Speed

Is the typical Schwarzenegger movie too complex for ya? Do you like your screenplays to resemble a news report from the Indy 500? Do you suspect that Keanu Reeves could be the new Brando, if he ever learned to act? If your answer to any of these questions is yes, then this movie is just your Speed.

Hi-octane action is the main ingredient of this mindless thriller that delivers the mindless goods and threatens to be the sur­prise, mindless hit of the summer. Speed has so much action that it doesn't have any room for a plot. It hardly has any room for the actors. Heck, its makers were barely able to squeeze in all of the vehicles they smash up. What do you want, dialogue?

Reeves (in a wooden performance) plays an LAPD cop who likes grunge fashions and unusual solutions to crisis situations. Shooting all of the hostages is one of his bright ideas. Shooting his own partner (Jeff Daniels) is another good one. Given the LAPD's track record, he could eventually make chief of police.

Dennis Hopper (in a lazy performance) plays a brilliant, but deranged, bomb expert who's out to blackmail the city. That's why he has wired a crosstown bus to explode if its speed drops below 50 m.p.h. Actually, his plan makes no sense, since we're talking about Los Angeles, where nobody uses public transportation. But Hopper really needs the money — given the amount of equipment he's using, he owes Radio Shack some big bucks.

But Speed isn't about actors. It's about large-scale, metal-wrenching mayhem, as we demolish assorted elevators, buses, cars, airplanes, subway trains and several bystanders. Speed is about fabulously filmed carnage (first-time director Jan DeBont is a noted cinematographer), ludicrous stunts and existential sarcasm.

Speed has no illusions about itself, as it throttles the audience with it's charged craziness. It may even be the definitive junk movie of the summer.

Just be sure to leave your brain in the lobby.

Belle Epoque

Spain seems intent on muscling its way into the European bedroom farce genre. That's the general feel that thor­oughly permeates Belle Epoque, a pleasant, if inconsequential, sex farce that's most notable for hugging the border between French sophistication and Italian slapstick with the amenable indifference of a neutral country that's working overtime to please everybody.
Belle Epoque is enjoyable, even surprising on occasion. But you just know that you've seen it all before (though the Italian versions tend to have more pastas and obvious phallic references).

Belle Epoque is set during that magical moment in 1931 when Spain was poised on the verge of leaving the Middle Ages and belatedly entering the 20th century. The Spanish monarchy is in the process of being overthrown, and a political union of leftist parties has declared a republic. The Spanish Civil War is still a few years away, and Gen­eralissimo Franco is still an obscure army officer. The fascist forces that would even­tually seize control of Spain appear to be on the run, and a casual air of radicalism has broken out in the countryside like a heady bout of spring fever.

Into this major outbreak of democratic fever stumbles Fernando (Jorge Sanz), an army deserter who's looking for a place to hide. Fernando is a relatively sweet-natured young man whose only skills are cooking and playing the bugle. Fortunately, an aging painter named Manolo (Fernando Fernan Gomez) is willing to give Fernando lodging for a while, because the boy listens patiently to Manolo's odd list of personal complaints and thwarted ambitions. Besides, Manolo has four attractive daughters who are com­ing from Madrid for a visit, and Fernando is a romantic sap who keeps falling hopelessly in love - over and over again.

As Fernando beds his way through the family, the daughters begin to discover things about themselves: the tomboyish Violeta (Ariadna Gil) prefers her indepen­dence. The widowed Clara (Miriam Diaz-Aroca) is ready for a new relationship. Rocie (Maribel Verdu) may finally be will­ing to accept her polite, but boring, suitor, while Luz (Penelope Cruz) is yearning to alter her virgin status.

In the pipe dream story of Belle Epoque, Fernando becomes the unwitting agent for change, personally and politically. Radio reports chronicle the formation of the Spanish Republic while Fernando under­goes repeated test runs as a potential son-in-law. Somewhere along the line, you expect the political commentary and sexual hijinks to converge, but the don't.

Belle Epoque is charming and funny, but it's also a very minor film. In fact, it helps if you don't know much about the politics involved — then you don't have to be both­ered by their seemingly pointless inclusion.

The Cowboy Way

Is it just me, or does it seem like every­one in Hollywood is trying to do East­wood? After all, what is The Cowboy Way except a muddled clone of the old Clint thriller Coogan's Bluff? Sure, there are some major differences between the two movies. For one thing, Eastwood didn't need a sidekick — he just needed his Stet­son and a guidebook to New York City.

In The Cowboy Way, Woody Harrelson and Kiefer Sutherland play cowpokes who've landed in Gotham and need more than their hats. Among other things, they need a script that's better than the tired old nag that's been hitched to this movie. The story is strictly a substandard, buddy action yarn, in which the boys play bron­co-riding hombres from New Mexico who go to the Big Apple in search of a lost friend. The friend turns up dead (don't they always?), and the boys find themselves heading for a showdown with a fistful of Cuban mobsters.

Naturally, the automatic weapons of the East Coast posse are no match for the Western six-shooter, and — continuing the element of fantasy — there's always a parking space in mid-town Manhattan for the boys' beat-to-crap pickup truck. Sutherland plays the strong silent type, while Harrelson does the dumb good-old-boy routine. Add a few barnyard jokes and a cameo appearance by Travis Tritt, and before you can say, "Line dance, anyone?" these men of the West are successfully pursuing a subway train on horseback. (I'm not making this up.)

The Cowboy Way has a few amusing moments. Three of them, to be exact. The rest of the movie is just dead space occasionally touched with a dash of crudeness. Of course, if you like gags involving a cow and some guy's private parts, then this flick is for you.

Little Buddha

Bernardo Bertolucci says that he's fed up with mindless Western con­sumerism, and that his new film, Little Buddha, is his pursuit of some greater, more spiritual value.

Okay. It sounds good to me. But despite the philosophy, Little Buddha plays like a meandering exercise in monotony. The brilliant flair that Bertolucci has often shown for portraying decadence just doesn't appear to spark when he's trying hard to be meditative. Instead, you get the distinct impression that Bertolucci directed this movie in his sleep.

Little Buddha is more of a Zen fairy tale than an epic quest. The idea for the film was inspired by several recent cases of young Western children who are believed to be the reincarnation of various important Tibetan lamas. Considering the brutal conditions of life in Chinese-occupied Tibet, it's not hard to see why a reincarnated lama might wish to appear in the States. The only question is, why Seattle? As presented in Little Buddha, the whole state of Washington is a perpetu­ally grey, rain-swept slab of concrete.

But Lama Dorje (Tsultim Gyelsen Geshe) must have liked the climate. Though dead, he returns to a fellow Tibetan priest in a dream and suggests that his reincarna­tion lives in a fancy modernist house in Seattle. Apparently, his soul has been reborn in the form of the all-American kid (Alex Wiesendanger) who lives there.

The boy's parents (Chris Isaak and Brid­get Fonda) are perturbed, at first, when a gaggle of Tibetan monks shows up on their doorstep. But since both Isaak and Fonda deliver embarrassingly bad performances, they have no business giving anyone else a hard time. In fact, the monks (some of whom are actually Buddhist monks) are the only people in the movie who act as if they know what they're doing.

In order to help the bad Western actors understand what's happening, the monks give them a children's book that explains how young Prince Siddhartha became the Buddha. Flashback to India 2,500 years ago (where we finally get to see some sunlight). Keanu Reeves pops up as the original poster boy of Karma in a jazzy rendition of Buddhist mythology that repeatedly veers into the Cecil B. DeMille school of thun­derous enlightenment. You half expect Charlton Heston to show up.

Through it all, a single, nagging question is continually reborn: what's the point? In the past, Bertolucci has been stylistically breathtaking (The Conformist), raw and dar­ing (Last Tango in Paris) and outrageously ambitious (1900 and The Last Emperor). With Little Buddha, he appears to be interested only in being exotic. Most of the movie comes off like a photo spread for National Geographic — lacking, however, the informative captions.

Sleepless In Seattle

The so-called "women's movie" used to be one of the most commercially reliable forms of Hollywood film­making.

Granted, the term was originally coined with a distinctly contemptuous tone. But the films always made money, while provid­ing a boom for the paper-hankie industry. And women weren't the only audience members secretly weeping into those han­kies — men simply wouldn't admit to it.

Oddly enough, the women's film started to fade from the screen about the same time the Western began to vanish. Neither the "weepies" nor the "cowboys" made it through the '70s intact. It was as if the exclusive men's club of the Western genre needed that feminine counter­point to survive.

Now, they're both back. Eastwood has reinvented the Western. With Sleepless in Seat­tle, writer-director Nora Ephron recasts the romantic weepie for the post-Ms, maga­zine generation.

Sleepless in Seattle asks the eternal movie question: is love a form of chance, destiny or simple neurosis? It never answers its own question, but it does have a nice time kick­ing the issue around.

Tom Hanks plays a bereaved widower whose depressed lifestyle drives is eight-year-old son to a phone-in radio talk show for help. Meg Ryan is the woman reporter who hears the show while driving to meet her boring fiancee. Naturally, she instantly falls in love with Hank's voice. The only problem is that Hanks lives in Seattle, and she lives in Baltimore. Seemingly, they are doomed to be forever separated by all of the large, square-shaped states in the middle.

Fortunately, eight-year-old kids are always capable of solving adults' prob­lems. Even better, Nora Ephron doesn't take her movie plot too seriously.

What Ephron does take seriously is clever dialogue and well-placed musical references in soundtracks. She also has good instincts for the emotional pull of the genre. Ephron realizes that the audience knows better than to fall for this kind of movie. She also knows that the allure of the romantic weepie (and, by the way, actu­ally a comedy) is virtually irre­sistible.

Ephron is no slouch in delivering the goods. Sleepless in Seattle has a sharp sense of humor — its characters debate the very cliches they are tum­bling into. As she previously demonstrated in her scripts for Heartburn and When Harry Met Sally, Ephron has a good writer's ear for witty, natural lines.

Throughout Sleepless in Seat­tle, the characters consult the 1957 film An Affair to Remember. It's the quintessential romantic weepie. It's obvious, manipulative and com­pulsively watchable. In many ways, so is Sleepless in Seattle.

Just bring your own hankies.

It Could Happen to You

It Could Happen to You is the kind of movie that they use to make in the 1950s with people like Jack Lemmon and Judy Holliday. They were the kind of films that forced high-stakes con­flicts between urban greed and small town virtues, corrupt sophistication challenged by naive integrity. These movies were always obvious and predictable, but they were also (sometimes) reasonably good.

That's not the case with It Could Happen to You, a contrived and underhanded excuse for a romantic comedy. Instead of a charm­ing fable, the picture unloads an excessive amount of passive-aggressive hostility in a pathetic attempt to make its two lead charac­ters sympathetic. It leaves a bad taste in your mouth in the process, as its feel-good mind­set turns into an ugly display of sticky-fin­gered grasping.

The story is pure Capra-corn: a sweet-natured, virtuous cop (Nicolas Cage) finds himself short on change in a diner and promises the down-on-her-luck waitress (Bridget Fonda) half of his lottery ticket as a tip. Bingo! He wins the big money and the tip turns into a $2 million jackpot. Unfortu­nately, Cage's wife (Rosie Perez) is a pushy true believer in the fine art of conspicuous consumption — and she doesn't believe in sharing.

The first half of It Could Happen to You makes for a mildly amusing comedy, but Cage is more goofy than virtuous, and Fon­da is too pinch-faced and superficially perky (and all at the same time) to be anything more than momentarily engaging. As for Perez, she's stuck with a character about as likable as Hitler at a bar mitzvah. Oddly enough, the movie would almost have worked if Perez and Fonda had been cast in each other's roles.

With Honors

Sometimes an ambitious college student just doesn't know which way to go with his or her studies. The same is sometimes true of comedy films. With Hon­ors just can't make up its mind whether it wants to be a sassy spoof on mis­guided intellectualism, or a sweet weepy on loves both lost and found. It ends up not being much of either, an indecisiveness that ultimately drags the movie's grade point average down to a C+.

The collegiate paper chase is the under­pinning to the story in With Hon­ors. It's winter semester at Har­vard, and Brendan Fraser (the defrost­ed caveman in Encino Man) is midway through his thesis on gov­ernment adminis­tration. His work is a shameless suck-up to the elitist theories of his academic advi­sor (Gore Vidal) — which is how Fraser plans to graduate summa cum laude. But he drops the ball when he loses the the whole text down a heating grate.

Not that the thesis is lost. It simply ends up in the hands of Joe Pesci (who's appearing in virtually every other currently released movie). This time, Pesci plays a widely traveled, street-smart bum who's looking to cut a deal for food and shelter. With the clock ticking toward graduation, Fraser is forced to play — he offers Pesci space in an abandoned van behind the house he shares with three roomies, in exchange for the return of his paper. (The deal is one day's use of the van for each page of the thesis.)

At this point, With Honors generally clicks as a vaguely amusing and predictable comedy in which Pesci knows more about real life than any of the students and begins to one-up Vidal in the classroom. He also starts advising Fraser about how to handle his love life, beginning with the basic obser­vation that Fraser needs to get one.

But With Honors isn't satisfied with simply being a comedy. Just as it's about to work as an Ivy League version of My Man Godfrey, it suddenly flip-flops into a teary-eyed mix of Stella Dallas and Terms of Endearment. Pesci is dying and he has yet to reconcile the greatest failing of his life, his abandonment, 30 years earlier, of his wife and sons.

Neither fish nor fowl, With Honors meanders through its last half. It stumbles on a few cliches but, to its credit, sidesteps a few as well. Unfortunately, it never quite gels, ending with a whimper instead of a bang.

The Client

In a scene from The Client, the most recent movie adaptation of a John Grisham novel, Susan Sarandon pulls a gun on a thug, only to have him snap that she won't shoot because she's a woman. Is it just me, or is that a real hoot? I mean, didn't this bozo see Thelma and Louise! Besides, Sarandon plays an attorney in The Client — and as we all know from Grisham's potboilers, lawyers are nastier than a cornered bobcat.

The Client follows in the dubious footsteps of The Firm and The Pelican Brief. This latest effort, however, fares better than its predecessors. The Client's plot almost makes sense (un­like that of The Pelican Brief), and it manages to avoid The Firm's obses­sion with Xerox machines. Even more importantly, it has Sarandon, who delivers a fine performance that manages to elevate the movie beyond its story.

The film opens in a trailer park swamp on the outskirts of Memphis. Brad Renfro plays a foul-mouthed kid who accidentally stumbles upon a vicious mob attorney who's getting ready to blow his brains out. Seems that this lawyer has a client in New Orleans who's being investigated by the feds for the murder of a Louisiana senator, and the attorney can't take the heat. Of course, he also can't die without blabbing everything he knows to the kid.

That leaves Renfro caught in the middle between an ambitious U.S. district attorney (Tommy Lee Jones)and a and a murderous mobster (Anthony LaPaglia). With nothing but loose change in his pocket, Renfro hires Sarandon to protect him from both sides. Before you can say "nolo contendere," this graduate of the Mem­phis State University Law School is slapping thugs and federal officials around in a display of litigious prowess that should guarantee Saran­don a spot on O. J.'s dream team.

Luckily for The Client, she pulls the part off with enough deft skill to make the movie fun and — almost — believable.

Vertigo

"When we were working on the restoration of Vertigo, we were working in the Hitchcock Theater at Universal," confessed Robert A. Harris. "So we had ghosts all over the place."

Somehow, spectral visions of the past is extremely appropriate. After all, Vertigo is Alfred Hitchcock's great lyrical masterpiece about the insidious emotional hold of the dead upon the living. When Vertigo was first released in 1958, it was widely dismissed (The New York Times referred to it as "another Hitchcock and bull story"). But over the intervening years, it has emerged as a film of immeasurable poetic depth and dark, fatalistic imaginings.

Which means that it is the kind of great movie that is approached cautiously by a wise restorer. But Harris and his partner, James C. Katz, also knew that if something wasn't done soon, Vertigo would eventually fade from sight

"Back in 1967," explained Harris, "Someone gave Hitchcock bad advice." All camera negatives and other materials belonging to Vertigo were destroyed by Hitchcock's
orders. "The only element that had survived, really, was a highly used optical soundtrack."

Which is ironic, since Vertigo is about the obsessive efforts of a disgraced private detective (James Stewart) to mold a stranger (Kim Novak) into the image of a dead woman (Novak, again)whom he loved but barely knew. This lost object of his intense passion was the subject of a case that the detective was working on, and her suicide could have been prevented if he didn't suffer from a near maddening fear of high places.

To say much more would reveal some of the most haunting plot twists ever devised in the history of l'amour fou (or mad love, as the English would say).

So Harris and Katz were once again working under the reverential pressure that they had previously felt when they had restored My Fair Lady and Lawrence of Arabia. "But we really had a brain trust on this film," noted Harris. Among the many people who supervised the restoration was Patricia Hitchcock (Alfred's daughter), Herbert Coleman (associate producer), Novak, and Sam Taylor (co-scriptwriter).

"We found the camera operator's reports; we had the location reports; we had Hitchcock's dubbing notes. So we had a pretty good idea of what was going on in the
production."

Which allowed Harris and Katz to retrieve the magnificent, elusive yet primal power of Hitchcock's most supreme achievement. Whether you are seeing Vertigo for the first time, or for the hundredth, this is the version that ultimately beckons with the musky allure of deadly compulsions. Despite its age, Vertigo still sends viewers spiraling to the edge of their seat...and beyond.

Vertigo is really that great of a film. In fact, it is among one of the greatest ever made. No wonder Brian DePalma keeps remaking it (e.g. Obsession, Blow Out, etc.).

But Harris would be happy with one, simple acknowledgment from the grave. "I would like to think that Hitchcock would have sit back and said, ' Hmmm. Not bad.
Not bad at all.' "

Red Rock West

It used to be that a guy had to go to the city for a bellyful of murder and duplicity. In the classics of the film noir genre, cities were so packed with corrup­tion that nice guys didn't sim­ply finish last, they usually finished face down in a back alley. But those were the old days when tough guys haunt­ed smoky jazz clubs and rain-slick streets. Today, the action is located on the prairie.

Which is what Nicolas Cage discovers in this year's hot cult movie, Red Rock West. It's the latest piece of "cowboy noir," following in the boot steps of Blood Sim­ple, Flesh and Bone and Kill Me Again, Red Rock West di­rector John Dahl's previous thriller. Not only has Dahl's new effort been a major criti­cal hit on the film festival cir­cuit, but it also has generated a deafening buzz among film buffs.

In Red Rock West, Cage plays a drifter who's cruising for jobs through the oil fields of Wyoming. He's flat broke when he pulls into the town of Red Rock and willing to try almost anything when a bar owner (J. T. Walsh) offers him a gig. What Cage doesn't realize is that Walsh has him confused with a hitman from Dallas whom Walsh hired and is expecting. Cage has no intention of doing the job, which is killing Walsh's wife (Lara Flynn Boyle). Then again, that money is damned tempting....

The plot of Red Rock West turns more twisty than a bad stretch of road, especially when Boyle offers Cage more money to murder her hus­band than her husband is of­fering Cage to kill her. Not to mention when the real hit­man (Dennis Hopper) shows up and offers to whack just about everybody. Add Dwight Yoakam in an effective cameo role, and you've got a movie lover's delight - a taut and surprisingly slick little gem of a film.

The House of the Spirits

This may be the finest movie ever made about Latin America by a Danish filmmaker working for a German production company with an English and American cast. (By the way, it was filmed partly in Norway.) A few more countries, and The House of the Spirits could qualify as a U.N. mission. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite cut it as a film.

Based on the acclaimed novel by Isabel Allende (the niece of slain Chilean president Salvador Allende), The House of the Spirits attempts a wild, impassioned roller coaster ride through the violent political history of modern Chile. Presented as a multigenerational saga, the movie follows the rise and fall of a powerful family whose wealth was originally built upon oppression and whose future is virtually consumed by the brutal military dictatorship that the father helps to create.

It's also supposed to be something of a love story, though the relationship between Esteban Trueba (Jeremy Irons) and his mag­ical, psychic bride (Meryl Streep) never comes across as either convincing or inter­esting. In fact, both Irons and Streep appear to be hopelessly miscast. Add an insipid performance by Winona Ryder as their daughter, and you'll discover new meaning to the phrase "dysfunctional family."

But the real problem with The House of the Spirits is writer-director Bille August. He simply can't handle the material. Throughout the movie, August tries for the grandiose, operatic flair of Luchino Visconti and Bernardo Bertolucci, but the movie ends up playing like an Aaron Spelling remake of 1900. Besides, August's screen­play so compromises the story that neither the politics nor the novel's ghostly magic make any sense. Instead, August provides us only with pretty pictures.

Four Weddings and a Funeral

It always helps if a movie has a great script. It's also a big plus if the director is really good. On these counts, Four Weddings and a Funeral comes close, but no cigar. The screenplay is passable, and the direction is okay, but we're not talking Citizen Kane.

What Four Weddings and a Funeral does have, however, is an extremely good piece of ensemble acting by a set of performers who could read fig­ures from the stock market and still earn a warm laugh. It's a triumph of acting over film­making, but who's complaining? Acting may be the one thing that the English are still good at, and this film is a delightful tour de force that deftly lampoons the absurdity of good manners.

Hugh Grant heads a large cast in the central role of Charles, a young London bachelor who much prefers being a best man to being a groom. He routinely catches up with his pals and numerous ex-girlfriends at their various weddings, where it becomes obvious that Charles has a problem far greater than his ten­dency toward embarrassing faux pas. He's incapable of uttering those "three little words" of endearment — which is why he has so many ex-girl­friends.

This especially becomes a problem when he falls hopelessly in love with Andie McDowell. She's a visiting American who keeps popping up at the same weddings Charles attends. She and Charles begin an incredibly disjointed love affair, despite the fact that Charles can't admit that he's in love with her, and McDowell doesn't expect him to. Besides she's already engaged to a stuffy Scottish politician (Corin Redgrave), which is one of the reasons Grant is so unsure of where he stands with her.

Where the couple mostly stands is at the back of the chapel. Charles' friends are moving down the aisle with the predictability of salmon in the spring, but the closest he gets to the altar is when he fum­bles handing off the ring to the groom.

The plot to Four Weddings and a Funeral may sound thin, even contrived. It is. The whole movie is sliding across a remarkably thin sheet of ice, and what really saves it is some solid skating by Grant and McDowell. Also along for the ride is a long list of eccentric friends who are successfully fleshed out as full-blown characters. Even the minor bits are well handled, most notably one by Kenneth Grif­fiths, whose "Mad Old Man" steals a hysterical five minutes of screen time.

Director Mike Newell is clearly looking to reclaim the previous success he enjoyed with Enchanted April. Four Weddings and a Funeral isn't quite in the same league, but it's close enough. It's definitely one of the few bright spots of the season.

Schindler's List

When's clicking, director Steven Spielberg is capable of making great movies. But when he misses the mark, he's off — way off. At his best, Spielberg strikes emotional chords within movie-goers that other directors can only dream about. At his worst, he's extremely manipulative and intensely adolescent.

Not that he needs to worry about these fluctuations affecting his affecting his finances. Despite a recent track record of mammoth bombs (Empire of the Sun, Always and Hook), Spielberg has always been able to rebound with hits that routinely rewrite the list of all-time box office champs. After the completely preposterous success of Jurassic Park, he could make a musical based on the Yel­low Pages without fearing for the robust­ness of his bankroll.

But Spielberg's hungry for things that money can't buy: critical recognition and artistic respect. He wants a gold-plated Oscar and a scrapbook full of rave reviews. Most of all, he wants to be taken seriously.

With Schindler's List, Spielberg finally gets his wish. The guy who used to be called the "Cincinnati Kid" is now the spokesperson for mature, significant filmmaking. The wunderkind who built movies as if they were theme parks is now confronting the Holocaust. And it works — Schindler's List is one of Spiel­berg's greatest films.

It's also one of his most difficult films to watch. Spielberg promised a direct confrontation with the death camps, and he wasn't kidding. Schindler's List relent­lessly unspools a detailed presentation of enough Nazi atrocities to fill a war-crime tribunal.

The movie's based on a true story, that of Oskar Schindler, a German entrepreneur who saved the lives of hundreds of Polish Jews by buying their freedom from Nazi death camps and giving them jobs in his factory. The film's script is adapted from author Thomas Keneally's book by the same name.

Schindler (played by Irish actor Liam Neeson) starts out as a lik­able, but incompetent, businessman who's followed the German Army into Poland because he smells an opportunity to make easy money. The Nazis are busy taking over factories and they're looking for loyal Teutonic types to run them, which is where Schindler comes in. Schindler also realizes that an equally lucrative business is to be had in the form of entertaining the Wehrmacht's officers with wild "presentations" (read: parties). So he convinces a Jewish man (Ben Kingsley) to do the boring book work at his new factory, while he han­dles the "presentations."

The deal's simple — and raw. While Schindler does the networking, Kingsley runs the real business and recruits other Jews from the Krakow ghetto to work in Schindler's factory. Unfortunately, at this point in the story, Schindler is less concerned with helping his employees than with exploiting them. The workers' wages are used to bribe Nazi officials, and in return for their lost wages, the employees are given pots and pans to barter with on the black market.

And so it goes, until the S.S. kicks into gear, destroying the ghetto and shipping the survivors off to a forced labor camp.

Slowly, it dawns on Schindler that the Nazis don't intend for anyone to get out alive. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, he becomes morally revolted by the very process be helped initiate. He begins to free prisoners by creating a list of (fictitious) factory jobs, then he uses his good standing with the Nazis (plus good old-fashioned bribes) to convince them to release prisoners to fill the jobs.

The story's simple structure barely suggests the emotional force that Spiel­berg invested in Schindler's List. Nor does it prepare viewers for the fact that Spielberg - quite unexpectedly - reinvents the art house film genre with this film, as he beats a complete (and wise) retreat from his Disneyland approach to movie­making. For Schindler's List, he borrows from such wildly divergent forms as film noir, cinema verite, Italian Neo-Realism and French New Wave. The movie's a virtual textbook of the past 50 years of international film movements. Even the liberation scene near the end of Schindler's List is designed to invoke Russian films of the 1950s.

Spielberg's touch isn't limited to visu­als, however. Schindler's List needs to be seen in a theater with a good sound sys­tem, because its soundtrack is a brilliant piece of audio construction. At times, important parts of the film take place in the speakers, rather than on the screen. Schindler's List is big, and powerful, and important. But to my mind, one of its most indelible moments is also one of its quietest: a slow pan across the mountainous heaps of clothing, eleglasses, and shoes that belonged to the dead. With this one camera shot, Spielberg captures the overwhelming horror of genocide.

In the Name of the Father

Gerry Conlon was once a petty thief in Belfast, Ireland. Today, he's a liv­ing reminder of one of the more ille­gal and high-handed acts committed in recent years by the British government.

In the mid-1970s, Conlon was ensnared in a web of circumstance that resulted in his conviction for an Irish Republican Army bombing in London and serving 15 years of a life sentence — even though British pros­ecutors knew that Conlon was innocent. It would be bad enough if only Conlon had suffered, but many of his friends and family were unjustly accused as well, including Cordon's father, who died in prison.

The new film In the Name of the Father is based on Cordon's case and details the injustice perpetrated on him. The film is fueled by a who's who of currently hot Irish movie types: Gabriel Byrne as executive producer, Jim Sheridan (creator of My Left Foot) as producer-director and Daniel Day-Lewis as star (it even has Sinead O'Connor on the soundtrack). Given the topic and chief personnel, you can under­stand why such a strong sense of militancy underscores In the Name of the Father. All in all, the movie promises to be as dark as Guinness Ale and as thick as Irish stew. And, for the most part, it is.

The story opens onto a typical day in Belfast in 1974. Heavily armed Eng­lish troops are on the prowl for IRA snipers, and Conlon is just dense enough to pick this day to attempt a roof-top robbery, despite the soldiers' presence. Not surpris­ingly, he's mistaken for a sniper and pursued through "sensitive" areas in which the IRA has secretly stockpiled weapons. The local IRA bosses are forced to relocate the weapons, and decide that Conlon deserves a little kneecapping as payment for the trouble he caused them. Thanks to his father's inter­vention, however, the "discipline" goes only so far, and Conlon is spared from being per­manently crippled.

Conlon's family packs him off to London for a while to keep him out of trouble. But the war in Northern Ireland is heating up, and the IRA decides to take the battle straight to England. Bombs start exploding throughout London, and one attack on a pub kills five people. Conlon chooses this unfortunate period to go skipping back to Belfast, unaware that he's a possible suspect in the bombings and is under surveillance by the British intelligence — until British troops show up in his bedroom one night.

In the Name of the Father is a surprisingly taut recreation of the Conlon case, with strong performances by Day-Lewis and Pete Postlethwaite, as Cordon's father. Emma Thompson's fans, however, may feel cheated by her limited role in the movie.

In the Name of the Father contains some minor flaws, but it's a good, strong film nonetheless - be prepared to walk out of the theater feeling outraged.