Word: auteurs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Pagnolmania the French call their long love affair with the author-auteur (he died in 1974). That benign affliction was rekindled last year with the European release of My Father's Glory and My Mother's Castle. This summer the two-film magical memory tour comes to American screens. Rapture is the only appropriate response...
...created the market for black-movie rage: Spike Lee. This acerbic auteur is probably best known as Michael Jordan's best pal Mars Blackmon, the hyperverbalizing Nike footwear flack on TV. But with scathing screeds like Do the Right Thing (1989) and the current Jungle Fever, Lee, 34, has carved a niche for fierce minority movies -- a niche that can be enlarged by other directors who are even younger, more choleric, closer to the action if not to the edge. Call them the Spikettes...
...comes across as your basic nest of contradictions. His very name is a fiction (Woody Allen is the sort of name suitable for a Catskill jester, not a renowned auteur), yet he strips himself naked in every film. A private person with an itch to dine out (at Elaine's, at the Russian Tea Room), he wants to be admired but not approached. He says he doesn't read reviews of his work, yet he counts as one of the four most important people in his career Vincent Canby, the New York Times critic whose reviews have exhausted superlatives...
...testing that instinct in her directorial debut with Little Man Tate, the story of a child prodigy (Adam Hann-Byrd), his caring mother (Foster) and a psychiatrist (Dianne Wiest). The film is due in the fall, but this month the new auteur is ecstatic. "I'm jammin'," she says. "It's getting a little hectic, but it's coming along great...
...Hoffman, Mastroianni: he's in that great class." Like those actors, Depardieu is capable of melodramatic excess; to give all is sometimes to give too much. But also like them, he has set an indelible stamp on his country's films, defining current French cinema as fully as any auteur...