Word: onscreen
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...backstage story as entertaining as this deserves the best of punch lines: rave reviews, big business, Oscars all around. But The Cotton Club-the movie, not the gossip machine-deserves less. The volatile drama that attended its making rarely flares onscreen; working at flash point made no sparks fly. On even the calmest of sets, the premise would have shown promise: to blend the early talkies' two most popular genres, the gangster film and the musical, into a sort of Public Enemy Goes to 42nd Street or, modernized, The Godfather Gets One from the Heart. Why, then...
...MacLachlan delivers his speeches as incantations from an old, old testament. The actors seem hypnotized by the spell Lynch has woven around them-especially the lustrous Francesca Annis, as Paul's mother, who whispers her lines with the urgency of erotic revelation. In those moments when Annis is onscreen, Dune finds the emotional center that has eluded it in its parade of rococo decor and austere special effects. She reminds us of what movies can achieve when they have a heart as well as a mind...
However whenever Bancroft is onscreen, Lumet's dallying film becomes rejuvenated. Although Bancroft must combat a simple script, her throaty voice, and earthy no-nonsense approach to living and dying, make her character a truly endearing woman. In her small hospital room, she watches the Knicks, reads about the labor movement and encourages her nurse to fight for a contract...
...years ago, François Truffaut stood in the wings of Avery Fisher Hall at Manhattan's Lincoln Center, chatting with an admirer while waiting to go onstage to speak at a tribute for Alfred Hitchcock. On cue the lights went down and scenes from Hitchcock films flared onscreen. Stopping himself in, midsentence, Truffaut exclaimed, "Oh! La projection!" and turned, eyes bright, to a peephole that gave access to the magic images. The old lure was irresistible for this French movie master who was, first and forever, a child of the American cinema...
...This is the rallying cry of a new breed of activists convinced of a causal link between sexual violence in movies and the physical violence that men too often unleash on women. Aroused or desensitized by images of erotic domination, the argument goes, men may follow the examples set onscreen. Thus movies containing scenes of sexual violence are criminal violations-if not of the obscenity statutes, then of women's civil rights. And this applies to slasher movies like Friday the 13th and art-house hits like Lina Wertmuller's Swept Away as well as to heterosexual hard...