sometimes seems, and when Macon gets carried away with a little sentimental generalizing about the future, she warns him, Don’t make promises to my son that you are not prepared to keep.

There is also great good humor in the characters in Macon’s family: brothers Porter (David Ogden Stiers) and Charles (Ed Begley, Jr.) and sister Rose (Amy Wright), a matriarch who feeds the family, presides over their incomprehensible card games, and supervises such traditional activities as alphabetizing the groceries on the kitchen shelves. One evening Macon takes his publisher, Julian (Bill Pullman), home to dinner, and Julian is struck with a thunderbolt of love for Rose. He eventually marries her, but a few weeks later Julian tells Macon that Rose has moved back home with the boys; she was concerned that they had abandoned regular meals and were eating only gorp.

This emergency triggers the movie’s emotional turning point, which is subtle but unmistakable. Nobody knows Rose as well as Macon does, and so he gives Julian some very particular advice: Call her up and tell her your business is going to pieces. Ask if she could just come in and get things organized. Get things under control. Put it that way. Use those words. ‘Get things under control,’ tell her.

In context, this speech is hilarious. It is also the first time in the film that Macon has been able to extend himself to help anybody—and it starts him on the road to emotional growth. Clinging to the sterility and loneliness that has been his protection, he doesn’t realize at first that he has turned the corner. He still doubts that he needs Muriel, and when she buys herself a ticket and follows him to Paris, he refuses to have anything to do with her. When his wife also turns up in Paris, there is a moment when he thinks they may be able to patch things together again, and then finally Macon arrives at the sort of moment he has been avoiding all of his life: He has to make a choice. But by then the choice is obvious; he has already made it by peeking so briefly out of his shell.

The screenplay for The Accidental Tourist, by Lawrence Kasdan and Frank Galati, is able to reproduce a lot of the tone and dialogue of the Anne Tyler novel without ever simply being a movie version of a book. The textures are too specific and the humor is too quirky and well-timed to be borrowed from anywhere; the filmmakers have reinvented the same story in their own terms. The movie is a reunion for Kasdan, Hurt, and Turner, who all three put their careers on the map with Body Heat (1981). Kasdan used Hurt again in The Big Chill (1983), and understands how to employ Hurt’s gift for somehow being likable at the same time he seems to be withdrawn.

What Hurt achieves here seems almost impossible: He is depressed, low-key, and intensely private through most of the movie, and yet somehow he wins our sympathy. What Kasdan achieves is just as tricky; I’ve never seen a movie so sad in which there was so much genuine laughter. The Accidental Tourist was one of the best films of 1988.

Across the Universe

PG-13, 133 m., 2007

Jim Sturgess (Jude), Evan Rachel Wood (Lucy), Joe Anderson (Max), Dana Fuchs (Sadie), Cynthia Loebe (Diner Waitress), Martin Luther (JoJo), T. V. Carpio (Prudence), Heather Janneck (Bowling Alley Dancer), Bono (Dr. Robert), Eddie Izzard (Mr. Kite), James Urbaniak (Bill), Linda Emond (Barbara Carrigan). Directed by Julie Taymor. Produced by Matthew Gross, Jennifer Todd, and Suzanne Todd. Written by Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais, and Taymor.

Here is a bold, beautiful, visually enchanting musical where we walk into the theater humming the songs. Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe is an audacious marriage of cutting-edge visual techniques, heartwarming performances, 1960s history, and the Beatles song-book. Sounds like a concept that might be behind its time, but I believe in yesterday.

This isn’t one of those druggy 1960s movies, although it has what the MPAA shyly calls some drug content. It’s not grungy, although it has Joe Cocker in it. It’s not political, which means it’s political to its core. Most miraculous of all, it’s not dated; the stories could be happening now, and in fact they are.

For a film that is almost wall-to-wall with music, it has a full-bodied plot. The characters, mostly named after Beatles songs, include Lucy (the angelic Evan Rachel Wood), who moves from middle America to New York; Jude (Jim Sturgess), a Liverpool ship welder who works his way to New York on a ship; and Lucy’s brother Max (Joe Anderson), a college student who has dropped out (I guess). They now all share a pad in Greenwich Village with their musician friends the Hendrixian JoJo (Martin Luther), the Joplinesque Sadie (Dana Fuchs), and the lovelorn Prudence (T. V. Carpio), who has a thing for Max although the curious cutting of one scene in particular suggests she might have lesbian feelings as well.

Jude and Lucy fall in love, and they all go through a hippie period on Dr. Robert’s Magic Bus, where the doctor (Bono) and his bus bear a striking resemblance to Ken Kesey’s magical mystery tour. They also get guidance from Mr. Kite (Eddie Izzard), having been some days in preparation. But then things turn serious as Max goes off to Vietnam and the story gets swept up in the antiwar movement.

Yet when I say story, don’t start thinking about a lot of dialogue and plotting. Almost everything happens as an illustration to a Beatles song. The arrangements are sometimes familiar, sometimes not, and the voices are all new; the actors either sing or synch, and often they find a tone in a song that we never knew was there before. When Prudence sings I Wanna Hold Your Hand, for example, I realized how wrong I was to ever think that was a happy song. It’s not happy if it’s a hand you are never, ever, going to hold.

Julie Taymor, famous early as the director of The Lion King on Broadway, is a wildly inventive choreographer, such as in a basic training scene where all the drill sergeants look like G. I. Joe; a sequence where inductees in jockey shorts carry the Statue of Liberty through a Vietnam field; and cross-cutting between dancing to the Beatles in an American high school prom and a Liverpool dive bar. There are underwater sequences that approach ballet, a stage performance that turns into musical warfare, strawberries that bleed, rooftop concerts, and a montage combining crashing waves with the Detroit riots.

But all I’m doing here is list making. The experience of the movie is joyous. I don’t even want to know about anybody who complains they aren’t hearing the real Beatles. Fred Astaire wasn’t Cole Porter, either. These songs are now more than forty years old, some of them, and are timeless, and hearing these fresh young talents singing them (yes, and Bono, Izzard, and Cocker, too) only underlines their astonishing quality.

You weren’t alive in the 1960s? Or the ’70s, or ’80s? You’re like the guy on the message board who thought the band was named the Beetles, and didn’t even get it when people made Volkswagen jokes because he hadn’t heard of VW Beetles either? All is forgiven. Jay Leno has a Jaywalking spot for you. Just about anybody else is likely to enjoy Across the Universe.

I’m sure there were executives who thought it was suicidal to set a Beatles musical in the Vietnam era. But this is a movie that fires its songs like flowers at the way we live now. It’s the kind of movie you watch again and again, like listening to a favorite album. It was scheduled for the Toronto Film Festival, so was previewed (as several Toronto films were) for critics in major cities. I was drowning in movies and deadlines, and this was the only one I went to see twice. Now do your homework, and rent the DVD of A Hard Day’s Night if you’ve never seen it. The thought that there are readers who would get this far in this review and never have seen that film is unbearably sad. Cheer me up. Don’t let me down (repeat three times).

Adaptation

R, 114 m., 2002

Nicolas Cage (Charlie/Donald Kaufman), Meryl Streep (Susan Orlean), Chris Cooper (John Laroche), Tilda Swinton (Valerie), Brian Cox (Robert McKee), Cara Seymour (Amelia), Judy Greer (Alice), Maggie Gyllenhaal (Caroline), John Cusack (Himself), Catherine Keener (Herself). Directed by Spike Jonze and produced by Jonathan Demme, Vincent Landay, and Edward Saxon. Screenplay by Charlie Kaufman and Donald Kaufman, based on the book The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean.

What a bewilderingly brilliant and entertaining movie this is—a confounding story about orchid thieves and screenwriters, elegant New Yorkers and scruffy swamp rats, truth and fiction. Adaptation is a movie that leaves you breathless with curiosity, as it teases itself with the directions it might take. To watch the film is to be actively involved in the challenge of its creation.

It begins with a book named The Orchid Thief, based on a New Yorker article by Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep). She writes about a Florida orchid fancier named John Laroche (Chris Cooper), who is the latest in a long history of men so obsessed by orchids that they would steal and kill for them. Laroche is a con man and believes he has found a foolproof way to poach orchids from the protected Florida Everglades: Since they were ancestral Indian lands, he will hire Indians, who can pick the orchids with impunity.

Now that story might make a movie, but it’s not the story of Adaptation. As the film opens, a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) has been hired to adapt the book, and is stuck. There is so much about orchids in the book, and no obvious dramatic storyline. Having penetrated halfway into the book myself, I understood his problem: It’s a great story, but is it a movie?

Charlie is distraught. His producer, Valerie (Tilda Swinton), is on his case. Where is the first draft? He hardly has a first page. He relates his agony in voice-over, and anyone who has ever tried to write will understand his system of rewards and punishments: Should he wait until he has written a page to eat the muffin, or …

Charlie has a brother named Donald (also played by Cage). Donald lacks Charlie’s ethics, his taste, his intelligence. He cheerfully admits that all he wants to do is write a potboiler and get rich. He attends the screenwriting seminars of Robert McKee (Brian Cox), who breaks down movie classics, sucks the marrow from their bones, and urges students to copy the formula. At a moment when Charlie is suicidal with frustration, Donald triumphantly announces he has sold a screenplay for a million dollars.

What is Charlie to do? To complicate matters, he has developed a fixation, even a crush, on Susan Orlean. He journeys to New York, shadows her, is too shy to meet her. She in turn goes to Florida to interview Laroche, who smells and smokes and has missing front teeth, but whose passion makes him … interesting.

And now my plot description will end, as I assure you I have not even hinted at the diabolical developments still to come. Adaptation is some kind of a filmmaking miracle, a film that is at one and the same time (a) the story of a movie being made, (b) the story of orchid thievery and criminal conspiracies, and (c) a deceptive combination of fiction and real life. The movie has been directed by Spike Jonze, who with Charlie Kaufman as writer made Being John Malkovich the best film of 1999. If you saw that film, you will (a) know what to expect this time, and (b) be wrong in countless ways.

There are real people in this film who are really real, like Malkovich, Jonze, John Cusack, and Catherine Keener, playing themselves. People who are real but are played by actors, like Susan Orlean, Robert McKee, John Laroche, and Charlie Kaufman. People who are apparently not real, like Donald Kaufman, despite the fact that he shares the screenplay credit. There are times when we are watching more or less exactly what must (or could) have happened, and then a time when the film seems to jump the rails and head straight for the swamps of McKee’s theories.

During all of its dazzling twists and turns, the movie remains consistently fascinating not just because of the direction and writing, but because of the lighthearted darkness of the performances. Chris Cooper plays a con man of extraordinary intelligence, who is attractive to a sophisticated New Yorker because he is so intensely himself in a world where few people are anybody. Nicolas Cage, as the twins, gets so deeply inside their opposite characters that we can always tell them apart even though he uses no tricks of makeup or hair. His narration creates the desperate agony of a man so smart he understands his problems intimately, yet so neurotic he is captive to them.

Now as for Meryl Streep, well, it helps to know (since she plays in so many serious films) that in her private life she is one of the merriest of women, because here she is able to begin as a studious New Yorker author and end as, more or less, Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen.

I sat up during this movie. I leaned forward. I was completely engaged. It toyed with me, tricked me, played straight with me, then tricked me about that. Its characters are colorful because they care so intensely; they are more interested in their obsessions than they are in the movie, if you see what I mean. And all the time, uncoiling beneath the surface of the film, is the audacious surprise of the last twenty minutes, in which—well, to say the movie’s ending works on more than one level is not to imply it works on only two.

Affliction

R, 114 m., 1999

Nick Nolte (Wade Whitehouse), Sissy Spacek (Margie Fogg), James Coburn (Glen Whitehouse), Willem Dafoe (Rolfe Whitehouse), Mary Beth Hurt (Lillian), Jim True (Jack Hewitt), Marian Seldes (Alma Pittman), Holmes Osborne (Gordon LaRiviere). Directed by Paul Schrader and produced by Linda Reisman. Screenplay by Schrader, based on the book by Russell Banks.

Nick Nolte is a big, shambling, confident male presence in the movies, and it is startling to see his cocksure presence change into fear in Paul Schrader’s Affliction. Nolte plays Wade Whitehouse, the sheriff of a small New Hampshire town, whose uniform, gun, and stature do not make up for a deep feeling of worthlessness. He drinks, he smokes pot on the job, he walks with a sad weariness, he is hated by his ex-wife, and his young daughter looks at him as if he’s crazy.

When we meet Glen, his father, we understand the source of his defeat. The older man (James Coburn) is a cauldron of alcoholic venom, a man whose consolation in life has been to dominate and terrorize his family. There are scenes where both men are on the screen together, and you can sense the sheriff shrinking, as if afraid of a sudden blow. The women in their lives have been an audience for cruelty; of the older man’s wife, it is said, Women like this, it’s like they lived their lives with the sound turned off. And then they’re gone.

Affliction is based on a novel by Russell Banks, whose work also inspired The Sweet Hereafter. Both films are set in bleak winter landscapes, and both involve a deep resentment of parental abuse—this one more obviously, since Sheriff Whitehouse’s entire unhappy life has been, and still is, controlled by fear of his father. We’re reminded of other films Schrader wrote (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Mosquito Coast) or directed (Mishima, Hardcore), in which men’s violence is churned up by feelings of inadequacy. (He also wrote The Last Temptation of Christ, in which at least one line applies: Father, why hast thou forsaken me?)

Wade Whitehouse is a bad husband, a bad father, and a bad sheriff. He retains enough qualities to inspire the loyalty, or maybe the sympathy, of a girlfriend named Margie (Sissy Spacek), but his ex-wife (Mary Beth Hurt) looks at him with deep contempt, and his brother Rolfe (Willem Dafoe), the film’s narrator, has been wise to clear out of the town and its poisons.

Early in the film, Wade decides to show a little enterprise on the job. A friend of his has gone out as a hunting guide for a rich man and returned with the man’s expensive gun, some bloodstains, and a story of an accident. Wade doesn’t believe it was an accident, and like a sleepwalker talking himself back to wakefulness, he begins an investigation that stirs up the stagnant town—and even rouses him into a state where he can be reached, for the first time in years, by fresh thoughts about how his life has gone wrong.

Because there are elements of a crime mystery in Affliction, it would be unwise to reveal too much about this side of the plot. It is interrupted, in any event, by another death: Wade and Margie go to the old man’s house to find that Wade’s mother, Glen’s wife, lies dead upstairs and Glen is unable to acknowledge the situation. It is even possible that the sick woman crawled upstairs and was forgotten by a man whose inner eye has long been focused only on his own self-diagnosis: not drunk enough, drunk just right, or too drunk?

Rolfe returns to town for the funeral and to supply missing elements from the story of their childhood, and the film ends in an explosion that seems prepared even in the first frame. Its meaning is very clear: Cruelty to a child is not over in a moment or a day, but is like those medical capsules embedded in the flesh, which release their contents for years.

Nolte and Coburn are magnificent in this film, which is like an expiation for abusive men. It is revealing to watch them in their scenes together—to see how they’re able to use physical presence to sketch the history of a relationship. Schrader says he cast Coburn because he needed an actor who was big enough, and had a great iconic weight, to convincingly dominate Nolte. He found one. Coburn has spent a career largely in shallow entertainments, and here he rises to the occasion with a performance of power.

There is a story about that. I met with Coburn before the picture began, Schrader told me, and told him how carefully Nolte prepares for a role. I told Coburn that if he walked through the movie, Nolte might let him get away with it for a day, but on the second day all hell would break loose. Coburn said, ‘Oh, you mean you want me to really act? I can do that. I haven’t often been asked to, but I can.’ He can.

After Hours

R, 96 m., 1985

Griffin Dunne (Paul Hackett), Rosanna Arquette (Marcy), Linda Fiorentino (Kiki),Verna Bloom (June), Thomas Chong (Pepe),Teri Garr (Julie), John Heard (Bartender), Catherine O’Hara (Gail). Directed by Martin Scorsese and produced by Amy Robinson, Griffin Dunne, and Robert F. Colesberry. Screenplay by Joseph Minion.

Martin Scorsese’s After Hours is a comedy, according to the strict definition of that word: It ends happily, and there are indications along the way that we’re not supposed to take it seriously. It is, however, the tensest comedy I can remember, building its nightmare situation step by insidious step until our laughter is hollow, or defensive. This is the work of a master filmmaker who controls his effects so skillfully that I was drained by this film—so emotionally depleted that there was a moment, two-thirds of the way through, when I wondered if maybe I should pause and gather my thoughts and come back later for the rest of the comedy.

The movie tells the story of a night in the life of Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), a mid-town Manhattan word processing specialist who hates his job and his lonely private life. One night in a restaurant he strikes up a conversation with a winsome young woman (Rosanna Arquette). They seem to share some of the same interests. He gets her telephone number. He calls her, she suggests he come downtown to her apartment in Soho, and that is the beginning of his Kafkaesque adventure.

The streets of Soho are dark and deserted. Clouds of steam escape from the pavement, as they did in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, suggesting that Hades lurks just below the field of vision. The young woman is staying for a few days in the apartment of a friend (Linda Fiorentino), who makes bizarre sculptures, has kinky sexual tastes, and talks in a strange, veiled way about being burned. In Arquette’s bedroom, Dunne makes the usual small talk of a first date, and she gushes that she’s sure they’ll have a great time, but then everything begins to fall apart.

At first, we think perhaps Dunne is the victim of random bad luck, as he is confronted with nightmares both tragic and trivial: Ominous strangers, escalating subway fares, a shocking suicide, sadomasochistic sexual practices, a punk nightclub where he almost has his head shaved, a street mob that thinks he is a thief. Only later, much later, on this seemingly endless night, do we find how everything is connected—and even then, it doesn’t make any logical sense. For Paul Hackett, as for the Job of the Old Testament, the plague of bad luck seems generated by some unexplained divine wrath.

And yet Scorsese does not simply make a horror movie, or some kind of allegory of doom. Each of his characters is drawn sharply, given quirky dialogue, allowed to be offbeat and funny. Teri Garr has a scene as a waitress who has tried to make sense of New York for so long that it has driven her around the bend. Fiorentino has a dry, sardonic angle on things. Arquette speaks wonderingly of a lover who was so obsessed by The Wizard of Oz that he always called her Dorothy in bed. John Heard is a bartender who has seen everything walk in through the doors of his all-night saloon and has lost the capacity for astonishment.

After Hours is another chapter in Scorsese’s continuing examination of Manhattan as a state of mind; if he hadn’t already used the title New York, New York, he could have used it this time. The movie earns its place on the list with his great films Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull. For New Yorkers, parts of the film will no doubt play as a documentary. In what other city is everyday life such an unremitting challenge?

After Hours is a brilliant film, one of the year’s best. It is also a most curious film. It comes after Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, a film I thought was fascinating but unsuccessful, and continues Scorsese’s attempt to combine comedy and satire with unrelenting pressure and a sense of all-pervading paranoia. This time he succeeds. The result is a film that is so original, so particular, that we are uncertain from moment to moment exactly how to respond to it. The style of the film creates, in us, the same feeling that the events in the film create in the hero. Interesting.

After Life

NO MPAA RATING, 118 m., 1999

Arata (Takashi Mochizuki), Taketoshi Naito (Ichiro Watanabe), Erika Oda (Shiori Satonaka), Susumu Terajima (Satoru Kawashima),Takashi Naito (Takuro Sugie), Hisako Hara (Kiyo Nishimura). Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda and produced by Sato Shiho and Akieda Masayuki. Screenplay by Kore-eda.

The people materialize from out of clear white light as a bell tolls. Where are they? An ordinary building is surrounded by greenery and an indistinct space. They are greeted by staff members who explain, courteously, that they have died and are now at a way station before the next stage of their experience.

They will be here a week. Their assignment is to choose one memory, one only, from their lifetimes: one memory they want to save for eternity. Then a film will be made to reenact that memory, and they will move along, taking only that memory with them, forgetting everything else. They will spend eternity within their happiest memory.

That is the premise of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life, a film that reaches out gently to the audience and challenges us: What is the single moment in our own lives we treasure the most? One of the new arrivals says that he has only bad memories. The staff members urge him to think more deeply. Surely spending eternity within a bad memory would be—well, literally, hell. And spending forever within our best memory would be, I suppose, as close as we should dare to come to heaven.

The film is completely matter-of-fact. No special effects, no celestial choirs, no angelic flimflam. The staff is hardworking; they have a lot of memories to process in a week, and a lot of production work to do on the individual films. There are pragmatic details to be worked out: Scripts have to be written, sets constructed, special effects improvised. This isn’t all metaphysical work; a member of an earlier group, we learn, chose Disney World, singling out the Splash Mountain ride.

Kore-eda, with this film and the 1997 masterpiece Maborosi, has earned the right to be considered with Kurosawa, Bergman, and other great humanists of the cinema. His films embrace the mystery of life, and encourage us to think about why we are here and what makes us truly happy. At a time when so many movies feed on irony and cynicism, here is a man who hopes we will feel better and wiser when we leave his film.

The method of the film contributes to the impact. Some of these people, and some of their memories, are real (we are not told which). Kore-eda filmed hundreds of interviews with ordinary people in Japan. The faces on the screen are so alive, the characters seem to be recalling events they really lived through in a world of simplicity and wonder. Although there are a lot of characters in the movie, we have no trouble telling them apart because each is unique and irreplaceable.

The staff members offer a mystery of their own. Who are they, and why were they chosen to work here at the way station instead of moving on to the next stage like everybody else? The solution to that question is contained in revelations I will not discuss, because they emerge so naturally from the film.

One of the most emotional moments in After Life is when a young staff member discovers a connection between himself and an elderly new arrival. The new arrival is able to tell him something that changes his entire perception of his life. This revelation, of a young love long ago, has the same kind of deep, bittersweet resonance as the ending of The Dead, the James Joyce short story (and John Huston film) about a man who feels a sudden burst of identification with his wife’s first lover, a young man now long dead.

After Life considers the kind of delicate material that could be destroyed by schmaltz. It’s the kind of film that Hollywood likes to remake with vulgar, paint-by-the-numbers sentimentality. It is like a transcendent version of Ghost, evoking the same emotions, but deserving them. Knowing that his premise is supernatural and fantastical, Kore-eda makes everything else in the film quietly pragmatic. The staff labors against deadlines. The arrivals set to work on their memories. There will be a screening of the films on Saturday—and then Saturday, and everything else, will cease to exist. Except for the memories.

Which memory would I choose? I sit looking out the window as images play through my mind. There are so many moments to choose from. Just thinking about them makes me feel fortunate. I remember a line from Ingmar Bergman’s film Cries and Whispers. After the older sister dies painfully of cancer, her diary is discovered. In it she remembers a day during her illness when she was feeling better. Her two sisters and her nurse join her in the garden, in the sunlight, and for a moment pain is forgotten and they are simply happy to be together. This woman who we have seen die a terrible death has written: I feel a great gratitude to my life, which gives me so much.

After the Rehearsal

R, 72 m., 1984

Erland Josephson (Henrik Vogler), Ingrid Thulin (Rakel), Lena Olin (Anna Egerman), Nadja Palmstjerna-Weiss (Anna at Twelve). Directed by Ingmar Bergman and produced by Jorn Donner. Screenplay by Bergman.

Ingmar Bergman’s After the Rehearsal seems to be as simple and direct as a tape recording of actual conversations, and yet look at the thickets of interpretation it has inspired in its critics. After seeing it, I thought I understood the film entirely. Now I am not so sure. Like so many of Bergman’s films, and especially the spare chamber films it joins (Winter Light, Persona), it consists of unadorned surfaces concealing fathomless depths.

It is safest to begin with the surfaces. All of the action takes place on a stage prepared for a production of Strindberg’s A Dream Play. An aging director sits among the props, and every chair and table reminds him of an earlier production. The rehearsal has ended some time ago, and now the director simply sits, as if the stage were his room. A young actress returns to the stage for a missing bracelet. But of course the bracelet is an excuse, and she wants to talk to the great man, and perhaps to begin a relationship with him (as, perhaps, she has heard that many other actresses have done over the years). The old director was once the lover of the girl’s mother. It is even possible that this girl is his daughter. They talk. Then an older actress enters. She has a few lines in the play, and wants to know—frankly, brutally—if her career as a leading actress is really over because she is known as a drunk. She cries, she rants, she bares her breasts to show the old man that her body is still sound, if sodden. The director is tempted: He was once this woman’s lover, and perhaps her daughter is his.

The young girl stays on stage during the extraordinary display of the older actress. When the older woman leaves, the director and ingenue talk again, and this time the old man, who has been through the turmoil of love too many times, talks her through their probable future: We could make love, we could have an affair, we would call it part of our art, you would be the student, I would be the teacher, I would grow tired, you would feel trapped, all our idealism would turn into ashes. Since the relationship is foredoomed, why bother with it?

Just in terms of these spare passages of dialogue and passion, After the Rehearsal is an important and painful confessional, for the old director, of course, bears many points of resemblance to Bergman, whose lovers have included his actresses Harriet Andersson, Bibi Andersson, and Liv Ullmann, among others, and whose daughter by Ullmann appeared in Face to Face. But the film is not a scandalous revelation: It is actually more of a sacramental confession, as if Bergman, the son of a Lutheran bishop, now sees the stage as his confessional and is asking the audience to bless and forgive him. (His gravest sin, as I read the film, is not lust or adultery, but the sin of taking advantage of others—of manipulating them with his power and intellect.)

If that were the extent of After the Rehearsal, it would be deep enough. But Bergman has surrounded the bare bones of his story with mystifying problems of interpretation. Just as in Persona he included scenes in which his characters exchanged personalities and engaged in scenes that might have or might not have been fantasies and dreams, so here, too, he gives us things to puzzle over. Reading the earlier reviews of the film, I discover that one critic realized only belatedly that the younger actress, Anna, was onstage the whole time the older actress, Rakel, poured out her heart. Strange, and yet another critic thought the whole scene with Rakel was the director’s own dream. Yet another suggested that Anna represents not only herself but also Rakel’s absent daughter. And another theory is that Anna is the daughter of the director and Rakel, and is brought into being by the residual love between them, as a sort of theatrical Holy Spirit. The age of Anna has been variously reported as ranging from twelve to twenty, with one critic reporting that both ages of the character are represented.

Which is the correct interpretation? They are all correct. Each and every one is equally correct; otherwise what is the use of a dream play? The point is not to find the literal meaning, anyway, but to touch the soul of the director, and find out what still hurts him after all these years. After all the sex and all the promises, all the lies and truths and messy affairs, there is still one critical area where he is filled with guilt and passion. It is revealed when Anna tells him she is pregnant. He is enraged. How could she, a young actress given the role of a lifetime, jeopardize her career and his play by getting pregnant? Then she tells him she has had an abortion, for the sake of the play. And then he really is torn in two, for he does not believe, after all, that a play—not even his play—is worth the sacrifice of a life. What we are left with at the end of After the Rehearsal, however, is the very strong sense of an artist who has sacrificed many lives for the sake of his art, and now wonders if perhaps one of those lives was his own.

The Age of Innocence

PG, 132 m., 1993

Daniel Day-Lewis (Newland Archer), Michelle Pfeiffer (Ellen Olenska), Winona Ryder (May Welland), Geraldine Chaplin (Mrs. Welland), Mary Beth Hurt (Regina Beaufort), Miriam Margolyes (Mrs. Mingott), Richard E. Grant (Larry Lefferts), Alec McCowen (Sillerton Jackson). Directed by Martin Scorsese and produced by Barbara De Fina. Screenplay by Jay Cocks and Scorsese, based on the book by Edith Wharton.

We live in an age of brutal manners, when people crudely say exactly what they mean, comedy is based on insult, tributes are roasts, and loud public obscenity passes without notice. Martin Scorsese’s film The Age of Innocence, which takes place in the 1870s, seems so alien it could be pure fantasy. A rigid social code governs how people talk, walk, meet, part, dine, earn their livings, fall in love, and marry. Not a word of the code is written down anywhere. But these people have been studying it since they were born.

The film is based on a novel by Edith Wharton, who died in the 1930s. The age of innocence, as she called it with fierce irony, was over long before she even wrote her book. Yet she understood that the people of her story had the same lusts as we barbaric moderns, and not acting on them made them all the stronger.

The novel and the movie take place in the elegant milieu of the oldest and richest families in New York City. Marriages are like treaties between nations, their purpose not merely to cement romance or produce children, but to provide for the orderly transmission of wealth between the generations. Anything that threatens this sedate process is hated. It is not thought proper for men and women to place their own selfish desires above the needs of their class. People do indeed marry for love, but the practice is frowned upon as vulgar and dangerous.

We meet a young man named Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis), who is engaged to marry the pretty young May Welland (Winona Ryder). He has great affection for her, even though she seems pretty but dim, well-behaved rather than high-spirited. All agree this is a good marriage between good families, and Archer is satisfied—until one night at the opera he sees a cousin who has married and lived in Europe for years. She is Ellen, the Countess Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer). She has, he is astonished to discover, ideas of her own. She looks on his world with the amusement and detachment of an exile. She is beautiful, yes, but that isn’t what attracts Archer. His entire being is excited by the presence of a woman who boldly thinks for herself.

The countess is not quite a respectable woman. First she made the mistake of marrying outside her circle, taking a rich Polish count and living in Europe. Then she made a greater transgression, separating from her husband and returning to New York, where she stands out at social gatherings as an extra woman of undoubted fascination, whom no one knows quite what to do with. It is clear to everyone that her presence is a threat to the orderly progress of Archer’s marriage with May.

This kind of story has been filmed, very well, by the Merchant-Ivory team. Their Howards End, A Room with a View, and The Bostonians know this world. It would seem to be material of no interest to Martin Scorsese, a director of great guilts and energies, whose very titles are a rebuke to the age of innocence: Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, GoodFellas. Yet when his friend and cowriter Jay Cocks handed Scorsese the Wharton novel, he could not put it down, and now he has filmed it, and through some miracle it is all Wharton, and all Scorsese.

The story told here is brutal and bloody, the story of a man’s passion crushed, his heart defeated. Yet it is also much more, and the last scene of the film, which pulls everything together, is almost unbearably poignant because it reveals that the man was not the only one with feelings—that others sacrificed for him, that his deepest tragedy was not what he lost, but what he never realized he had.

The Age of Innocence is filmed with elegance. These rich aristocrats move in their gilded circles from opera to dinner to drawing room, with a costume for every role and every time of day. Scorsese observes the smallest of social moments, the incline of a head, the angle of a glance, the subtle inflection of a word or phrase. And gradually we understand what is happening: Archer is considering breaking his engagement to May, in order to run away with the countess, and everyone is concerned to prevent him—while at no time does anyone reveal by the slightest sign that they know what they are doing.

I have seen love scenes in which naked bodies thrash in sweaty passion, but I have rarely seen them more passionate than in this movie, where everyone is wrapped in layers of Victorian repression. The big erotic moments take place in public among fully clothed people speaking in perfectly modulated phrases, and they are so filled with libido and terror that the characters scarcely survive them.

Scorsese, that artist of headlong temperament, here exhibits enormous patience. We are provided with the voice of a narrator (Joanne Woodward), who understands all that is happening, guides us, and supplies the private thoughts of some of the characters.

We learn the rules of the society. We meet an elderly woman named Mrs. Mingott (Miriam Margolyes), who has vast sums of money and functions for her society as sort of an appeals court of what can be permitted and what cannot be.

And we see the infinite care and attention with which May Welland defends her relationship with Newland Archer. May knows or suspects everything that is happening between Newland and the countess, but she chooses to acknowledge only certain information, and works with the greatest cleverness to preserve her marriage while never quite seeming to notice anything wrong.

Each performance is modulated to preserve the delicate balance of the romantic war. Daniel Day-Lewis stands at the center, deluded for a time that he has free will. Michelle Pfeiffer, as the countess, is a woman who sees through society without quite rejecting it, and takes an almost sensuous pleasure in seducing Archer with the power of her mind. At first it seems that little May is an unwitting bystander and victim, but Winona Ryder gradually reveals the depth of her character’s intelligence, and in the last scene, as I said, all is revealed and much is finally understood.

Scorsese is known for his restless camera; he rarely allows a static shot. But here you will have the impression of grace and stateliness in his visual style, and only on a second viewing will you realize the subtlety with which his camera does, indeed, incessantly move, insinuating itself into conversations like a curious uninvited guest. At the beginning of The Age of Innocence, as I suggested, it seems to represent a world completely alien to us. By the end, we realize these people have all the same emotions, passions, fears, and desires that we do. It is simply that they value them more highly, and are less careless with them, and do not in the cause of self-indulgence choose a moment’s pleasure over a lifetime’s exquisite and romantic regret.

Akeelah and the Bee

PG-13, 112 m., 2006

Angela Bassett (Tanya Anderson), Keke Palmer (Akeelah Anderson), Laurence Fishburne (Dr. Joshua Larabee), Curtis Armstrong (Mr. Welch), J. R. Villarreal (Javier), Sahara Garey (Georgia), Sean Michael Afable (Dylan), Erica Hubbard (Kiana Anderson). Directed by Doug Atchison and produced by Laurence Fishburne, Sidney Ganis, Nancy Hult Ganis, Daniel Llewelyn, and Michael Romersa. Screenplay by Atchison.

Akeelah Anderson can spell. She can spell better than anyone in her school in south central Los Angeles, and she might have a chance at the nationals. Who can say? She sees the national spelling bee on ESPN and is intrigued. But she is also wary, because in her school there is danger in being labeled a brainiac, and it’s wiser to keep your smarts to yourself. This is a tragedy in some predominantly black schools: Excellence is punished by the other students, possibly as an expression of their own low self-esteem.

The thing with Akeelah (Keke Palmer) is that she can spell, whether she wants to or not. Beating time with her hand against her thigh as sort of a metronome, she cranks out the letters and arrives triumphantly at the words. No, she doesn’t have a photographic memory, nor is she channeling the occult, as the heroine of Bee Season does. She’s just a good speller.

The story of Akeelah’s ascent to the finals of the National Spelling Bee makes an uncommonly good movie, entertaining and actually inspirational, and with a few tears along the way. Her real chance at national success comes after a reluctant English professor agrees to act as her coach. This is Dr. Joshua Larabee (Laurence Fishburne), on a leave of absence after the death of his daughter. Coaching her is a way out of his own shell. And for Fishburne, it’s a reminder of his work in Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993), another movie where he coached a prodigy.

Akeelah is not mocked only at school. Her own mother is against her. Tanya Anderson (Angela Bassett) has issues after the death of her husband, and she values Akeelah’s homework above all else, including silly after-school activities such as spelling bees. Akeelah practices in secret, and after she wins a few bees, even the tough kids in the neighborhood start cheering for her.

Keke Palmer, a young Chicago actress whose first role was as Queen Latifah’s niece in Barber Shop 2, becomes an important young star with this movie. It puts her in Dakota Fanning and Flora Cross territory, and there’s something about her poise and self-possession that hints she will grow up to be a considerable actress. The movie depends on her, and she deserves its trust.

So far I imagine Akeelah and the Bee sounds like a nice but fairly conventional movie. What makes it transcend the material is the way she relates to the professor and to two fellow contestants: a Mexican-American named Javier (J. R. Villarreal) and an Asian-American named Dylan (Sean Michael Afable). Javier, who lives with his family in the upscale Woodland Hills neighborhood, invites Akeelah to his birthday party (unaware of what a long bus trip it involves). Dylan, driven by an obsessive father, treats the spelling bee like life and death, and takes no hostages. Hearing Dylan’s father berate him, Akeelah feels an instinctive sympathy. And as for Javier’s feelings for Akeelah, at his party he impulsively kisses her.

Why’d you do that? she asks him.

I had an impulse. Are you gonna sue me for sexual harassment?

The sessions between Akeelah and the professor are crucial to the film, because he is teaching her not only strategy but also how to be willing to win. No, he doesn’t use self-help clichés. He is demanding and uncompromising, and he tells her again and again, Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. This quote, often attributed to Nelson Mandela, is actually from Marianne Williamson but is no less true for Akeelah (the movie does not attribute it).

Now I am going to start dancing around the plot. Something happens during the finals of the national bee that you are not going to see coming, and it may move you as deeply as it did me. I’ve often said it’s not sadness that touches me the most in a movie, but goodness. Under enormous pressure, at a crucial moment, Akeelah does something good. Its results I will leave for you to discover. What is ingenious about the plot construction of writer-director Doug Atchison is that he creates this moment so that we understand what’s happening, but there’s no way to say for sure. Even the judges sense or suspect something. But Akeelah, improvising in the moment and out of her heart, makes it airtight. There is only one person who absolutely must understand what she is doing, and why—and he does.

This ending answers one of my problems with spelling bees and spelling-bee movies. It removes winning as the only objective. Vince Lombardi was dead wrong when he said, Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing (a quote, by the way, first said not by Lombardi but in the 1930s by UCLA coach Henry Red Sanders—but since everybody thinks Lombardi said it, he won, I guess). The saying is mistaken because to win for the wrong reason or in the wrong way is to lose. Something called sportsmanship is involved.

In our winning-obsessed culture, it is inspiring to see a young woman like Akeelah Anderson instinctively understand, with empathy and generosity, that doing the right thing involves more than winning. That’s what makes the film particularly valuable for young audiences. I don’t care if they leave the theater wanting to spell better, but if they have learned from Akeelah, they will want to live better.

Alex in Wonderland

R, 109 m., 1971

Donald Sutherland (Alex), Ellen Burstyn (Beth), Meg Mazursky (Amy), Glenna Sergent (Nancy), Viola Spolin (Mother), Paul Mazursky (Hal Stern). Directed by Paul Mazursky and produced by Larry Tucker. Screenplay by Mazursky and Tucker.

Who are you, said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied rather shyly. "I—hardly know, Sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then."

That was exactly the case in Hollywood in the early seventies. Works of genius were showered on us by bright, radical, young, etc., filmmakers who announced their intention to overturn the Hollywood establishment. Occasionally one of their films did make it very big, as Easy Rider did. Within weeks, the Hollywood hills were jammed with other would-be geniuses, shooting nihilistic cycle flicks with pseudo-Dylan lyrics. Meanwhile, the original boy wonders … have got to make themselves another film. That was the situation for Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker, who wrote, produced, and directed Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. That movie was an artistic and financial success. It was chosen to open the New York Film Festival. It was argued about in all the best publications. Elliott Gould became a star. Natalie Wood made her comeback. Tucker and Mazursky got rich. The whole enchilada, baby.

Alex in Wonderland was their response to that situation; it’s a movie about a director whose first movie is a success and who’s at a loss for another project. In this sense, it’s autobiographical; not in the details of life, but in the crises. Mazursky himself even appears, as Hal Stern, the doggedly mod movie producer who hopes to interest Donald Sutherland in Don Quixote as a Western? Or maybe …?

If the director’s dilemma sounds familiar, perhaps you’re reminded of Fellini’s 8½. Mazursky and Tucker were. The blocked director’s daughter even asks why he doesn’t do a movie about not knowing what to do next, and he says, no, Fellini already did that. Alex in Wonderland is a deliberately Felliniesque movie, all the same, and all the more fun for that. Fellini himself appears briefly, to no special purpose, and Fellini trademarks like parades, circuses, and clowns keep turning up in the hero’s daydreams.

If Alex had been left just on this level, however, it would have been of little interest. What makes it so good is the gift Mazursky, Tucker, and their actors have of fleshing out the small scenes of human contact that give the movie its almost frightening resonance.

Sutherland, as the director, has trouble handling his success. His uncertainty about what to do next spills over into aloofness, even cruelty, toward his wife (Ellen Burstyn) and mother (Viola Spolin). A short scene in a car with his mother, and a long scene in a kitchen with his wife, actually make the rest of the movie work, because they give the character a depth that sticks even through the superficial dream sequences.

And beyond these intimate scenes, there are icily observant portraits of the new Hollywood. Of aimless idealistic arguments on the beach, of luncheon meetings, of idle people trying somehow to be idly committed. These scenes are the 1970 equivalent of Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon or Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust: unforgivingly accurate studies of the distance between America and the filmmakers who would be relevant about it.

The Fellini elements are laid onto the film and don’t quite sink in (although buffs will enjoy them just as parody). But the human story does work, remarkably well, and if the movie doesn’t hold together we’re not disposed to hold that against it. Half an enchilada is better than none.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

PG, 113 m., 1974

Ellen Burstyn (Alice Hyatt), Kris Kristofferson (David), Billy Green Bush (Donald), Diane Ladd (Flo), Alfred Lutter (Tommy), Harvey Keitel (Ben). Directed by Martin Scorsese and produced by David Susskind and Audrey Maas. Screenplay by Robert Getchell.

Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore opens with a parody of the Hollywood dream world little girls were expected to carry around in their intellectual baggage a generation ago. The screen is awash with a fake sunset, and a sweet little thing comes strolling