Word: caste
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...posters are enough to make your heart sink: another "screwball comedy" with Bill Murray carrying the whole cast. Will it be another Kingpin, where Bill's comb-over and fringed vest are the last vestiges of laughability in what has remade the paradigm of a really bad movie...
Angels in America doesn't really have any "lead" characters, and Altman's cast performs with the smooth excellence of a true ensemble. Shapiro, in her first Harvard performance, is a revelation. Harper is a sympathetic character but not necessarily a likable one. Shapiro dares to make her paranoia and love-starvation obvious from her first scene, but accents her performance so shrewdly with comedy and irony that the character devastates rather than depresses...
...Kevin Kline) whose life turns upside down when he's declared gay by a former student-turned-movie star (Matt Dillon) marks Hollywood's own comingout party. No wonder then that it's a bland comedy that ends up reinforcing, not puncturing, gay stereotypes, and squanders a fine comic cast. Kline manages to rise above the plodding humor, especially in his show-stopping dance scenes, and Selleck is terrific as the sleazy, faintly Mephistophelean tabloid reporter who dogs his footsteps...
...corrupt police in 50s Los Angeles with all its gradations of ethics. Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe turn in fine performances that give us two different approaches to policing, thinking first and hitting later, or vice versa. A reptilian James Cromwell and slick Kevin Spacey round out a fine cast and a finer tale...
Jennifer Jason Leigh is perfectly cast in Agnieszka Holland's adaptation of Henry James's novel. An awkward young woman starved for affection is caught between a cynical, distant father and a spirited but selfish young suitor. Holland's camera work and sense of period are engaging throughout, and her trademark comic acuity leavens the somber arc of the story. Eventually, though, Leigh assets herself just long enough to break your heart. Like its heroine, the film misses true magnificence, but its intelligent cast and sensitive story-telling are more than enough to recommend...